Substack seems like a not-horrible acq target for Medium, if Medium has the funds to buy it. Many content creators appear to trust Substack and trust the potential to earn money on it. The acquisition would be worth it for the trust alone.

The model for paying content creators seems interesting, but I'm really curious what the market opportunity here is. My guess is that it's not that high... so it seems likely that Substack would consider inserting ads into the free newsletters.

However, if they pivoted to other mediums like video, then maybe there's something here. People will pay really little for a blog post emailed to them each week, but they'll pay a ton more for great video content.