Custom domains now available on Substack
blog.substack.com
blog.substack.com
I wonder why they're doing this. Substack is already taking 10% of revenue which is huge.
I think a better model would have been to offer it for free to paid newsletters so it's considered a premium feature and it can't be abused by their users not generating any revenue.
I also disagree that 10% of revenue is a "huge" chunk. Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial (not to mention acquiring readers in the first place).
> Running your own mail list and custom domain isn't trivial
Regardless of whether this is trivial or not, Substack is a service, not a partner.
If one day you decide to increase your prices and work your ass off to produce more valuable content to your readers, why should Substack get more money?
If instead of sending newsletters we were talking about ecommerce (which is way less trivial) would you be ok with Shopify charging 10% of revenue?
What about AWS charging you 10% of your revenue?
- Shopify
- Sendgrid
- Mailchimp
- Wordpress.com
- Firebase
- Vercel
- Netlify
- Surge
Even free blog platforms give you customs domains with HTTPS for free: https://hashnode.com/
For example, these days most wordpress hosts do this for you for free.
Not that I think it's unreasonable to charge for this, just saying it's probably not the reason.
The alternative is a self-hosted or SaaS subscription to something like Ghost or Mailchimp. $50 seems like a better deal to me.
I was wrong. In fact, a lot of merchants saw the third-party domain as a status thing. There were thousands of merchants in one tribe and thousands in another. They are still doing it today, including at levels of commerce that prove that I was not just off, but that I totally misread the market.
People trust few domain extensions more than others even though many of them are similarly priced and available. It's all about who else is using the same extension. .com? Used by most companies. .news ? no one? not trust worthy then.
It's somewhat fascinating to me that the bigger the company, the more trust people put in their verification of actors employed on the platform. Intuitively, I would think the more actors in a company - the less trustworthy or verified the actors would be.
An argument against custom domains being a "premium" feature, then? If you don't have a paid plan, then you have to bring your own domain. Paying gets you the *.example.com status symbol. Makes sense — a custom domain usually requires technical expertise and some amount of inconvenience for users (not unlike a services company that publishes their source code to GitHub, which you can always set up and maintain for yourself, but if you want to use the company's hosted services, then you have to pay). Another part of the value proposition would be, "You're gonna have to spend money one way or another — either to a registrar or to us — so why not let it be us?"
Keyword you want is "on-demand TLS"