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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Substack cuts out the middlemen in opinion journalism and tolerates a wide spectrum of politics. Both is disruptive for entrenched businesses, and both induces anger from less paid and more dogmatic journalists.

Potential failures of Substack are elsewhere - no local coverage, little investigative journalism, a tendency to build bubbles - but as a vehicle to reduce the grip of the anointed "opinion makers" (how I hate this candid expression!) it is very useful.

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If you don't look too closely, yes. Thing is, as a promotional thing, Substack will give some writers an advance to live off of, and who picks who gets an advance?

The opinion makers working at Substack.

Substack don't seem interested in opinion making. Perhaps one day they will be, but for now their advances appear to be driven by some very smart BD guys and are given to whoever will be profitable. The story is always the same: they approach some writer who was just attacked by some woke institution and is now out on their own. They tell them, hey, did you know you could make some six figure sum by charging for newsletters? And they say, no you're wrong, I can't earn that much. So they say, OK, we'll give you a much smaller six figure sum guaranteed and take the rest. If we're right, we win. If you're right, you win. Sounds fair? It does, so they say yes. And Substack always wins.

> Perhaps one day they will be

Unfortunately if they survive they will become quite fixated on opinionmaking. It's structurally inevitable, manufacturing consent.

One aspect of unbundling (ads/opinion/news) is that there nothing to subsidize your foreign bureaus or multi-month investigative journalism that may not even pan out, to say nothing of hyper-local news.

Did Medium 'win', though?

Substack only wins if the company goes public. A bunch of paid newsletters isn't going to cover their bills.

Why not? Their bills should be trivial. Substack's tech is primitive, it's basically a (very) basic blogging and commenting platform connected to a mail relay and a billing system. Text is cheap. If Substack can't run the whole tech operation with 5 guys and a tiny hosting bill they're doing something wrong (e.g. probably using AWS).

The cost and innovation at Substack is all business development. Are they cutting good deals? They can prosper. From a software and overheads perspective there's really nothing to see here.

I have lost count of the number of HN posts questioning why Company X "should" need anything more than Y number of staff. If all it took was the tech stack, then everybody would be on ConvertKit or MailChimp or Tinyletter, companies with a long track record.

And yet, within months of is announcement, Substack is better known than any of those other tools. They are paying six-figure advances to shore up their portfolio of writers. And, like all VC-backed startups, they are spending massively on Google and Facebook ads.

Building name recognition that quickly isn't cheap.

No, I'm not claiming they aren't spending money. They clearly are, but it's all going on business development to create growth. Unless they mis-manage things in the typical way and end up with 1000 engineers building their own programming language or something, they can scale back on those deals at any point. In fact they have to. The deals that are winning so well for them can't be repeated because they awaken authors to their true value, so next year they won't re-sign them. Nonetheless, the business calculations for this are presumably quite easy to do, so I doubt they will have difficulty converting those writers to profitable revenue streams even if the profits aren't as high as when Substack is exploiting some kind of apparent informational asymmetry.

Book authors have been getting advances against future sales for a long, long time, so it's hardly novel. I'm not really following the the concern.

I'm not expressing concern about Substack's opinion makers here (though there are certainly some very strong thoughts expressed elsewhere about their particular choices), but that due to the economics involved, GP's positioning of Substack as a wholly neutral platform is not entirely correct - Substack's actions with whom they chose to give an advance to constitutes expressing an opinion, however indirectly.

Authors given an advance by Substack are on a much broader ideological spectrum than, say, NYT op-ed columnists.

> Potential failures of Substack are elsewhere - no local coverage

Interestingly, one of the top performing Substacks is a local publication, the Charlotte Ledger: https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/local-news-subst...

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