As someone who is writing a reasonably popular Substack newsletter - and have used several newsletter platforms in the past - I have to disagree.
The biggest difference between Substack and Spotify/Medium/Google Reader is how, with Substack - and with Ghost, Beehiv and other newsletter platforms - the author owns the relationship with readers.
When you sign up for Substack, assuming you use a custom domain (which is a one-off $50 fee), you own:
- Your domain
- The email list of your subscribers
- Your content that you can easily export and migrate
- Your subscriptions: as you are not paid by Substack, but subscribers pay you via Stripe, and then you pay Substack
This makes your Substack content, "audience" and paid subscriptions fully portable, should you ever want to move to or from this platform. These days, migrating to and from platforms like Ghost is fairly trivial without losing anything (content, subscribers or SEO ratings).
This portability and owning of my content, and the connection with subscribers is why I am on Substack. It means that I have the freedom to leave to another platform.
It's also why there have been many publications that have left Substack - and then some came back. For example, the newsletter Expontential View that has about 80,000 subscribers and thousands of paid subscribers left Substack for Ghost in June 2021 [1] and then migrated back to Substack from Ghost on August 2022 [2]. In both cases, they moved all their subscribers and content. And any publication can leave (or move to) without issues, any time!
Sure: this portability is not the best business to Substack. But it's the opposite of threat to newsletters: it's the opportunity to choose your platform, and move when you want to.
Show me another platform outside of newsletters that has this option.
[1] https://www.exponentialview.co/p/important-migration-from-su...