Graydon Carter's Wild Ride Through the Golden Age of Magazines

newyorker.com

15 points·samclemens··4 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20250322040148/https://www.newyo...

> Then he got bored, and started thinking up ideas. The result was Air Mail, an e-mail publication he created with the journalist Alessandra Stanley which launched in 2019. E-mail, at that point, seemed retrograde and uncool—Substack was still in its youth—but, like many of Carter’s circumspect ideas, the plan had a surprising canniness. An e-mail publication was invulnerable to the caprices of social-media platforms and their algorithms. And, at last tally, Air Mail had in excess of four hundred thousand paid subscribers, which is more (but who now is counting?) than Harper’s or Fast Company.

(https://airmail.news) 400,000 paying subscribers?! It's apparently $40/year so that's $16 million in ARR, which must surely surpass many well-known magazines, and is frankly an incredible sum for an email newsletter.

Yeah, let's cut through the hype. First, the expense accounts were never unlimited, even in the good old days. The editors gave a tight budget and you had to justify any request for more.

Now, onto this stretch. I'm sure that not all 400k are paying. There are usually so many deals and games to dial up and down the numbers.

I don't think it's that wild. There are many Substack authors who makes millions every year.

Maybe not 16 million.

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