Understanding the Substack Boom and What It Means for Media
It’s no secret that newsletters are having a moment in the media industry. Prominent writers and journalists like Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, The Verge’s Casey Newton, New York magazine’s Andrew Sullivan, BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen and Vulture’s Hunter Harris have all left their gigs in recent months to write their newsletters full-time for paying subscribers on platforms like Substack. Publishers have also taken note and are focusing more on email newsletters to increase readership and subscriber numbers. Substack, an online platform for publishing free and paid newsletters, launched in 2018 and has, in the past year, become the go-to platform for writers looking to monetize their followings. But is all this success sustainable? And who benefits most from making the pivot to Substack? TheWrap spoke with Delia Cai, a growth and trends editor at BuzzFeed and the creator of Deez Links — a newsletter with over 10,000 subscribers that sends readers links to some of the most interesting, strange or otherwise noteworthy stories about or related to the media industry — to discuss the rise and what she calls the “illusion” of newsletters, what lies ahead as more writers and journalists head to Substack and what lessons she hopes traditional...
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