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Platform’s creators have turned Substack newsletter ads into their primary source of income

  1. 2

    Interesting article @rosiesherry. As far as ads go on Substack, I'm ok with this approach for creators.

    The platform over time may get pressure to accommodate more advertising functionality, but overall I'm ok with the manual nature of it today. I think it forces the advertising partnerships to be more thoughtful. Better than a random 3rd party snippet farming out to the highest bidder.

    It reminds me of advertising in The Skimm or Morning Brew.

  2. 1

    Makes sense that Substack aren’t happy with this development. It cuts them out of the value chain, as you can use Substack for free if you don’t charge for subscriptions. So if you are 100% ad-funded, Substack makes nothing from you, apart from a bit of exposure for their platform.

    The only practical way for Substack to deal with this trend (apart from ignore it) is to embrace it, help creators by (auto-)generating custom ad decks for them, building an ad booking engine, and taking a clip of the revenue.

    Like The Hustle CEO Sam Parr says in the article: “You know who else wasn’t going to do ads? [Google co-founder] Larry Page”.

  3. 1

    I feel like this model puts more power in the hands of the authors, which I view as a positive. By not facilitating automated ad placements, Substack leaves puts more power in the hands of the authors. The authors own both their relationship with their audiences and their relationship with their advertisers. I suspect this would make it easier for them to bring both of those with them, if they were to move off the platform.

  4. 1

    While some Substack creators are out in market hustling up their own ad partnerships, the platform’s most popular writers now routinely get cold pitches by everything from cryptocurrency startups to media brands.

    That advertiser interest is already strong enough that some of the platform’s creators have turned Substack newsletter ads into their primary source of income.

    1. 2

      After just a few months of writing I was approached by 3 sponsors. I now have 5 sponsors and have barely even started outreach. Amazing.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 7 months ago.

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