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29 Comments

What trends have you noticed recently?

I'm a Substack customer and I knew they were growing, but I didn't think they had grown this much.

Substack

Source: https://explodingtopics.com/topic/substack

Thanks @jhowarth15 😊

Crazy!

What trends have you noticed recently?

  1. 12

    Community is a big one. The web is 30 years old, but it takes decades for societies to adopt new technology, and we're still getting to the point where a sizable portion of the population conducts a lot of their social life online. As a result, we're seeing a corresponding shift where offline communities are being replaced with online communities. (Not necessarily 1:1… some offline communities die, never to be replaced with anything, whereas new online communities form that never had an analog in the real world.)

    A few things are speeding up this trend, too:

    • as mentioned above, newer tech-savvy generations are being born even as older tech-resistant generations are dying out and/or adopting tech
    • COVID-19 is forcing people to adopt online communities who'd be otherwise slower or more reluctant to do so; ecological changes are forcing changes in social norms
    • paid content is blowing up, and community is often an essential value-add for paid content business models (e.g. Substack allows authors to supplement their newsletters with communities)
    • the massive social networks built up in the 2010s are being unbundled
    • increased competition on the web is motivating people to niche down, and communities usually correspond to niches, so people are doing more to create, support, and participate in communities
    • better tooling and education are making it easier for people to build communities

    And all of this feeds into itself. More people participating in online communities → more people deciding to create communities → more people creating tools and education around community → better communities → (repeat) more people participating in online communities…

    1. 1

      +1 to all of this.

  2. 12

    The trend I've noticed is "Trends". Trends.co Trends.vc Exploding Topics Glimpse Morning Brew. Much of the newsletters on substack gear towards a journalistic or gonzo journalism trend hunt.

    I'm actually a little worried that this is becoming a bit of a farce. I saw this same thing play out on YouTube. "React Videos" still to this day top the charts.

    I'm not worried if there is as much creation as there is curation. But the medium of the newsletter is super easy/simple now and (myself included) have become curation monsters. Yes I run a curation newsletter.

    Curation is one singular use of a newsletter.
    Writing distribution is one singular use of a newsletter.
    I wish there were more use cases and I hope we discover them, or create them sooner rather than later.

    2000's Everyone has a blog
    2020's Everyone has a newsletter.

    1. 1

      Writing distribution is a meta use case.

      There is different types of "Writing Distribution". Writing itself is is 10 or more sub "use cases".

      Let me outline a few:

      1. Business Case Study writing - Simplinations
      2. Fiction writing via email newsletter - HotSheet
      3. Teaching / Learning via email newsletter - Multiple
      4. Industry breaking news - multiple
      5. Political opinion (this is moving away from large publications to individual brands) - Dispatch
      6. Sports stats distribution newsletter - Cleaning the glass
      7. Daily affirmation / reminder - multiple
      8. Opinion - Sinocism, etc.

      I am sure there are many more.

      The point I am making is - what we consider a Newsletter will no longer be just that.

      Take your 2000's blog example.

      There were multiple use cases that were "blogs", some of which became multiple $ Million exits.

      1. Industry news blog -Tech Crunch, GigaOm
      2. Engineering blog - Netflix, etc.
      3. Photo blog - many who started daily photo blogs have moved to "Instagram"
      4. Personal blogs - multiple
      5. Deal of the day blog - Became GroupOn
      6. General news blog - became HuffPost and many other copies
      7. Images and graphics - became 99designs
      8. Video Blog (Vlog) - moved to YouTube

      Sources: https://thenextscoop.com/successful-companies-started-blogs/

  3. 9

    I think we're seeing a huge boom in Content becoming a new force on the internet as the tools to empower creators become more abundant. Big media groups like The Ringer, Deadspin, Vox, Vice, Bon Appetit, etc. are all facing an ongoing existential threat of building up and creating mini internet celebs and having them leave to launch independently operated sites, twitters, book deals, podcasts and more (if you listen to ex-Barstool podcast Throwing Fits you'll hear them talk about the "360" deal they signed with WME for this exact reason)

    Substack is at the precipice of this new trend and it's allowing an easy medium for writers with loyal followings to easily make money. With so many ways to connect directly with a quality-over-quantity audience, it's no surprise that writers are eschewing traditional media jobs and instead electing to go independent where as little as a few hundred paying subscribers can provide them an equal salary with a much more direct connection and autonomy. Even anecdotally it's interesting to look at someone like the adored Matty Matheson who launched his internet persona due to a few super-viral Vice / Munchies videos and has now parlayed that into his own channel with uber high production value. I expect will see a lot more of this, especially in big big niches like cooking, sports, and politics, as creators, writers, and journalists all begin to take greater control of their own destiny and realize that the tools available to them allow this easily without any real sacrifice.

    What's interesting to me as an entrepreneur is how do you allow equally talented people to partake in this boom without having worked within Conde Nast or appeared on MSNBC every night to gain the Twitter or Instagram following needed to go independent. I imagine whoever figures out how to amplify and give a spotlight to new creators (Tiktok does a very good job of this with their FYP algorithm) who have yet to build a critical mass of followers will do quite well.

    Another food for thought is how this connects to the massive DTC trend. The barriers to entry to create a new shoe or frying pan or skin serum is clearly very low, so seems only natural that Content will merge with Commerce and brands will begin to provide value well beyond the products they are delivering to your door. Mr. Porter does a great job with this, but the bar still seems very low. Good content takes time and money that not all brands can afford when they're still fighting for positive unit economics and market recognition.

    1. 1

      Good analysis. It's amazing how big of an audience a lot of journalists have gained after working for large media orgs. I've been paying attention to some of the big layoffs over the past year, and without fail the journalists who end up tweet, "Just got laid off, looking for work," have between 30k and 120k followers on Twitter.

      1. 1

        Thanks so much! And you're absolutely right. A lot of them amass followers by default just for being so widely distributed. Seems especially common with Sportswriters and seems to have been a big part of The Athletic's strategy - hire sports writer with hundreds of thousands of followers, have them broadcast their new position on twitter with a link, rinse and repeat.

    1. 2

      Phwoar, that's a great one Graeme 🔥

    2. 1

      Did you get your hands dirty with GPT3 yet?

      1. 1

        noo not yet, unfortunateyl don't get the time :/

        I put this list of design-related projects together though! https://prototypr.io/post/gpt-3-design-hype/

  4. 2

    The no-code/low-code movement definitly!

  5. 2

    Products with "Stack" in their name

  6. 2

    I see a trend in dedicated or I'll just do one job businesses.

    With internet businesses from 2000, marking their 20th year with hundreds of features (eg: Instagram launched Reels recently just to compete with TikTok has really added bloat to their system), these companies are trying to do a "lot". Lot as-in there's so much to consume that I'm actually lo(s)t.

    The bloat from mature products helps products like Substack grow really well. For example, New York Times subscription wouldn't really help me as I'm getting a lot more content from arounld the world than I could consume each day, and I get it, I can follow or set interests but it's still a lot. The same consumption-explosion does not happen in Substack. I can pick from whom I want to hear right in my box.

    In simple words, NYT at their standard $17/m is less meaningful to me as it has so much to do (Bloat). Whereas, in Substack, or just any company that does one thing but really does that well, I can get what I need with as little as $5/m.

  7. 2

    I've noticed a mini trend
    indie hacker podcasts

  8. 1

    Hey There 👋I've been trying to approach this problem in a completely different way than some tools out there and made this http://gettrendytags.com/ also made a view where you can see how COVID-19 is changing us at https://gettrendytags.com/covid19
    Looking for feedback and if people like yourself find this useful!

  9. 1

    trends.co and and trends.vc are doing quite well 😅

  10. 1

    fire emojis seem to be popular on the front page of iH today.

  11. 1

    As a designer, I noticed, long blog to short blogs,
    For example
    http://designerassets.in/

  12. 1

    Most trends are wrong

    1. 1

      Can you go a bit further on this? Really curious.

      1. 1

        Because the best ideas are not obvious, else everyone would be pursuing them. Blindly following any trend is like the following the herd, once something becomes popular whole world starts talking about it, so it grows more like a chain reaction.
        Look at all the path-breaking companies in the last decade[uber, tesla, airbnb], all of them worked on a problem that was ignored by many before them. They never followed a trend, they create one.

  13. 1

    I see build in public everywhere.

  14. 1

    Haha, anytime Rosie 😋

    (And also meant to say congrats on the Rosie.land growth. We'll have it on ET soon I'm sure!)

    1. 2

      Haha, that's my life's goal now!

      1. 1

        Aha, excellent 😂

  15. 1

    Substack is definitely a thing. I really like their frictionless setup and distribution.

    Also, the ability to turn your newsletter/ blog into a paid geek. I've moved all my Medium content and re-distribute on Substack.

    The performance is more transparent than Medium. And I'm pretty happy with my current Substack account

    I'd love to see how Substack moving into other marketing pillars

  16. 3

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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