Blogs have been the avenues that amateurs flock to when they crave lighter opinions. There are no serious incentives for bloggers to write a 3000-word post that is deeply researched. Even though the masses don’t yearn for these deep posts, humanity as a whole needs them. These are the posts that document human civilization’s behaviour as a whole or write well balanced opinionated posts. And to write these posts is no mean feat. You can only find these breeds in New York Times, New Yorker or Washington Post and they attracted all these talents by providing a platform(already established audience) and lucrative career options. But the underlying thing of these entities is that they had a distribution moat. Not anymore.

With the advent of the Internet, creating a distribution channel is as easy as clicking on the “Create Channel” button in YT. Distribution is still the undisputed king of the world and companies get differentiated by how strong their distribution channels are. But what has changed is the cost of creating a distribution channel. By leveraging YT as their primary distribution channel many Indian Edtechs have even achieved the coveted Unicorn Status. The sky is the limit for the type of Media behemoths you can conjure. It was only a matter of time, for these individuals, who wrote for these corporations, to go independent. The incentives were waiting.

Enter Substack, the internet company which put these professional writers in drivers’ seat w.r.t to their audiences. Many companies have failed trying to crack this problem including some prominent ones like Medium and Quora. Despite attracting these talented writers to their platforms, Medium and Quora, they treated these writers as a secondary goal. Their primary goal was to establish their Networks so that the much-aspired network effects can kick in and bolster the company’s moat. The bottom line is that they played the game of Facebook and Twitter where the network precedes the users in terms of priority. Quora’s top writers were so frustrated with its policies that they had to flock to writing pieces on Medium, which at least was the lesser evil. Quora on its part played the correct game where it tried to monetize the user’s data through ads(later they launched all sorts of bs programs, that’s another story). There is no excuse for Medium though. I mean what were they thinking? that just by helping people to launch a pseudo blog on the internet and making a bunch of recommendations they can milk the money of the users? This is where Substack played a different game. It made these writers first-class citizens and handed back the subscriber’s data(emails) to them. And this created ripple effects.

The writers can now play a positive-sum game with substack and the readers. They can produce high-quality pieces that can be funded by the audience. The best and worst part of Substack for a publisher is that you can’t achieve the escape velocity by starting in it. This is good for Substack though. Because it only gets the best of the writers. Most of the accomplished writers on Substack are the ones who built their audience via Twitter. Substack leveraged Twitter’s distribution network and should thank Twitter for its initial take-off. Later Twitter itself acquired Substack competitor Revue. Substack shouldn’t just worry about Revue yet. Because Twitter prioritizes users over the publishers. Substack will win eventually because it prioritises readers. Twitter can be the lever that Substack can use to pull off a brilliant heist.