Medium had 700,000 paid subscriptions with $35 million in revenue (
The mess at Medium) going into this year and a successful company by any measure.
But the point wasn't to build a successful company, the point of Medium was to make something so big, that you go publicly traded and you could get a multi-billion dollar market cap or something so big and attractive that it would be bought by Facebook/Google/etc., for a billion or two or some other plural number.
As for everyone whining about Substack, I wish they would all just shut the **** up.
Here's the thing, Substack is a vendor. That's it. People complaining about it are like people complaining about Constant Contact or Mail Chimp, those are both platforms to manage and distribute emails to a wide list. Substack took it a step further by adding the ability to build a site using very basic software for free.
You literally don't pay a penny to Substack if you don't charge. If you do. then they get 10 percent plus, as previously noted, a percentage charged for the credit card transactions through another vendor.
Making it free meant they needed to attract some names that would build buzz, and that's what they did, using VC money from some tech bro douche. They aren't using the sub fees they get to attract names. It is all VC money. Does Substack have some issues?
Sure, but for those of us in the got laid off because the mega corporation we worked for decided to close the papers and Substack provided a rare bit of hope in a ****ty world for reporting. Because, let's face it, it is ****ty. Everyone knows it is ****ty and rather than try to make it better, they'd rather just complain because someone they don't know but don't like got a publishing advance to write words, which is, by the way, the established model for things like publishing words.
There's also plenty of writers who are making good livings using Substack, isn't some pipe dream but you have to make it a business. You have to not just write but learn how to do marketing and accounting and social media promotion and then go out and do those things to make it a real shop.
Why does everything have to be so dumb, all the time?
