Intellectualism Goes Mass-Market
Substack wants to be the final boss of the creator economy, even as it cringes at the term itself.
This is an essay about Substack—where it’s been, what it stands for, where it wants to go, and how I think it tackles getting there. In short, Substack wants to scale to all content formats, not just long-form writing, and it wants to do that while keeping its prideful, high-brow reputation in tact. On the business side, it wants to offer the promise of YouTube meets OnlyFans— direct creator-to-audience subscriptions with great discovery, but no ads. The product is getting heavy in the process, and perhaps it’s been overvalued—but as someone who’s built media products, been a power user of nearly 4 years, and a so-called “bestseller” on the platform, I’m mostly bullish—it has the cultural momentum.