Substack – the American tech platform that enables anyone to create, publish, and (if they wish) get paid for a subscription newsletter – has belatedly become the New New Thing in mainstream media (MSM) discourse. It’s actually been around for ever (since 2017, ie 42 internet-years ago) and you could think of it as the continuation of blogging by other means (and indeed, the tradition of conspiracy-theorising is alive and well on Substack). But MSM was never much interested in blogs – possibly because many journalists, like Samuel Johnson, regard anyone who writes for nothing as an imbecile. Substack, though, they can understand, because well-known writers (including a few famous hacks) appear to be earning serious money from it.
Substack is free for authors, operationally reliable and easy to use. If you want to charge subscribers a monthly fee, there’s a simple button to activate it. The financial side is handled by Stripe; Substack takes 10%, and Stripe levies a 3% fee, but after that it’s all yours (and the tax collector’s).
