Reading between the lines, Medium tried a model where they hired authors, paid them to create content, and sold subscriptions to this content, and it was very u

Reading between the lines, Medium tried a model where they hired authors, paid them to create content, and sold subscriptions to this content, and it was very unprofitable. Worse, it was unprofitable in a difficult to fix way, because it's unclear which authors you can let go with a minimal impact on subscriptions. (And firing people from a paid team of writers is always going to have significant costs in terms of moral, productivity, etc.) Substack seems to be trying a model where they will, in some cases, guarantee an author will receive a minimum amount of subscriptions for the first year, in exchange for a hefty cut of subscription revenue. I don't think we have information on how the program is doing on net, but in at least some high profile cases they've turned a profit on it. Also, even if the program is significantly loss making, it should be easy enough to shift to profitability; just scale down offering new contracts to people without large existing readerships. The model is not enormously different at the twenty thousand feet level, but I think it has the potential to play out quite differently in practice nonetheless.