2 ms·

I'm only going off a few media reports from what was disclosed, you're technically correct but the guarantees were in excess of what they would likely have earn

by tootie 4y ago

I'm only going off a few media reports from what was disclosed, you're technically correct but the guarantees were in excess of what they would likely have earned from subs. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/11/business/media/substack-newsletter-competition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/11/business/media/substack-n... This writer had 18k subs at $50/yr ($90k/yr revenue, of which Substack would take 10%) but was paid $430k for 2 years. Maybe they grow their reader base to close some of that gap but it's still a loss leader to build reputation. It's possible some other writers took less favorable deals but I haven't seen the details.

pessimizer 4y ago
> [...M]any of the writers who took advances now regret doing so: They would have made more money by simply collecting subscription revenue, and paying Substack 10 percent, [rather] than making the more complex deals with money up front. > The former Vox writer Matthew Yglesias calculated that taking the advance wound up costing him nearly $400,000 in subscription revenue paid to Substack. The writer Roxane Gay told me she earned back her advance within two months of starting The Audacity ($60 a year) with an audience of 36,000, about 20 percent of them paying. Your article was a reference for what I said, and I remember running into a few others.