I've seen people trying to compare Amazon to Substack, but it doesn't add up for me. One Substack "generates" the sale, transferring the relationship to your o

I've seen people trying to compare Amazon to Substack, but it doesn't add up for me. One Substack "generates" the sale, transferring the relationship to your own site feels cheap. It's like if Amazon stopped selling New Yorker subscriptions. If I actually gave a crap about the NYer subscription I was paying for, I'd find some other way to pay for it. Amazon [Substack] is a commodity in this vertical. Of course, the people who didn't care about your subscription because they never read it would disappear. But, they were going to churn eventually. I imagine if you amortize over a year, this marginal loss is less than the diff between Substack's take rate and operating your own blog + newsletter. --- Acting rationally from an economic point of view, the only reason you'd want to stick around on Substack is that you think this equation holds true: (Future subscriber base on Substack * (monthly rate - Substack fee)) > (Future subscriber base as an independent * (monthly rate - cc transaction fees)). For "young" writers who don't yet have an audience, Substack helps a lot. But if you have a well-developed audience, IDK, I imagine Substack must view them as big flight risks (hence the advance payments). Some substantial things Substack can do to make this equation more favorable: - Give you free (or low-fee) marketing on substack properties (note this is a zero sum game over ad inventory, choosing to give you ad space means choosing to not give it to others. this is a hard game to solve, but they can probably do it). - Reduce their take rate for mature audiences. IMO, their current model doesn't make a lot of sense if you're somebody with a large audience. Especially now that we're out of ZIRP and they can't afford to sweeten the deal as much anymore.