You say newsletter but you describe blog. So which one is it? Given you go on to mention Substack, I will assume you are talking about a blog, so no e-mail is

You say newsletter but you describe blog. So which one is it? Given you go on to mention Substack, I will assume you are talking about a blog, so no e-mail is involved. Well, I have created Gethly.com platform, which is what you are talking about, but the Google thing will always be a problem for paywalled content, by nature. You have to pick whether you want audience or customers. If you want to build a brand, pick audience and write content freely and fully available to anonymous visitors and focus on SEO. In such case your own blog and domain will be the best solution, as you have everything fully under your control. Using Wordpress, or another SSR CMS, will be the best for indexing and search engines to process. If you want customers, there is multitude of paywall platforms for it, you just pick one and that is about it. But in both cases, the actual writing part is the least important one as you need to also put on the advertising and marketing cap on and do the actual work - lure in customers/visitors. You have to be a salesman first and foremost, no matter which approach you're interested in. This is what people don't get. They think they are this unique eloquent content creators that out of nowhere thousands of people from all over the world will flock to their page. Well, no. That is absolutely not how this works. You will need to put months and years of work and hard labour to get your name out and attract users, somehow. So, be ready for that and good luck. Lastly, soon I'll be releasing a new feature for Gethly - paywall as a service, where you have full control over your content as you can host is outside of the platform, and Gethly will just handle payments+access to your content, giving you the best of both worlds. So, stay tuned :)