I love substack and think their “project” of moving monetization to subscription models is valuable and good and beneficial for all, but it is sort of fascinating how much of a departure it is from the way large email lists used to make money. Like, I ran the Mother Jones newsletter program for six years and through two relaunches and that program made money three ways:

1) it moved people down the funnel to subscribe to the print magazine and donate (not an insignificant amount of money! And it’s sort of similar to substack’s model)

2) display ads and sponsorship takeovers (considerably more money than the funnel)

3) “renting out” the email list to advertisers to basically spam the half a million people who had signed up for editorial content but would then find themselves getting a bunch of emails directly from an advertiser (with only a small disclaimer at the bottom mentioning us) and this third one was like volumes more than the former two. The upper limit on that revenue is self-control because they lead to lots of unsubscribes.

Like, the entire reason we had newsletters and I was able to hire a dedicated person to write them daily was simply to give subscribers enough value that they would not unsubscribe because they got random spam from Save The Whales a few times a month.

People really hate that list rental thing and it is one of the most sort of annoying and cynical ways you can monetize an email list. (I don’t know that every publication does it. In fact, I know that lots of them don’t). But if you had told me in 2018 or something that there would be a booming newsletter subscription model that actually didn’t’t engaged in either list rental or sponsored sends and display ads, I would have scoffed.

But that’s probably why I am not a smart investor! The Substack brain trust saw that potential and was right.

It’s just a fascinating evolution of newsletter monetization.