Substack Is a Scam in the Same Way That All Media Is By Eric Levitz. "A tool for publishing newsletters, Substack grew in prominence over the past year as several well-known opinion journalists abandoned their longtime employers to start their own subscription-based, bespoke punditry shops on the platform. In most cases, this proved to be an astoundingly good business decision. There are apparently a great many journalism consumers who aren’t willing to pay $5 a month to support the work of dozens of journalists at a single publication but are eager to pay $8 a month to patronize a single blogger. Combine this reality with the exceptionally low overhead costs of running an email newsletter, and you get a formula for achieving the impossible: a hyperprofitable digital-journalism enterprise." "But this was not the focus of last week’s Substack discourse. Rather, what roiled media Twitter was the revelation that Substack poached some of its big-name columnists by providing them with a guaranteed minimum income for their first year on the platform. This arrangement isn’t philanthropic. In exchange for guaranteeing Yglesias a base salary of $250,000, Substack reportedly required him to let the platform collect 85 percent of the gross subscription revenue his newsletter generated; had he declined this offer and accepted the standard terms of service available to all Substack users, the platform would have claimed only 10 percent of such revenue. Ultimately, opting for Substack’s star treatment will cost the columnist hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is not clear how many of Substack’s top writers secured similar deals, as the platform does not mandate such disclosure from all the writers it directly finances."