Substack raised a $65m round at a $650m valuation

Substack raised a $65m round at a $650m valuation, and wrote about its plans for encouraging more individual newsletter writers. Substack has managed to get itself into a fraught strand of high-school / tech/media insider / culture wars arguments, which I'm not sure that it's necessarily handled very well. But really, all it's trying to do is to build enough of a critical mass of writers and subscribers that it has network effects – people go there to discover new things, which in turn means it can deliver new subscribers to writers, justifying its 10% cut and making itself more of a destination for more writers and more subsbscribers. One part of that is paying advances to names who can prime the pump, giving them the confidence to jump by guaranteeing a year's income. Some of those names, almost inherently, have enemies.

Whether that actually works is another question, though: I don’t know how many people will sign up to how many $5 or $10/month newsletters, and if that's enough to make Substack itself a brand – and how many writers want Substack to own their brand anyway (which is one of a number of reasons I decided not to use it for this newsletter).