test 2025-12-20

Substack, which has long opposed ads, is testing them out. This is partly a side effect of one of Substack's other growth strategies: a few years ago, they turned on newsletter recommendations, and just about every Substack's free user count inflected positively; paid conversions weren't that common, because users need a lot less intent to keep a checkbox checked than to enter their email address and manually sign up for something. But they're still an audience, and it's low-engagement viewers who are most responsive to ads, in part because there's less of a gap in how subjectively interesting the ads are compared to the content. It's the curse of any great social network to start out cool and elitist and to converge with the average media company as it grows, and that convergence applies to both the content and the revenue model. Fortunately, this represents a kind of cross-subsidy where Substack remains a great place to publish the good stuff; because they're more direct-to-inbox by default, mediocre content doesn't crowd out the best stuff as much. https://read.haus/pi/8D0-4vWK