Nachdem Substack dabei erwischt wurde, dass sie mal wieder Nazis eine prominente Bühne geboten haben, gerät nun auch ihr Geschäftsmodell unter genauere Beobachtung. Die Plattform sammelt nämlich immer mehr Investoren Geld ein, nach meinem Eindruck jagt man vor allem der fixen Idee einer 1 Milliarden $ Bewertung nach. Die Frage dabei: Ist das überhaupt ein Markt der so groß ist? Und wenn nicht: Wie weit entfernt sich die Plattform dabei von der Idee ein guter Ort für Autoren zu sein?
John Gruber macht dabei folgende simplifizierte Rechnung auf:
Now let’s do some rough back-of-the-envelope math. The New York Times Company has a market cap of $8.5 billion. Just gut-feeling-wise, I do not think Substack is worth one-eighth of the Times, nor do I think they’re on a path to get there. The Times has around 11 million digital subscribers who all pay around $25–35/month, and a strong advertising business. Individual Substack publications tend to charge around $5–7/month, and Substack only gets 10 percent of that. So Substack only pockets like 50–70 cents per month from subscribers, per publication. (Substack’s 10 percent commission, again, is pretty high compared to competing platforms.) Substack currently has no advertising business at all, and many of their writers publish with them specifically because Substack, as we know it, has no ads.
I firmly believe one could build a very nice business taking 10 percent of subscription revenue for a blogging/newsletter platform, if you could get as nice a roster of popular writers to build on the platform as Substack has. I do not think that’s a $1 billion business, though. And if it were, they should, at this point, be able to get there on their own, without additional funding. They should have achieved profitability lift-off long ago.