Substack Launches App, Substack and the Four Bens, In-App Purchase and the Substack Bundle (Stratechery Update 3-14-2022)

Metadata

• URL: https://stratechery.com/2022/substack-launches-app-substack-and-the-four-bens-in-app-purchase-and-the-substack-bundle/
• Published Date: 2022-03-14
  • Title: Substack Launches App, Substack and the Four Bens, In-App Purchase and the Substack Bundle (Stratechery Update 3-14-2022)
• Author: Ben Thompson

Highlights

• Publisher Ben, though, remembers that my business model is predicated on a higher average revenue per user (thanks to subscriptions), not a higher number of users; that means making tradeoffs, and foregoing wide reach is one of them. That, by extension, means not agreeing to Spotify’s terms for Exponent (note on this below), and accepting that leveraging RSS to have per-subscriber feeds makes having the Daily Update Podcast on Spotify literally impossible. More broadly, owning my own destiny as a publisher means avoiding Aggregators and connecting directly with customers.
  • Note: Per, Anil Dash tweet.