For countless writers and content creators who want to publish and distribute their own works, the American newsletter publishing site Substack is one of the most popular online platforms. Its easy-to-use and simple charging model attracts a large number of content creators, which in turn provides users with a variety of high-quality content, which can be sent directly to their email inbox.
Picture: Substack, a newsletter publishing website headquartered in San Francisco
Substack is a self-publishing service, and almost anyone can create newsletter content and charge subscribers. In return for providing a professional publishing platform and revenue stream, Substack can extract a 10% commission from the revenue generated by content creators. However, what many people don’t know is that this San Francisco-based startup was inspired by WeChat .
Although email communication has existed since the beginning of the Internet, in an era when traditional media can hardly compete with recommendation-driven content algorithms, Substack has caught up with the new wave of Internet celebrity news. This trend makes readers turn to niche content, to authors with original or expert voices, instead of focusing on free or paid general aggregate content. Around 2013, with the emergence of WeChat public accounts, this trend began to rise in China.
Matthew Brennan, managing director of China Channel, a consulting firm, said: “Substack newsletter is very similar to WeChat official account. Technically speaking, WeChat is China’s email service. Substack is very popular. You You can find someone on the email list, and you can continue to contact them somewhere they are tracked.”
Substack was created by a team of entrepreneurs who initially planned to develop an instant messaging application, claiming that their goal was to create a “Western WeChat.” Before founding Substack, Chris Best was the co-founder and CTO of Kik, who was also known as the “Western WeChat”. Kik was once very popular, and in 2015 it even received a US$50 million investment from Tencent.
Figure: WeChat is often described as a super APP in China, with hundreds of millions of users
However, this plan did not succeed in the end, and Kik was drowned in the chat apps of competitors ranging from Messenger to Snapchat. Best and two other Kik employees, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi, eventually left in 2017 and co-founded Substack.
Angel investor Bill Bishop pointed out the influence of WeChat on the founding team of Substack. He said: “Kik tried to learn a lot from WeChat. The key lesson is that users are willing to subscribe to WeChat content and even pay for them to browse the content.” Like WeChat invites reporters, economists and other industry professionals through WeChat. Like the public accounts sharing their insights, Substack positions itself as a platform with various writers.
There are two key similarities between WeChat and Substack: First, both have flourished under the mode of sending content directly to the user’s inbox; second, both enable writers to build their own micro-media empire , And get rid of traditional publishers.
The WeChat official account has enabled many writers and brands to establish their own direct audience, which is tantamount to a revolution in the media industry. Chinese millennial entrepreneurs are always seeking differentiation and creating original brands. Today, a similar phenomenon is also happening in the West, which is subverting the algorithm-driven content delivery model.
Bishop said that the self-publishing model is of great significance to content creators with deep industry knowledge and readers with specific interests. He said: “The current technology is very simple. With Substack, I only need to write content, and they will do all the rest for me.”
According to Dev Lewis, a researcher at the Hong Kong think tank Digital Asia Hub, thanks to modern technology, journalists and policy writers can now do many things that were once only possible with the help of large media organizations. . He said: “All the technologies we use are so powerful that you can even do quite a lot of data processing fairly easily. If you can do all these things yourself, why do people still work for media companies?”
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