As of today, we’ve made it radically easier for anyone to publish on Substack, without setting up a publication. Now anyone with a Substack account can publish posts, on the web or in the app. That means everyone in the Substack ecosystem is now just a couple of clicks away from sharing a piece of their writing, video, or audio with the world. With this update, you can also start collecting free or paid subscriptions, and accumulate pledges, right from your Substack profile. If, one day, you decide you want more sophisticated publishing tools—such as a website, multiple admins, and sections—you can seamlessly transition to using our advanced publishing tools while keeping your posts and subscribers. We’re releasing these features today in their simplest form, with rapid improvements to come in the weeks and months ahead. During this introductory period, we’d appreciate your feedback in comments on this post and through the feedback form in the app settings. Please don’t hold back!
Many users have been asking us to make Substack more mobile-friendly so they can manage their entire experience—as either publishers or subscribers—without having to use a desktop computer. That’s why we recently made it possible to publish full posts and check post stats from the app, and we have started testing live video and in-app payments (we are working with Apple to make this widely available). There’s much more to come. We hope these new publishing capabilities help meet those needs while also making Substack easier to use. Of course, even as we improve the Substack mobile experience, we will continue to make sure that the product is fantastic to use on the web and desktop. Email will forever be a key part of this platform, and subscriptions will always live on mailing lists that publishers own and control. Email and the web’s openness guarantee a Substack publisher’s independence and a subscriber’s right to choose where to spend their time. Ultimately, however, we think bringing more powerful mobile tools to Substack will make it simpler and more accessible for everyone. It will be easy to start and run a media business from your phone. If you don’t already have a publication and inspiration strikes, you can publish a post instantly and start building an audience, even if it’s a while before you’re ready to publish anything else. If you come up with an idea for an article in the shower, you can be making money from it by breakfast. If you’re good at expressing your ideas through voice and video, you will be able to “go live” and watch paid subscriptions roll in as you talk. Making Substack as accessible as possible is essential to our mission of creating a new economic engine for culture, with a new media ecosystem based on different rules from today’s dominant media structure. The Substack model prioritizes ownership for creators and agency for subscribers. Creators own not only all their content but also their relationships with their subscribers, making them less vulnerable to the vagaries of social networks. At the same time, subscribers can vote for the kind of culture they want by directly supporting the creators they most trust with subscriptions. The vast majority of the revenue generated by this model—9 out of every $10—goes to creators. Substack can only succeed when they succeed. We believe it is important for this model, which gives power to people over platforms, to spread as widely as possible, and these updates reflect that belief. Substack’s desktop-focused publishing experience works well, particularly for people who do most of their work on computers, such as journalists, bloggers, and podcasters. But those people also want to be able to publish on the go, and there are many more people—including millions of creators and billions of consumers—who seldom use desktops and spend almost all of their media time on their phones. Those same people largely use media platforms whose primary loyalties are to advertisers rather than users. Such systems seek to trap people in an unwinnable attention game that robs them of agency and ownership, while all the economic value accrues to the platform owner. We think the world can improve for creators and consumers if the attention economy has less of a vise grip on culture. In making Substack more mobile-friendly, we’re fusing the simplicity of a social app with the economic power of direct subscriptions, and replacing attention with intention. Your phone doesn’t have to be your mind’s prison. It can be your portal to a better culture. We just have to change that culture’s operating system. Let’s do it together.
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