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Businesses The Almighty Buck News

Substack Pauses Fundraising Efforts of Potential 100x Valuation (axios.com) 10

Substack stopped fundraising efforts for a round of $75 million to $100 million, the New York Times reported Thursday. Axios reports: The round could have valued the newsletter publication platform between $750 million and $1 billion. But the abandoned plans come amid the market's cooling and layoffs among other tech firms. NYT reported that Substack told investors its 2021 revenue was about $9 million. That means its potential valuation of $1 billion would have been 100x its revenue. Substack touted in November that it has more than 1 million paid subscriptions and that its top 10 writers collectively generate $20 million in annual revenue. But only a fraction of that contributes to Substack's bottom line.
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Substack Pauses Fundraising Efforts of Potential 100x Valuation

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  • Because ultimately, substack is a centralized website based mailing list. You subscribe to a person, and in return you get access to their newsletter.

    I would guess that value is equivalent to quality and quantity of people you have on it, and their ability to attract paid subscribers. It's fundamentally something similar to early newspapers, where there was one or two writers and primary funding comes from subscribers who want to read what specific reporters want to report on.

    Be it local news or specialist

    • Or any other franchise. They provide a ready-made audience by advertising and pulling users in. Especially for substandard products. If I had to guess I wouldn't be surprised to find a large percentage of the newsletters there are scammy ones.

      It wasn't till recently that I fully grasped the scale and truth of the phrase a suckers born every minute. There are multiple billionaires and hundreds if not thousands of multi-millionaires who's only job is to build people out of their money using a wide variety
      • Whoever's managed to pump Substack, a web site for writing newsletters, up to a valuation of imaginty-million dollars is definitely in the televangelist, cryptocurrency, anf NFT league. I mean, if they could perhaps figure out how to get the newsletters to leap out of the monitor and blow you they might have a a chance of surviving, but without that, what future has a web site for online versions of throwaway letterbox-cluttering garbage got?
    • It's fundamentally something similar to early newspapers, where there was one or two writers and primary funding comes from subscribers who want to read what specific reporters want to report on.

      I'm not so sure that's how early newspapers worked, depending on what you mean by "early". I don't think the phenomenon of the celebrity reporter started until the 20th century. I mean sure, people picked up the local paper to see what Mencken and Ernie Pyle had to say, and maybe going back to Nellie Bly, but I'm

      • Dick Tracy as fiction is as true today, two way cellular like my Apple Watch âOEsï

        Real value in comic franchises exceeds Ernie Pyle, Jimmy Breslin et al

        Mencken is the only one to really impact today, as he really nailed it alongside contemporary Abrose Bierce, with Mark Twain much more humorously adding the final punches!

  • Being a spammer is not enough of a health hazard, and they still get paid. Have you told a spammer to FOAD today?

  • When I found out that Gab is able to offer a site that works very well for several million users, providing a dangerously close to Facebook level of features (even if they're not as well-implemented) using about 9 full time engineers and their CEO, it really hit me how screwed a lot of these businesses are with their thousands of employees who deliver... what?

    I mean FFS, look at what Substack does. That is something that should be doable with a team of a few dozen technical employees working 40 hours a week

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