The Billion-Dollar Illusion of Independence

Substack, this very platform I am publishing on, is barely eight years old with just $45 million in revenue a year. But it convinced investors to assign it a $1.1 billion valuation.

We are watching the industrial collapse of institutional media and the rise of personality-led publishing as its replacement. But beneath the romance of independence lies a more precarious truth: platforms like Substack are becoming financial instruments for betting on the slow death of editorial structure.

Trust, stripped of oversight, amplified by algorithm, and sold as audience ownership is being monetized. That’s far from journalism.

Substack’s model was built for writers, not investors. That was the pitch. Keep 90% of your earnings (minus the Collison brothers tax), own your list, and escape the clickbait treadmill. But that model doesn’t scale.

The company earns a fraction of what its top creators do. Its success is inversely tied to its cut. The more it empowers creators, the less it profits from them. And they can bail anytime, you know, they own “the list.”

So the incentives had to shift.

Enter advertising. The founders after publicly rejecting it might reconsider their naivety. With advertising, Substack becomes less like a tool and more like a platform. It’s simple, if growth is slowing and your cut is capped, you need a new stream. One not tethered to individual success.

You don’t scale creators. You scale attention. And then you sell it.

But even more valuable than ad revenue is insulation from the AI-driven collapse of Google Search.

As AI chatbots cannibalize traffic from publishers, those with direct user relationships become premium real estate.

Substack’s pitch?

In a web where discovery is collapsing, distribution is everything. And the creator’s inbox is the last beachfront property that AI can’t reroute.

Moat. Look it up, made Warren Buffet rich.

Substack presents itself as a rebellion, a place where writers escape institutions and reclaim their voice. But its new valuation depends on the same platform logic it once rejected.

It needs scale, not just substance. And in the name of independence, it’s becoming just another gatekeeper. Algorithmic, ad-funded, and increasingly extractive.

What made it special is exactly what must be monetized for its valuation to make sense. They directness, the trust, the intimacy.

Substack is not the future of media. It’s a mirror held up to what’s left of it. The real shift isn’t from newsroom to newsletter, it’s from institution to individual brand. From shared standards to personal cults. From facts to vibes.

What matters now isn’t where the story is published. It’s who tells it, how it spreads, and whether anyone still cares enough to verify it.

The platform is just the stage. The economy is still attention. And the price of going direct is carrying the entire burden of credibility on your name.