Azeem Azhar

I mean, it is institutional grade scale.

And on the other hand, you have Barry Weiss, who left the New York Times, built something called the Free Press, which is an aggregator built on Substack.

And it looks like a webzine, to use an old word.

And it is exactly that.

You get your single subscription, you get podcasts, you get essays, guest essays, on-staff essays.

And somehow she's parlayed the

the low entry cost of being able to set up a media business on Substack into something that looks more traditional in terms of its organizational structure and its tempo and its cadence.

And Substack has been able to support both of those.

And in some sense, that means there's nothing new under the sun in a way.

We're just seeing a market segment in different ways.

And, you know, I think the conservative commentators are incredibly strong on YouTube relative to, you know, progressive or liberal commentators.

And I think, you know, within Substack, it's hard to know because algorithms hide, you know, the full spectrum of what's going on.

One of the real powers of Substack has been

that it drives subscribers to you.

So I forget the number, but it's certainly a majority, or if not a majority, approaching a majority of all of our new free and paid subscribers have already been on Substack and are already subscribed elsewhere.

And I think that that's a really powerful engine and a discovery engine that exists within Substack.

And people break out, they'll write a great essay, they'll have

1,000 free subscribers, that SA will get 800 likes and reshares and they'll see themselves hit that 10,000 number very quickly.

So there's something about the network effect within Substack, the discovery and its ability to drive traffic, which is something that

media organizations used to provide writers.