Substack and Twitter

Launch of Notes is a significant move

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Substack and Twitter

Substack's mission is to transform the internet from a one-business-model platform into one that can support content creation without resorting to advertising as the revenue stream that pays for it. The subscription network summarizes the core shift its founders want to catalyze.

This week Substack launched Notes, its content feed, as part of its ongoing attempt to enable a network effect whereby content creators can post, like, share, re-post, mention, and reply to each other's work. The product is well done, albeit in a style highly reminiscent of Twitter.

Twitter has probably overreacted to the product. It has stopped Tweets from being embeddable into Substack newsletters. It initially went further, only to back off, from blocking references to Substack in Tweets.

The court is now set. The match can begin. Will Substack's Notes product impact Twitter? Will the product help Substack?

I seriously have doubts that Twitter will be impacted. And I suspect it will not be too long until Twitter realizes that blocking the embedding of Tweets in a Substack newsletter does nothing good for Twitter.

That said, I do think Notes will help Substack. This newsletter gets many new subscribers each week, and they almost all come from within the Substack ecosystem. Notes will add to my ability to reach others and their ability to find me. I will certainly post in Notes. I think every content producer on Substack will benefit, and Substack will become a more interesting destination for those discovering creators.

But Notes is imperfect, as expected from a new product. The main weakness is that it is not integrated into the Android or iPhone "sharing" technology. When looking at a web page on the iPhone there is a sharing button. It can post the content you are looking at to Facebook or Twitter, WhatsApp, or Telegram. But it can't post to Substack. That makes posting external content into a Note a manual copy-and-paste job. That needs fixing if Notes is to be a first-class host of shared and discussed content.

Twitter - possibly in response - announced subscriptions to Twitter accounts today. This adds fuel to Substacks fire. The belief in a subscription model may be shared between the two companies.

What is interesting, as we have sometimes discussed on , is that Substack's hostility to advertising is also standing in the way of a better use of sponsorships. always tells me how important sponsorships are for trade press and events. Certainly, that is true for Podcasts. It would seem obvious that a Substack could have one or more sponsors, either permanent or temporary. I know that if offered to sponsor That Was The Week for 12 months. I would happily give some placement in return for the $200k. Nobody would be better placed than Substack itself to attract sponsors and help us integrate them and their revenue streams into our newsletters. It is a "Google Adsense" moment.

Outbound promotion of a Substack post is already built into the publishing platform. Tweeting a Note might also make sense, with the link pointing back to the author's Notes profile, showing the specific Note Tweeted. The same for Facebook. And I am still surprised LinkedIn is not added to those outbound lists.