The Rundown
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While the digital world struggles to keep up with the increasingly strange goings on at Twitter (Dogecoin logo we’re looking at you), rival publishing platform Substack are making moves into the social space, announcing this week their newest feature called Notes.
Notes is designed to let users share posts, quotes, comments, images, links and ideas in a dedicated short-form feed that looks a lot like Twitter. By their own admission, Notes “may look like familiar social media feeds.” but are keen to point out that content discovery on their platform differs from traditional social media feeds because it doesn’t run on ads.
“The lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed is attention,” the company wrote in a blog post. “By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing great work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences.”
Image Credits: Substack
While Twitter’s subscription model approach struggles to get off the ground, it will be interesting to see whether Substack’s new feature encourages more popular creators to take their audiences over onto the platform where direct engagement can be monetised.
Substack is not only taking on Twitter, where many back-and-forth threaded discussions between writers and readers already take place, but also other online communities where writers have been building out networks of their own, like Discord, Slack and Telegram. We have also seen a trend for popular Instagram influencers and creators taking their audience over to the Substack platform, such as Emma Gannon, Pandora Sykes and Katherine Ormerod to name a few.
How popular the new Notes feed will prove to be will take time to see, but definitely one to keep an eye on as Substack continues to grow in numbers and value.