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GameStop’s rollercoaster ride through the absurd machinery of the stock market has been fun to watch. It sent some of CNBC’s finest minds scrambling to Wikipedia to find out what Reddit is and allowed for Very Serious Thought Leaders to peddle all sorts of pet theories, like blaming GameStop’s unlikely rise on young men not having enough sex. A literal billionaire cried on national TV about it. But we all know how it ends. For a lot of people who actually invested in meme stocks, it won’t be pretty. And the rest of us will be left with the same broken economy as before.
But it doesn t mean you have to stay there forever.
On Tuesday, Every, the business-centric newsletter bundle formerly known as Everything, announced that after one year on Substack, it had moved to a custom-built website, taking its subscribers, contributors, and revenue along with it. In doing so, the chief architects of Every, Dan Shipper and Nathan Baschez, borrowed a technique first popularized by Discourse Blog, a left-leaning political publication that was born on Substack but migrated to its own website after reaching a critical mass.
Like the Discourse Blog founder Aleksander Chan, Shipper and Baschez pointed to the technical limitations of Substack as a key reason for leaving the platform. Before launching Everything, Baschez was one of Substack s first hires, a role that left him uniquely positioned to understand the capabilities of the platform.
Maria Bustillos This story is available exclusively to Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.
The Brick House Cooperative is a group of nine independent publications that operate under one umbrella.
To make clear how the publications would conduct business, they created a 25-page legal document called an operating agreement, which Brick House Cooperative founder Maria Bustillos shared with Insider.
The document lays out the unique way the publications divide revenue and split ownership.
One month after its launch, the Brick House Cooperative has nearly everything 1,800 paying subscribers and has generated more than $100,000 in subscription revenue.
Last August, nine independent publications joined in a collective experiment: banding together, they formed the Brick House Cooperative, a media company that would be worker-owned, subscription-based, and free of formal investment.
Subscriptions start working for the middle
“Six-figure Substack incomes and subscriber numbers sure sound great, but they’re not the only ends to the means.”
If media is a cafeteria, there’s no question that this year’s Popular Girl was Substack. It felt like every few weeks, someone new was getting invited to the cool kids’ table to join the likes of Daniel Lavery, Judd Legum, and Emily Atkin to launch their own screamingly profitable personal newsletters. And while much ink has been spilled over the lucrative new incomes, the unleashed creative potential, and the sweet, sweet uncensored freedom entailed, there’s also been plenty of smart criticism over how the Substack model has most immediately rewarded established those with Twitter megaphones and decades-old followings.
A theory about his strangest nominees and appointments
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
If the staggered unveiling of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet has done little to enthuse the (broadly defined) left, it has also not yet been quite as disastrous as some predicted (and that will remain true so long as Rahm Emanuel remains outside the administration). What it has been, so far, is very puzzling.
Take what happened to Marcia Fudge. The Ohio representative was openly lobbying to be made secretary of agriculture, in order to focus the department’s attention on hunger and food security. She believed she had the relevant experience for the job and had even gone to the press with plans for what she wanted to do if selected: Her goal, as she explained in an interview last month, was to change the perception that the department only exists to help rural whites.