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> Of all these writers I subscribe to for free: would I be willing to pay a single price for all of them together? That might be worth $10 a month

Fair enough, but a magazine is largely filled with advertisements, which is where much/most of the revenue comes from. I like that Substack does not have ads like this.



There are magazines with no ads, like Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated in its early days.


Consumer Reports is able to do that because it makes $260 million a year from subscribers.

The only magazines in the world with more subscribers ADAC Motowelt in Germany and AARP and Costco's magazines in the US. They have a scale that makes it possible to forgo advertising that isn't really applicable to other magazines.


Sure, but that's not exactly comparable to most Substacks (at least the popular ones).




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