What Is the Point of a Paywall?

With social platforms like Facebook throttling distribution for news and the online ad market collapsing, more and more writers are turning to paid newsletters as a way to make a living. In a November 2018 episode of this podcast, I interviewed Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, a platform that made it easy for writers to launch newsletters and charge subscribers to receive exclusive issues of those newsletters. At the time, McKenzie said that Substack writers had converted a combined 25,000 readers into paying subscribers.

Flash forward to today, and that number is up to 40,000. In fact, BuzzFeed recently reported that the 12 top writers on Substack make over $160,000 a year each. For this week's episode, I interviewed one of those writers: Robert Cottrell.

Ten years ago, Cottrell founded a website called The Browser. He would comb through thousands of articles a day and pick the five he found most interesting, adding a dash of commentary to go along with each pick. As time wore on, he began to notice that many of his readers were signing up for an email digest of his daily recommendations.

In 2013, he launched a paid version of the newsletter, and in the intervening years it's grown to over 10,000 subscribers. I interviewed Cottrell about how he goes about choosing articles every day, what his longterm ambitions are for the newsletter, and why he recently hired a CEO.