In another snippet of podcast news this week — wait, you didn’t see the three pieces about the Spotify/Gimlet/Anchor news? — Substack, the all-in-one independent (paid) newsletter provider, is now offering support for subscriber-only audio, too.
The added feature won’t make the same kind of splash as Spotify’s $230 million buy, of course. But Substack has garnered more than 35,000 paid subscribers across the newsletters it hosts, up from 11,000 when we last wrote about them in July 2018. That’s a big chunk, especially considering most of the newsletters also have a free tier, and now it can expand to podcasters as well.
“We wanted to build through the core strength of Substack. You’re not paying for stuff or a product; you’re paying for a relationship with a writer, maybe now a podcaster, you really trust,” Hamish McKenzie, the company’s cofounder, said.
There are a lot of routes this feature could take: Is it for writers to dip their toes into…
