Substack’s model is based on patronage, not on acting as a neutral platform

In the past, there was the patron: a wealthy individual who funded an author, without intermediaries, in exchange for a personal connection with their work. The system lasted for centuries, until first the printing press and then the publishing groups dismantled it, replacing the direct link between writer and reader with a chain of publishers, distributors and advertisers. In 2026, the Substack website aims to rebuild that pre-industrial relationship through a subscription service. Readers pay five euros a month for a single journalist’s newsletter and, in doing so, take on the role once reserved for the Medici or the Este families: a widespread form of mass patronage.

The platform was launched in 2017 in San Francisco by three entrepreneurs driven by a simple yet rather radical idea: if online journalism had been reduced to a machine for generating clicks to boost advertising revenue, could a model be reintroduced in which the reader paid the writer directly, bypassing advertising and, with it, the conflicts of interest that accompany it? It took some time for the idea to become a phenomenon, but it soon attracted names from prestigious publications – people such as Casey Newton, who left The Verge; Hanif Kureishi, who used it as a platform to share his new life as a quadriplegic; and Heather Cox Richardson, whose daily newsletter on US politics has a subscriber base that any decent regional newspaper would envy. The substance of the message was not new, but what is new is the economic structure underpinning it. In Italy, the phenomenon arrived with the usual inherent delay, but is now gaining ground at a pace that has surprised even industry insiders. Journalists, authors and columnists have moved a substantial part of their output to Substack, the so-called ‘patient reading’ platform – a space that rejects the logic of the instant feed in favour of long, thoughtful pieces, read by those who have chosen them on the basis of a properly remunerated subscription, rather than stumbled upon by chance whilst scrolling. At this point, however, the matter becomes more interesting than a mere eulogy to slowness. The question is not whether Substack restores dignity to reflective writing – the answer, to put it mildly, is yes – but whether this dignity corresponds to an actual superior quality of the text, or whether it primarily promotes an intimate, confidential style of writing, closer to a diary-style confession than to the standards of journalism. If an article passes through the filter of an editorial team and is discussed and fact-checked, this check on excesses is absent here. A Substack newsletter lives and dies in the mind of a single person, who enjoys a freedom that an editorial team would grant only in very exceptional cases; and, after all, it is precisely this freedom that readers are paying for.

The venerable communications analyst Neil Postman argued as far back as 1985, in his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death", that every medium carries its own epistemology. Substack deserves the same treatment: it is not a neutral platform hosting long-form texts; it is an economic structure that produces a certain type of writing. The author, paid by readers, cultivates a relationship of trust with those who support them and avoids giving rise to unpleasant doubts about themselves. It is the mechanism that governed the relationship between patron and Renaissance artist: the patron pays, and implicitly expects to be represented with dignity.

There is also a structural aspect brought about by this resurgence of independent writers: the redistribution of editorial power from a handful of publications to many small voices does not eliminate concentration, but rather shifts it. Those with a name, such as a long-established newspaper columnist, bring with them to Substack a capital of attention that no newcomer can replicate. The platform promises a democratisation of writing that ends up resembling more of a diaspora of celebrities towards a new territory, with the usual hierarchies being reproduced. Consider the nineteenth-century serialised novel, the kind readers followed in instalments, buying the newspaper more for the new chapter than for the day’s news. Even then, fiction thrived on a subscription basis, and the author wrote knowing who was paying them and what was expected – with the predictable consequences for the narrative: chapters dragged out for commercial reasons, plot twists tailored more to the audience’s sensibilities than to the story’s coherence, and so on. It is hardly surprising that some writers, both Italian and otherwise, have begun to see Substack as the ideal platform for publishing works that are not books, but serialised stories that replicate the logic of the nineteenth-century serial, with the risk of bending their content to the demands of the subscription model. After all, the pressure to publish regularly so as not to lose subscribers is reminiscent of the logic of the creator economy, with the burden of consistency weighing heavily on those who make a living producing posts on any platform. The Substack subscriber pays in advance for a regular output that the author must guarantee, regardless of what they actually have to say. But what happens to a culture when the economic relationship between writer and reader becomes as explicit as a gym membership? Something will change, in an effort not to disappoint the clientele. These, however, are side notes: texts that would not have found a home elsewhere do exist on Substack and are read and discussed with a level of care that social media makes impossible. The point is not to condemn digital patronage, but rather not to portray it as a triumph of quality over commodification: it is another form of commodification, with its own particular aesthetic and an explicit relationship between the parties. Even patronage, by becoming a platform, comes with a monthly fee.