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Substack, the San Francisco-based newsletters start-up, was co-founded by Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi. Photo: Substack

How US newsletter site Substack took inspiration from China’s WeChat to give content creators a voice

  • The San Francisco-based start-up’s founders took inspiration from WeChat, which popularised self-publishing with WeChat Public Accounts in China
  • Both thrive on a model where content is delivered to a user’s inbox and where writers can establish their own mini-media empires
Internet

Newsletter publishing site Substack has quickly become the favourite online platform for thousands of writers and content creators to get their work published and distributed.

Its ease-of-use and simple fee model appeals to content creators while consumers are drawn by a product that provides them with a wide variety of quality content on topics of interest, delivered directly to their email inbox.

Substack, which competes with other self-publishing services such as MailChimp and Patreon, allows almost anyone to start a newsletter and charge subscribers for it. You register via e-mail, produce your content, and upload via the easy-to use note-pad style interface. Substack then allows you to set a subscription fee and invite users to sign up.

In return for providing a professional publishing platform and income stream, Substack takes a 10 per cent cut from sales generated by the content creator.

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What many people do not know though is that this San Francisco-based start-up took its inspiration from WeChat, the Chinese super app operated by internet giant Tencent Holdings.

Tencent vice president Allen Zhang founded email service Foxmail before joining Tencent in 2005 to work on QQ Mail. He was later tasked with creating a mobile communications tool by the name of Weixin. In 2012, Weixin acquired an English name - WeChat - and the rest is history.

Although e-mail newsletters have been around since the internet’s inception, Substack has caught the new wave of influencer-style journalism in an age where traditional media has found it hard to grapple with recommendation-driven content algorithms.

This trend has seen readers turn towards niche content and writers with an original or expert voice and move away from general, aggregated content with a pay-for-it all or not-at-all delivery model.

Sinocism was the first Substack newsletter ever published and it has remained one of the most popular. Photo: Sinocism

This trend took off in China around 2013, with the advent of WeChat Public Accounts, which are media accounts that distribute content straight to the inboxes of WeChat users - a model that has taken China by storm.

“WeChat Public Accounts are very similar to Substack newsletters for sure. Reaching people where they are is the broad concept here,” said Matthew Brennan, managing director of consultancy China Channel.

“WeChat is the email in China on a technical level. Much like WeChat, Substack is popular because you get someone on the email list and you can actually reach them somewhere where they will be tracking, which is their inbox and you can reach them there continuously,” he added.

Substack and its founders did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

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WeChat was originally created by a team of e-mail specialists inside Shenzhen-based Tencent and Substack was created by a team of entrepreneurs who initially set out to build a messaging app with the self-professed goal of creating the “WeChat of the West”.

Before founding Substack, Chris Best was co-founder and the chief technology officer of Kik, styled as the West’s answer to WeChat. Kik became popular for a time and it even received US$50 million in funding from Tencent in 2015. Best went on CNBC and Bloomberg at the time to trumpet the app’s mission to replicate WeChat’s success.

But the plan did not work out as Kik was swarmed by competitor chat apps ranging from Messenger to Snapchat. Best and two other Kik employees — Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi — eventually left the company in 2017 to co-found Substack.

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Bill Bishop, author of China current affairs newsletter Sinocism on Substack, who is also an angel investor in the company, notes the influence of WeChat on Substack’s founding team.

“[Kik] tried to learn a lot from WeChat,” said Bishop, adding that key takeaways were the willingness of users to subscribe and even tip WeChat writers for their content.

Just like WeChat invited journalists, economists and other industry professionals to share their insights via WeChat Public Accounts, Substack has positioned itself as a platform for writers with wide-ranging areas of expertise.

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Substack has also attracted Chinese investors.

“They have a couple of Chinese investors. I think [the investors] saw what was happening on WeChat with all these independent media accounts and how much people were tipping and how much money people were making,” said Bishop.

WeChat and Substack basically share two key similarities.

Both thrive on a model where content is delivered straight to a user’s inbox and secondly, both enable writers to establish their own mini-media empires and move away from traditional publishing.

WeChat is often described as a super app in China, with hundreds of millions of users. Photo: EPA-EFE

WeChat Public Accounts has enabled many writers and brands to establish their own direct audience, a revolution for China’s tightly-controlled media landscape where most newspapers and television channels used to be state-owned.

A case in point is Xiao Han, the founder of the popular art education account EY Art, who left her job as a television host to start her own WeChat Public Account in 2013.

“There’s nothing wrong in wanting to have a stable job like being a presenter at a state-owned media company, but I was eager to do something different to prove my own worth,” Xiao told the Post in a 2016 interview.

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Xiao Han’s EY Art went on to become a highly successful WeChat Public Account with both written and video content, amassing more than 1.5 million subscribers and landing a 15 million yuan investment led by Pegasus Group in 2016.

Chen Xinxin started a WeChat Public Account called The Things About Mobile Games back in 2013 with two friends, analysing business trends in the gaming industry. Averaging about 20,000 views per article, the account now employs about a dozen full-time writers.

“The success of WeChat Public Accounts has a lot to do with the fact that it has turned itself into a good space for mobile users to consume in-depth and quality content,” Chen said.

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“When we first entered the field around 2013, it was actually already kind of late as other gaming-dedicated self-media teams were building up their WeChat Public Accounts. In the beginning, our core group of readers were mainly just our own friends in the gaming community because we were so niche,” she added.

Millennial entrepreneurs in China have looked to differentiate themselves and build an original brand. Today, a similar phenomenon appears to be playing out in the West in the form of newsletters, which are disrupting the algorithm-driven content delivery model.

John Oliverius, president of Verius Ventures, said that he started his newsletter called The China Esports Business News Digest with the aim of serving a niche audience.

“It started as a memo which I shared on Slack with some friends who are into e-sports. Eventually I decided to turn it into a newsletter because I was finding more and more people who were looking for this kind of content.”

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Sinocism’s Bishop said that the self-publishing model makes sense for both content creators with deep sector knowledge as well as readers who have specific interests.

“The technology is simple now. Running a Substack, I just write and they do everything for me. Post on WeChat, they do everything for you,” said Bishop. “The technology is there, the back-end is done, the publishing tools are done and then the payment layer stuff is there. In China, it’s WeChat Pay. Here it’s Stripe.”

Dev Lewis, a fellow at Hong Kong-based think tank Digital Asia Hub and the writer of China India Networked on Substack, said that thanks to modern technology, journalists and policy writers can now do many things that were once only possible with the help of large media organisations.

“There’s so much power packed into all the tech that we have access to ... and you can even do quite a bit of data crunching fairly easily,” Lewis said. “If you can do all these things on your own, why do people work for media companies?”

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