Let me get this out of the way: I don't like Substack. I'm not defending Substack. I think it's a mediocre company that employs human garbage, and their obnoxious comments to the press about not slowing down hiring look very egotistical given today's news.

That said, a bunch of people were wrong online, so let's put on our thinking caps.

Even with the first paragraph in mind, it's actually valued reasonably. Or, at least, valued in a manner that's not surprising, given other Silicon Valley valuations.

The $9,000,000 in revenue isn't exactly the whole story. Yes, they're pulling in $9,000,000 in a year, but they only take a 10% cut of sales on their platform, and they hoist Stripe fees onto the authors.

They're pushing over a hundred million through their platform in a year. When you factor in that they're probably (if you're of the stance that a company tends to reflect its most visible employee in integrity) going to pull a Patreon at some point and raise their cut, and that they've still got a lot of market to address, especially as they've proven themselves willing to expand into more than just the written word, and on top of that the deals they made with the people they paid to seed the platform will be shifting to the standard deal soon enough...

Yeah, unfortunately it's looking pretty good for them, and they haven't even really gotten into trying to cannibalize local media ecosystems, yet. They're probably overvalued, but they aren't that overvalued.

These ghouls will be around to haunt for a while to come, so let's not get too smug that they're booting a handful of people from their money printer. Unless they're run by complete incompetents (which wouldn't be surprising, given their choice in VPs), we will still be suffering headlines about them for years to come.

Sorry.