I understand what they meant though: paying celebrities to join while giving people the impression that those celebrities joined by free choice* (ie because the platform was so great).
* edit: free choice as in "not swayed by payment"
* edit: free choice as in "not swayed by payment"
Musicians complain a lot about Spotify being a poor deal for them financially, but there's no doubt it was an excellent deal for Joe Rogan.
However, a guaranteed paycheck for the first year is lower risk, so they took the deal.
This all depend on your own efforts building an audience and it's still the case that most authors won't make much. But it seems like better terms than Spotify for moderately successful authors.
Paying writers for their work means they didn't choose to join Substack?
But then people who don't know or understand this yet might subscribe to one of these paid contributors and think, gee, Substack must be a great platform because Famous McBrain writes on it, as opposed to the subtly more accurate point that Substack's _money_ must be great because Famous McBrain took it.
He most definitely didn’t pretend to “just go there”, and his post on the subject mentioned a few others with similar deals by name.
Do you have a problem when a publisher pays an advance to (say) Stephen King in order to get him to publish through them?