The brief history of people writing things to other people

Newsletters peaked in ~1530, the Medicis invented Substack and we are running a sale for a week before starting experiments with the paywall.

While independent journalism is often seen as a subversive activity by those in power, the reality of it, especially on funding, is rarely revolutionary.

Probably the most meaningful structural "innovation" of the last two decades was the introduction of digital paywalls. I remember the first conversations I had about this in the early 2010s, and it felt like pure sci-fi. People from Slovakia (Piano was a Slovak company back then) came to the Budapest Ringier office to tell us about audiences actually paying for content. Sitting in that conference room truly felt like ascending to the top level of the expanding brain meme, mind: blown. And somehow forgetting that 10 years before that, we all worked in print where people paying for content was the norm, actually for centuries.

This is not to say digital audience revenues are trivial or that no innovation happens, but I think there are a lot of changes that are presented as groundbreaking, when in reality they're more cyclical, or like a …