Prediction certainty 3/5 debate potential 2/5

Best: Substack plans to build creator sponsorship tools from first principles

Chris Best · Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media · Sep 2, 2025 · at 23:17

Chris Best is the co-founder and CEO of Substack. He discusses Substack's intention to develop monetization options that support high-quality independent publishing rather than traditional display ads.

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“And I think there's a version of unlocking, you know, more economic opportunity, more economic upside that is aligned with the idea of independence, the idea of having differentiated value and quality. And so we're very interested in doing that, but you know, my belief is we have to take a sort of a first principles approach and not just, you know, stuff ads in a thing, but ask the question, like, what would the good version of this be? And help build that.”

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Assertion Not checkable as stated
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Disclosure
Best: Free speech is not Substack's primary mission
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