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Substack says it has more than 1 million paid subscriptions — www.axios.com

Substack has announced that there are more than 1 million paid subscriptions to the newsletters on its platform. That's up a staggering 750,000 from last December and that kind of growth is a big boost to the creator-evangelists saying people will pay for content published directly by writers they rate.

We've highlighted instances of publishing brands like The Atlantic fighting back with their own newsletter offerings, but it would be a curmudgeonly publisher that didn't give Substack credit for growing the reader-funded newsletter space.

"These are subscriptions that didn’t exist before", wrote Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie in his million-subscription announcement. "They represent a rush of new money into the media ecosystem, the vast majority of it going directly to writers."

Is it time to demonopolise Big Tech for real? — www.thedrum.com

Our Chris is taking a look at the pros and cons of breaking Big Tech's stranglehold on the digital advertising markets. With digtal ad spend in the US up almost 40% and set to exceed $200 billion, you would think publishers would be celebrating. But 64% of that will go to Google, Facebook and Amazon in the US and 80% in the UK, and the calls to tackle the monopoly are getting louder.

Weekly print newspaper for Wales to close, focus shifting to digital — www.pressgazette.co.uk

Newsquest is to stop printing The National, its weekly newspaper for Wales. After seven months in print the focus will now shift to growing the publication's digital subscriber base. The National was initially seen as a digital project, but a strong response to early pop-up print editions led to thirty-three weeklies being printed before Newsquest shifted back to online only.

What people value in digital news — showme.missouri.edu

The team at the National in Wales might find the latest research from the Missouri School of Journalism interesting. The team there fear print newspapers moved to digital without understanding how readers use contextual clues to make sense of the news online. They're offering advice on building trust with readers by using eight useful cues, from flagging story genres and age to signposting interactivity.

This week's podcast:

The Independent US Senior Vice President Blair Tapper on shaping the publication overseas — voices.media

This week, we hear from Blair Tapper, Senior Vice President at The Independent US. She talks about what her priorities have been since the brand’s US launch, what an Independent reader looks like across the pond, and why their new commercial offerings are more mission-based.

The Great Privacy Reset: Insider, Future and Permutive on the opportunities for publishers — voices.media

In this new Conversations episode, we hear from Jana Meron, Senior VP of Programmatic and Data Strategy at Insider Inc, Nicholas Flood, Future plc’s Global Ad Product and Revenue Operations Director, and Joe Root, Founder of Permutive. They talk about where advertising issues arose from, some of the challenges they face implementing the changes, and how we can all work towards a sustainable advertising ecosystem.