Newsletter platform Substack is introducing the ability for writers to send videos to their subscribers via Chat, its direct messaging feature, the company announced on Wednesday.
The rollout of video in Chat comes two months after the newsletter platform brought videos to Notes, its X/Twitter copycat that lets users share short-form content.
To share a video in Substack Chat, writers can open a new chat and click on the plus icon in the bottom left corner.
Substack also provides the option to add a caption, put the video behind a paywall, as well as email subscribers about the video.
Additionally, writers who allow subscribers to start their own chat threads will now also be able to share their own videos.
Post News, a microblogging site that emerged in the days after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is shutting down just a year and a half after launching in beta.
Founder Noam Bardin, previously CEO of Waze, broke the news in a post on Friday.
“At the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform,” Bardin said.
Instead of subscribing to various different publications, Post users could purchase individual articles from certain partner outlets.
But perhaps it was too soon to try to capture this nascent movement in a social platform.
Substack is adding new capabilities to its Twitter-like Notes feature that bring it more in-line with the social network now known as X.
The company announced on Tuesday that users can now post videos directly to Notes in the Substack app and on the web.
Notes let users share posts, quotes, comments, images, links and ideas in a Tweet-like format, The short-form content is displayed in a dedicated Twitter-like feed.
Starting today, users can post videos directly to Notes by recording a video or selecting one from their phone’s camera roll or their desktop.
In its blog post, Substack explains that Notes is especially valuable for users who don’t have large pre-existing audiences.
Agnes Kozera and David Kierzkowski, the co-founders of podcast sponsorship marketplace Podcorn, today launched their newest app—Storiaverse, a short-form entertainment platform that offers a multi-format reading experience, combining animated video and written content.
Available on iOS and Android devices, Storiaverse caters to graphic novel readers and adult animation fans who want to discover original stories in a short-form, animated format.
At launch, Storiaverse offers 25 original titles spanning genres such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and comedy.
Additionally, TikTok star and independent animator King Science (Science Akbar) is teaming up to create an exclusive story on the app.
There are currently over 100 creators working with Storiaverse and more than 100 stories in development.
India-based audio platform Pocket FM has secured $103 million in Series D funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Stepstone Group.
Pocket FM offers audio series with several short episodes and aim to become the “Netflix for audio” globally.
That means you can’t use the coins you bought on Pocket FM to unlock content Pocket Novel products and vice versa.
Pocket FM also has a limited audiobook vertical where it competes with the likes of Audible with a similar pay-to-unlock strategy.
Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADIA has held talks with Pocket FM for a potential mega funding round, TechCrunch reported last week.
Substack is introducing direct messaging, allowing users to have private one-on-one conversations, the company announced today.
DMs can be accessed in the Chat tab on the Substack app and website.
After launching an X (formerly Twitter) clone last year called Notes, Substack is now copying yet another feature from the social network.
Substack says DMs was a highly requested feature among users, and many users have shared their excitement on the announcement post.
The launch of DMs comes a few days after Substack updated its peer-to-peer recommendation system, allowing writers to curate and share a list of publications for their readers to subscribe to.
Today, the company announced a new capability for its Palmyra model that generates text from images, including graphs and charts, they call Palmyra-Vision.
May Habib, company co-founder and CEO, says that they made a strategic decision to concentrate on multimodal content, and being able to generate text from images is part of that strategy.
“We are going to be focused on multimodal input, but text output, so text generation and insight that is delivered via text,” Habib told TechCrunch.
She reserves the right to create charts and graphs at some point from data, but that’s not something they are doing at the moment.
This particular release is focused on generating text from those kinds of images.
Substack is updating its peer-to-peer recommendation system, the company announced today.
With this new update, Substack is helping writers aid other writers in expanding their reach and potentially getting more subscribers and followers, as the company is now allowing writers to curate and share a list of publications for their readers to subscribe to.
Most social media networks currently leverage algorithms for their recommendation systems, but Substack is instead focused on allowing writers to curate their own networks of recommendations.
Substack says the new update will help writers build up goodwill with other writers by helping them reach more people, while also helping readers curate a worldview.
The platform will show writers how many subscriptions and follows they have driven for people in their network.
Substack has industry-leading newsletter tools and a platform that independent writers flock to, but its recent content moderation missteps could prove costly.
Earlier last year, Substack CEO Chris Best failed to articulate responses to straightforward questions from the Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel about content moderation.
The interview came as Substack launched its own Twitter (now X)-like microblogging social platform, known as Notes.
Substack authors are at a crossroadsIn the Substack fallout, which is ongoing, another wave of disillusioned authors is contemplating jumping ship from Substack, substantial readerships in tow.
It’s unfortunate that Substack’s writers and readers now have to grapple with yet another form of avoidable precarity in the publishing world.
