I used to write a column for Macworld magazine. People trying to butter me up would tell me they bought the magazine just to read my modest contribution. I didn’t believe them, but it got me thinking. It was the mid-’90s, the early days of the web, and pioneers were starting their own sites. What if I “went internet”—sold just my column and charged a buck for each edition? Cheaper than the magazine! If I were paid by only a fraction of Macworld’s several hundred thousand readers, the proceeds would far exceed the fee Macworld paid me. An interesting thought experiment. I put my calculations in a PowerPoint deck and made it part of a presentation about the internet I was giving back in those days, which ended with a promise that, sooner than they thought, many of the people in the room would have their own email addresses. Really!

Attempting to execute that plan in 1995 would have been preposterous. The audience hadn’t arrived. The tools weren’t there. How would people pay me? And besides, the big media companies I was working for were well established and secure.

Twenty-five years later, though, that exact idea is suddenly in vogue. Everyone is on the internet. The tools are there. Stripe handles payments. And some companies, notably a 2017 startup called Substack, offer turnkey options to get going, even offering promising writers an advance to pay the utility bills while they build an audience. The preferred format is newsletters, sent to readers’ inboxes, where they’ll be wedged between Zoom meeting links, face-mask spam, and updates on your cousin’s wedding. (Postponed again! Jeez, why don’t you elope already?) Brand-name journalists are bailing from publications—whether because they didn’t like to be edited or felt that their political views were unpopular with colleagues—to peddle their prose directly to consumers. Other writers were simply thrust into the unemployment diaspora by cutbacks or shutdowns of their outlets and decided to go indie. The deal is that you hook people with a free version and then sign them up at 50 or maybe 100 bucks a year.