Cutting out the middle man

Disintermediation seems to be all the rage. But new ways to cut out the middleman come with their own challenges and negotiations.   

In 2019, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Nick Anderson co-founded Counterpoint¹, the “world’s first cartoon-led² news media company.” Its initial aim was to “create a different business model for editorial cartooning, to decouple us from newspapers.” Counterpoint began as a response to legacy media firing political cartoonists, including Anderson, who lost his job at the Houston Chronicle in 2017. Using seed funding from a healthcare entrepreneur, Counterpoint launched as a free newsletter³ housing around 16 prominent editorial cartoonists, including Kevin Kallaugher, Lisa Benson, Michael Ramirez, and Rob Rogers.  

By pairing liberal and conservative voices, Counterpoint sought to commission original cartoons on a daily roster to represent a wide spectrum of political perspectives. Anderson started Counterpoint to “help cartoonists make a living.” Cartoonists were paid for their work, with a sole condition of 24-hour exclusive publishing rights. The newsletter initially went out five days a week, with each edition carrying two cartoons – one from the left and one from the right. The audience grew to over 100,000 over the first year.  

In the second year, Anderson moved Counterpoint onto the newly emergent platform Substack.  

Founded in 2017, Substack has over 5 million paying subscribers⁴ and hosts over 17,000 creators⁵ who generate income through paid subscriptions. The platform can be extremely profitable: over 50 creators on Substack currently make over $1 million annually.⁶ 

“It is certainly a sustainable business model for some people,” Anderson explains. “It’s not for me. I’m not one of the lucky creators making bank. I don’t make nearly enough on Substack to make a living, so I try to stitch together as many small streams of income from freelance clients and other online platforms like Patreon as I can. It's a constant challenge.”  

This points to a broader tension within Substack: while the platform can offer high earning potential for hyper-successful creators who bring their own audiences, creators on the platform with smaller audiences can struggle. The median income on Substack remains a mystery. But it appears that many creators treat their labour on Substack as a supplementary income, rather than a primary job.  

Once Counterpoint introduced paid subscriptions on Substack, some of their free audience dropped to around 95,000, and paid subscriptions did not generate enough revenue to support original commissions. 

“We had 3 days a week that were paid, and 2 days a week that were free to bring in new people. But we were never able to get enough money coming in from the paid subscribers to match what we were paying the cartoonists, and to cover all the overhead and expenses. So we reduced the amount we were paying the cartoonists,” says Anderson. 

Counterpoint established itself as an independent and alternative media source while gradually incorporating features from legacy media it had initially sought to leave behind. By 2022, when the Washington Post Writers Group began winding down, Anderson established Counterpoint Licensing and Syndication, taking over most of the former Washington Post political cartoonists. Amy Lago, the comics editor at Washington Post News Service, joined the Counterpoint Media Group. The Syndicate’s profits subsidised the Substack newsletter.  

At that point, the combined operation was “making no money,” says Anderson. “But at least we were covering it.” 

When Lago left Counterpoint in 2025, Anderson did not have the capacity to manage the Syndicate alongside a full-time job and 3-5 weekly cartoons. He and Lago decided to transfer the Syndicate’s cartoonists to Tribune Content Agency, where Anderson already had a syndication agreement for his own work. Anderson also considered discontinuing the newsletter although he persevered for the 70,000 free subscribers and an established paid audience. But it became clear that Counterpoint needed to adapt its approach.  

“Who's passionate about bipartisanship enough to pay for it? Nobody. Well, very few people,” Anderson says. “We had subscribers, but it's just a hard sell to say, ‘we're giving you both sides. Will you pay for this?’ And most people are like, ‘well, that's admirable, but no, I don't want to pay for it’.”  

As a result, while continuing a near-daily publication schedule, Counterpoint switched to a more popular left-leaning model and replaced original cartoons with syndicated work accompanied by Anderson’s written editorial. “We’ve been getting a really good response to both the cartoons, the format, and to the satirical writing… I just wish that I could pay cartoonists a lot more,” says Anderson. 

Substack describes itself as an ‘alternative’ to legacy media, and its founders emphasise that the platform is free to use and accessible to all. Editorial oversight is non-existent within the platform content guidelines, and creators retain full copyright of their work and 84% of revenue⁷ they make from subscribers.  

Anderson explains, “It was a noble experiment. It’s still going, but… I’ve had to really change it dramatically… I haven’t had a vacation in 18 months. Because I feel like if I take a vacation, I’m going to lose subscribers, and I’ll lose money.” 

While Substack might be a new media frontier promising disintermediation, it appears to solve one sustainability issue by creating another. While some ongoing problems within legacy media are reproduced – economic precarity, heavy workloads, and a lack of job security – new pressures are redistributed to creators who manage their own subscriptions, audience expectations, and platform dependence. Counterpoint is a unique example of how cartoonists have taken steps to transition away from legacy media while adopting some of its institutional features. We are currently working on further research into Substack through the lens of autonomy and precarity and will come back with more updates. 

References 

1. https://counterpoint.substack.com/ 
2. https://bado-badosblog.blogspot.com/2019/06/counterpoint.html 
3. https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2019/08/15/csotd-extra-counterpoint-quickly-comes-of-age/ 
4. https://post.substack.com/p/5-million 
5. https://searchengineland.com/guide/substack-users 
6. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/substack-subscriptions-uk-creators-half-a-million-1236588979/ 
7. https://wefunder.com/substack