What FT Alphaville's Substack launch says about reaching new audiences
Author: Sam Barber, Founder of Pitchr.ai
Financial Times is launching an FT Alphaville Substack while keeping the original site running. This is about meeting new audiences where they already are.
Going where readers congregate
Alphaville has spent years building one of finance's most dedicated audiences and thriving communities, one that rivals the likes of Matt Levine's Money Stuff and Fortune's Term Sheet. A blog in the truest sense, its founding goes back to the early days of the Web 2.0 era.
Substack, the defining long-form platform of the creator economy era, has become its own ecosystem for financial commentary. And there's a generation of readers who discovered markets through online communities like Reddit and Substack, not traditional financial news sites.
Editor Robin Wigglesworth realizes this. Announcing the news on LinkedIn, he explained Alphaville wants "a way to reach readers directly, rather than rely on social media or search algorithms bestowing some clicks on us."
The audience shift is real
The blog doesn't need help reaching its existing base. But Substack delivers what a standalone site can't: readers discover newsletters through the network and algorithmic distribution, with discussions happening natively in the platform.
Substack is also where a generation of finance professionals now goes for analysis. Alphaville is 15+ years old. Its core audience likely skews mid-to-late career, people who remember the financial crisis firsthand. The Substack play captures readers who started out after 2015.
Is this the beginning of a wave?
I don't think so. The content Alphaville publishes is particularly well suited to a Substack audience, and the move makes sense for them specifically.
There are scattered examples of traditional publishers experimenting with Substack offshoots, but most have invested in proprietary in-house newsletters instead. That said, how many other financial media franchises are running this same calculation right now? Bloomberg could do this with any major columnist. WSJ could spin up Substack versions of popular franchises.
This move points to traditional media continuing to expand across more channels to increase reach and engagement. Alphaville built something valuable over 15 years. Now they're taking it somewhere new because that's where the next generation of readers is building its habits.
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