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At the risk of taking made-up numbers too far, it may be worth looking at this the other directions. 560 USD/year means an individual content creator could get 80K annual income from 145 full-paying members, from 8000 1-USD/year members, or from 16000 5-USD/year members. A person putting forward 5 USD/year per creator would have 112 separate subscriptions. And 80k USD is actually almost twice the average journalist pay, albeit with the recognition that it's a Pareto field on pay as well as on consumption.
((For sanity check, Fek is getting something around 1100 subscribers averaging 10 USD/month despite largely having put his main project on the backburner for a few years now. Although his main project is a furry bondage simulator.))
I don't want to put too much weight on Dunbar numbers, but I'm pretty skeptical that most people could (or would want) to keep up with that level of pay-worthy output at length. Yes, there are people who religiously read every column in a newspaper, or who finish full books on a weekly basis, but if you're not doing that now, I'm skeptical that Substack will be the change you need in the world to get there.
I think there's an underlying tension between "entertainment" and "sense-makers", not solely relevant to this discussion, and "sense-makers" don't really make sense within the business model he's proposing. Not because you're incapable of paying 500 USD/year for a hundred experts: because I'm not going to pay 5 USD/year for someone I don't already trust to some extent. "Sense-making" in the sense of attracting large communities talking about first responses to random people aren't really compatible with that -- indeed, you'll often find that 'sense-making' often benefits a lot from responding to people who aren't worth paying.
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