Yes. Substack has Stripe billing built in, and a user base which both accepts monetization culturally and is probably already subscribed to another substack so it’s much easier to subscribe to a second.
Getting new updates via email matters a lot of user retention. Sending emails in bulk to get around spam filters is nothing that WordPress can easily do out of the box.
I don’t really understand why Substack became so popular, compared to eg WordPress. Is Substack writing easier to monetize?
Yes. Substack has Stripe billing built in, and a user base which both accepts monetization culturally and is probably already subscribed to another substack so it’s much easier to subscribe to a second.
Getting new updates via email matters a lot of user retention. Sending emails in bulk to get around spam filters is nothing that WordPress can easily do out of the box.