Source: It's Nice That
The Stack's data shows consumption patterns have diverged so sharply that "readers" no longer form a coherent market—some are deep-diving on Substack while others graze TikTok captions, and publishers betting on a unified reading culture are losing revenue. What matters isn't whether reading survives as a behavior, but that the economics of attention have fractured: the long-form subscriber, the algorithmic scroller, and the audio-commuter require entirely different business models and can't be monetized the same way. Publishers positioning themselves as "a reading platform" rather than as serving three separate consumption tribes are the ones failing.