Substack
Based on Wikipedia: Substack
The Newsletter Revolution That Almost Wasn't
In 2017, three men made a bet that the internet was ready to pay writers directly. Not through advertising. Not through the attention-harvesting machinery of social media. Just money, from reader to writer, for words worth reading.
They were right. And they were almost too early.
Substack—the platform they built—now has five million paying subscriptions. Not free sign-ups. Paying subscriptions. People handing over their credit card numbers to read newsletters. If you had pitched this idea to a venture capitalist in 2005, they would have laughed you out of the room. Email newsletters? Those were supposed to be dead, killed by blogs, then by social media, then by whatever came next.
But here we are.
The Founders and Their Unlikely Inspiration
Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie came from different worlds. Best had co-founded Kik Messenger, the chat app that briefly seemed like it might challenge WhatsApp. Sethi was his lead developer there. McKenzie was a tech reporter at PandoDaily, which means he had spent years watching other people build things while writing about them.
What united them was an obsession with a single newsletter: Stratechery.
Ben Thompson started Stratechery in 2013, writing deeply analytical pieces about technology and media strategy. He charged readers directly—around $100 per year—and built a devoted following of tech executives, investors, and strategy nerds who considered his analysis worth more than a hundred free articles elsewhere. Thompson proved something that seemed almost paradoxical: in an age of infinite free content, people would pay for writing they truly valued.
The Substack founders looked at Thompson's success and asked a simple question: what if anyone could do this?
Not just anyone with Thompson's analytical brilliance or his years building an audience. Anyone with something worth saying and readers willing to pay to hear it. What if you could strip away all the technical complexity—the payment processing, the email delivery, the subscription management—and let writers just write?
How the Money Actually Works
The business model is elegantly simple. Writers set their own subscription prices, though Substack sets a minimum of five dollars per month or thirty dollars per year. When a reader subscribes, Substack takes ten percent. That's it. No advertising. No data harvesting. No algorithmic manipulation of what readers see.
This ten percent cut matters more than it might seem. Traditional publishing houses take far more—often seventy to ninety percent of revenue. Even digital platforms like YouTube take thirty percent or more. Substack's relatively modest slice means writers keep most of what they earn.
The platform also lets writers offer free subscriptions alongside paid ones, and they can make individual posts available to everyone, not just paying subscribers. This creates a kind of funnel: free readers can sample the work, and some percentage convert to paying supporters. The psychology here echoes the old newspaper model—give away the front page, charge for the deep reporting—but with the crucial difference that readers are paying the writer, not a faceless corporation.
The Great Migration of 2020
Substack might have remained a niche platform for tech writers and independent journalists if not for a perfect storm that hit traditional media.
By 2019, American newsrooms had lost half their jobs compared to fifteen years earlier. The advertising-based business model that had sustained newspapers and magazines for a century was collapsing. Google and Facebook had vacuumed up the advertising dollars, leaving publications fighting over scraps. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this decline, triggering another wave of layoffs and furloughs.
Suddenly, a generation of journalists found themselves with expertise, audiences, and no paychecks.
Substack offered an alternative. Glenn Greenwald left The Intercept—the publication he had co-founded—to write on Substack. Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone writer known for his gonzo financial journalism, made the jump. Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times and launched a Substack that quickly became one of the platform's most successful publications.
But it wasn't just political journalists. Food writer Alison Roman started a newsletter. Economist Emily Oster began translating academic research into practical parenting advice. The historian Heather Cox Richardson launched "Letters from an American," offering nightly historical context for current events, and built one of the largest followings on the platform.
By late 2020, The Dispatch—a conservative news and commentary site—had become Substack's top publication, with over 100,000 subscribers and more than two million dollars in first-year revenue.
Beyond the Newsletter
If Substack had stopped at newsletters, it would still be a significant company. But the founders kept expanding.
In 2019, they added podcasts. This made sense—audio is just another way to deliver words to an audience, and the subscription model works equally well for spoken content. By 2024, Substack had partnered with Spotify, letting podcasters distribute episodes on both platforms simultaneously.
Video came next, though more gradually. The platform began testing video features in 2022, then launched original shows in 2023. By 2024, they had added five-minute video capabilities and were actively courting TikTok creators through something called Creator Studio.
The chat feature, launched in 2022, let writers create private group conversations with their subscribers. Think of it as a cross between a comments section and a Discord server—a way for communities to form around shared interests and trusted voices.
Then came Notes.
The Twitter Problem
In April 2023, Elon Musk called Substack's leadership about buying the platform. They said no.
The same month, Substack launched Notes—a feature that lets users publish and repost short-form content. If this sounds like Twitter, that's because it is Twitter. Or rather, it's what Twitter used to be before Musk's acquisition transformed it into something more chaotic and unpredictable.
Musk did not take kindly to this competition. Twitter began censoring links to Substack, making it harder for users to share newsletter content. Musk publicly criticized Notes. The relationship between the platforms turned openly hostile.
This confrontation revealed something important about what Substack had become. It was no longer just a newsletter platform. It was a direct competitor to social media giants, offering an alternative vision of how information could flow online—one based on subscriptions rather than advertising, on direct relationships between writers and readers rather than algorithmic manipulation for engagement.
The Content Moderation Question
Every platform that lets people publish eventually faces the same question: what speech will you allow?
Substack's answer has been more permissive than most. The New Yorker described their moderation policy as "lightweight," prohibiting only harassment, threats, spam, pornography, and calls for violence. Decisions are made by the founders themselves, not by a bureaucratic trust-and-safety team.
This approach attracted criticism almost immediately. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were removing content they classified as medical misinformation, some of the people banned from those platforms moved to Substack. Joseph Mercola, who had built a following promoting alternative medicine, established a presence there. So did Steve Bannon.
In January 2022, the Center for Countering Digital Hate—an advocacy group focused on combating online extremism—accused Substack of profiting from vaccine misinformation. They estimated the company earned two and a half million dollars annually from the top five anti-vaccine authors alone. The three founders responded with a blog post affirming their commitment to minimal censorship.
The controversy escalated in November 2023, when journalists discovered white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and open antisemites using the platform. More than 100 Substack creators signed an open letter threatening to leave unless the company acted. Some high-profile writers—Casey Newton, who covers technology; Molly White, who writes about cryptocurrency; and Ryan Broderick, who tracks online culture—did leave.
CEO Hamish McKenzie (Chris Best had stepped back from the CEO role by this point) defended the platform's approach. Attempting to censor extremist views, he argued, would make the problem worse. This is a familiar argument in debates about free speech online, and it remains contentious. The question of where to draw the line—and who draws it—has no easy answer.
The Writers Who Made It Work
A platform is only as valuable as what people create on it. Substack has attracted an extraordinary range of writers.
Glenn Greenwald brought his investigative journalism and his willingness to challenge conventional wisdom from any political direction. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, uses the platform to explain economic concepts to a general audience. Seymour Hersh, now in his late eighties, continues the muckraking journalism that exposed the My Lai Massacre in 1968 and the Abu Ghraib torture in 2004.
The literary world is well represented. Salman Rushdie—author of "The Satanic Verses" and survivor of an assassination attempt—writes there. So does George Saunders, the short story master. Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote "Fight Club," found a direct line to his readers. Nick Hornby, Susan Orlean, and Daniel M. Lavery represent different corners of contemporary writing.
Academics have embraced the platform as a way to reach beyond the ivory tower. John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia, writes about language and culture. G. Elliott Morris and Matthew Yglesias apply data analysis to politics. Glenn Loury and Emily Oster translate economic thinking for general audiences.
Even comic book creators made the jump. In 2021, Substack signed several prominent creators—Saladin Ahmed, Jonathan Hickman, Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV—paying them advances while letting them keep their subscription revenue for the first year.
The Money Behind the Platform
Substack raised its initial funding in 2018 from a mix of investors including The Chernin Group, a media investment firm; Zhen Fund, a Chinese venture capital firm; Emmett Shear, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Twitch; and Justin Waldron, who co-founded Zynga.
The Series A round in 2019 brought in $15.3 million from Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most powerful venture capital firms. Some of that money went toward recruiting high-profile writers, paying them advances to establish their newsletters on the platform.
These advances became a sensitive topic. In March 2021, Substack revealed that it had been running a program called Substack Pro, which paid advances to writers for creating publications. The problem was that Substack hadn't disclosed which writers were part of this program, making it unclear who was writing independently and who had been paid to be there. The program ended in 2022, but the controversy highlighted the tension between platform and publisher—is Substack just infrastructure, or is it making editorial decisions?
The company's valuation has fluctuated with the broader tech market. In April 2022, The New York Times reported Substack might be valued at $650 million. A month later, the company dropped an effort to raise between $75 million and $100 million. By June 2025, though, things had changed: independent journalist Eric Newcomer reported that Substack was in talks to raise a new round, and The New York Times later confirmed that the company had raised $100 million at a valuation of $1.1 billion.
Legal Protection for Writers
One of Substack's more unusual offerings is Substack Defender, a program providing legal support to writers.
Journalism is risky. Powerful people and organizations sometimes respond to unflattering coverage with legal threats, even when the reporting is accurate and defensible. A cease-and-desist letter from a well-funded law firm can be enough to silence an independent writer who lacks the resources to fight back.
Substack Defender offers lawyers who will review stories before publication and provide advice when writers receive legal threats. The company has committed to covering up to one million dollars in legal fees for cases accepted by Defender lawyers. In 2025, the program expanded through a partnership with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization focused on defending free speech.
This is genuinely unusual. Most platforms treat legal problems as the user's responsibility. By offering legal support, Substack has positioned itself as more than a neutral hosting service—it's actively invested in protecting the journalism published on its platform.
The Privacy Stumble
No discussion of a tech company would be complete without at least one embarrassing security incident.
On July 28, 2020, Substack sent an email about privacy policy updates related to the California Consumer Privacy Act. There was just one problem: someone put all the email addresses in the "cc" field instead of "bcc." This meant every recipient could see every other recipient's email address—a significant privacy breach for a platform built on the relationship between writers and their readers.
The company acknowledged the mistake on Twitter. It was a reminder that even companies built around email can make elementary email errors.
What Substack Means for Media
The rise of Substack represents more than just another tech company success story. It's a restructuring of how information flows in society.
For most of the 20th century, media was organized around institutions. Newspapers, magazines, and television networks employed journalists, paid them salaries, and distributed their work to mass audiences. The institution provided quality control—editors vetted stories—and financial stability. Writers traded independence for a steady paycheck.
The internet disrupted this model without replacing it. Social media made everyone a publisher, but it paid almost no one. The attention economy rewarded outrage and engagement over substance. Advertising supported the platforms, not the creators.
Substack offers a different arrangement. Individual writers build their own audiences and receive payment directly from readers. No advertising means no pressure to chase clicks. No algorithm means no incentive to optimize for engagement at the expense of quality.
But this model has its own tensions. Without institutional support, individual writers shoulder all the risk. There's no editor to catch errors, no legal department to review stories, no health insurance or retirement plan. The writers who succeed on Substack tend to be those who already have audiences and reputations built elsewhere—they're graduating from traditional media, not replacing it.
And there's the question of who can afford to pay for information. A reader with subscriptions to five Substacks might be paying $25 or more per month for newsletters alone—fine for affluent professionals, but a barrier for many others. The advertising model, for all its problems, at least made information broadly accessible.
The TikTok Connection
When the United States imposed restrictions on TikTok in January 2025, Substack moved quickly. By February, the platform had added the ability to post and monetize videos directly through its app.
This wasn't charity. TikTok's troubles represented an opportunity. If creators suddenly needed a new platform, Substack wanted to be that platform. The Creator Studio initiative launched in June 2024 had already begun courting TikTok creators, offering a year-long development program.
Livestreaming capabilities arrived in September 2024, further positioning Substack as an alternative to social media rather than just a complement to it. The platform that started with email newsletters now supports text, audio, video, live streaming, and social-style short posts.
Whether this expansion strengthens Substack or dilutes it remains to be seen. The simplicity of the original concept—writers send words, readers pay—was part of its appeal. A platform that tries to be everything to everyone risks becoming nothing to anyone.
The Local News Problem
One hope for Substack was that it might help revive local journalism. As local newspapers collapsed across America, the theory went, independent writers might fill the gap, covering city councils and school boards for paying subscribers.
It hasn't quite worked out that way. In 2020, The New Republic noted a dearth of local news newsletters on Substack, especially compared to the abundance of national political commentary. The incentives explain why: a newsletter about national politics can attract readers from anywhere in the country, while a newsletter about city council meetings in Des Moines can only attract readers in Des Moines. The former can scale; the latter cannot.
This represents a real limitation of the subscription model. Some information—local accountability journalism, coverage of court proceedings, investigative reporting on corruption—has immense public value but limited commercial appeal. The advertising-supported newspaper, for all its flaws, cross-subsidized this work with classifieds and department store ads. Substack offers no such mechanism.
Five Million and Counting
By March 2025, Substack had five million paid subscriptions. Not users. Not free sign-ups. Paying subscriptions.
To put this in perspective: The New York Times, after 170 years of operation and relentless focus on digital growth, has around 10 million digital subscribers. Substack, founded in 2017, has half that number—and it's a platform, not a single publication. Its five million subscriptions are distributed across thousands of writers, each with their own audience and their own revenue.
The growth has been remarkable. In 2018, the platform had 11,000 paid subscribers. By 2019, that had grown to 50,000. By August 2020, more than 100,000 users were paying for at least one newsletter. By August 2021, there were 250,000 paying subscribers. By November 2021, the platform claimed 500,000 paying subscribers representing over one million subscriptions (some readers subscribe to multiple newsletters). By November 2024, there were four million paid subscriptions. By March 2025, five million.
These numbers suggest something important: people are willing to pay for writing they value, even in an age of infinite free content. The question is whether this model can sustain a media ecosystem, or whether it will remain the province of a fortunate few who can build audiences large enough to make a living.
What Comes Next
Substack's future depends on questions that extend far beyond the company itself.
Will people continue to pay for information directly, or will they drift back to advertising-supported platforms? Will the expansion into video and social features strengthen the core product or distract from it? Can the company maintain its light-touch approach to moderation as it grows, or will scale force more aggressive intervention?
And perhaps most importantly: what happens to the broader information ecosystem when the business model rewards individual writers rather than institutions? Who does the unglamorous work of local reporting, of covering stories that matter but don't attract subscribers, of building the shared factual foundation that democracy requires?
Substack didn't create these tensions. They've existed since the first blog post undermined the first newspaper's business model. But Substack has accelerated them, offering writers a path to independence while leaving open the question of whether independence alone can sustain the journalism society needs.
Five million subscriptions is an answer of sorts. It says that yes, people will pay for words they value. Whether that's enough to replace what we've lost—or to build something better—remains to be seen.