Substack, a platform launched in 2017 to help independent content creators monetize e-mail newsletters has seen a recent surge in popularity. The latest figure, reported as of February 2023, shows the service as having a two million subscribers - twice as many subscribers as there were in November 2021.

Introduction

Substack Statistics: ​Substack, established in 2017, has experienced notable growth in the digital publishing landscape. As of February 2023, the platform reported over 2 million paid subscriptions, doubling from 1 million in November 2021. By January 2024, Substack attracted approximately 49.4 million unique visitors, marking a 41.95% increase since August 2023. The platform hosts over 17,000 writers earning income through their publications.

Collectively, the top ten authors generate more than USD 25 million annually. Substack's revenue model includes a 10% commission on subscription fees, and the company raised USD 65 million in a Series B funding round in March 2021, achieving a valuation of USD 650 million. These metrics underscore Substack's significant impact on content creation and distribution.​

The highest earning email newsletter on Substack was "Letters from an American", with implied minimum earnings of five million U.S. dollars in overall subscriber revenue. The best represented genre among the top-performing Substacks was politics.

The New York Times had **** million digital subscribers as of February 2025, making the publication the global leader in this regard, followed by Substack and The Wall Street Journal with **** million and *** million online news subscribers respectively. Digital subscriptions – the future for news publishers? Subscriptions were cited as the most important digital revenue stream for publishers worldwide in every year from 2021 to 2023, ahead of advertising. As subscriptions have increased, customer retention has also become a growing concern, and according to the aforementioned subscriber losses experienced by The Washington Post, is a well-founded one. Retaining paying members is crucial to achieve growth, and publishers must keep abreast of their users’ needs and industry trends in order to do this. The challenge to achieve sign-ups Converting readers to becoming paying subscribers to news products is challenging. Even video streaming services are experiencing churn. A 2022 survey revealed that ** percent of U.S. subscribers aged 18 to 34 years old canceled between *** and five subscriptions in the three months running up to the survey. If consumers are sacrificing more popular entertainment subscriptions to save money, news subscriptions could also suffer. In fact, ** percent of U.S. subscribers canceled their news subscription* in the last year, a figure which could grow higher as the recession worsens and trust continues to fall.

As of September 2023, the social media reference tool Linktree saw a growth of over 157 percent in engagement with its provided links to Substack. In comparison, Linktree links found in content hosted on online survey platform Typeform saw 94 percent more clicks in the examined period in 2023 when compared to the previous year. Social media and forum platform Reddit saw an increase in Linktree clicks of almost 50 percent year-over-year.