Substack Statistics and Facts (2025)
Updated · Mar 19, 2025
WHAT WE HAVE ON THIS PAGE
- Introduction
- Editor’s Choice
- Substack Paid Subscribers
- Substack Revenue
- Substack Highest Earning Newsletters
- Substack Financial Journey
- Substack Valuation
- Substack’s Business Model Faces Several Key Risks
- Subnstack Website Traffic By Country
- Substack Marketing Channels
- Alternatives To Substack: Medium, Ghost, And Memberful
- Conclusion
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.
Editor’s Choice
- Substack has surpassed 5 million paid subscriptions as of early 2025, marking a significant increase from 4 million in November 2024.
- Substack’s top ten publishers collectively generate over USD 40 million in annual revenue.
- In 2023, Substack recorded USD 29 million in revenue, reflecting a 50% increase from the previous year.
- The platform takes a 10% commission on all subscription payments.
- Over 40% of Substack subscribers pay for publications that include video content.
- 82% of the platform’s 250 highest-revenue creators utilize audio and video features.
- Substack.com ranked 15th among News & Media Publishers in the United States and 355th globally in February 2025, with 112 million total visits.
- The platform’s audience is 50.43% male and 49.57% female, with the largest age group being 25 to 34 years old.
- The minimum subscription fee is USD 5 per month or USD 30 per year.
- 63% of Substack’s website traffic comes from the United States, followed by 7.44% from the United Kingdom.
- The primary marketing channels include direct traffic (60.05%), organic search (17.25%), and social media (14.79%).
- As of December 2024, Substack’s network includes over 4 million paid subscriptions and tens of millions of active subscribers.
- In February 2023, Substack had approximately 3 million paid subscribers.
- Among the most lucrative newsletters on the platform:
- Letters from an American generates USD 5 million annually.
- The Pragmatic Engineer and Lenny’s Newsletter each generate USD 1.5 million annually.
- Bulwark+ and The Fifth Column earn between USD 500,000 and USD 800,000 per year.
- In 2021, Substack recorded a USD 22 million loss.
- The company has raised approximately USD 100 million in funding and achieved a post-money valuation exceeding USD 650 million.
- In 2022, Substack raised USD 7.8 million in a community funding round.
- In March 2023, Substack’s valuation was estimated at USD 585 million, based on a 30x multiple on its trailing revenue of USD 20 million.
- Substack’s valuation varies between USD 29 million at a conservative 1x multiple and USD 713 million at a 25x multiple.
- The platform supports multiple languages, with:
- 87.2% of newsletters written in English.
- Portuguese (2.4%), Spanish (2.1%), French (1.6%), Italian (1.5%), German (0.5%), and other languages (4.7%).
- Newsletter publication frequency varies as follows:
- 24% published monthly.
- 21% weekly.
- 14% biweekly.
- 13% multiple times per week.
- 8% twice a month.
- 3% daily.
- 17% published at other intervals.
- Substack has expanded its services to include podcasts, discussion threads, and video content, attracting journalists, authors, and multimedia producers.
- Alternatives to Substack include:
- Medium, which hosts online events for writers.
- Ghost, which generates over USD 25 million in annual revenue and charges no fees for payments.
- Memberful, which offers tools to convert free readers into paid subscribers.
Substack Paid Subscribers
(Reference: statista.com)
- Starting operation in 2017, Substack was built to provide independent creators with the ability to monetise newsletters via email.
- This platform has seen rapid growth in recent years.
- Substack statistics show that the two-million mark in subscribers was reached in February 2023, which was quite a spurt from the 1 million it had had less than two years before in November 2021.
- This growth in subscribers was achieved in just a little over a year, underlining the rapidly growing crowds of creators and readers heading to Substack.
Substack Revenue
(Source: sacra.com)
- Substack statistics demonstrate that Revenue from Substack hit an estimated US$29 million in the calendar year 2023, showing a 50% increase from about US$19 million in 2022.
- This comes from an estimated paid subscriber base of about 3 million consumers. The platform earns its money through a 10% cut on every payment sent to writers.
Substack Highest Earning Newsletters
(Reference: statista.com)
- Substack, which has recently come up as a promising platforms for several newsletter writers, has called up a few in making impressive sums of revenues in subscriptions every year.
- Letters from an American have topped the chart with US$5 million a year, showing the high earning potential of the platform.
- According to recent Substack statistics, The Pragmatic Engineer and Lenny’s newsletters are closely followed: US$1.5 million each. Several others earning substantial figures include Bulwark+ and The Fifth Column, both generating US$1 million each year.
- In the middle, you have earners such as The Free Press and Slow Boring with annual revenues of US$800,000, whereas Tipping Point Prophecy Update hits US$770,000.
- Newsletters such as House Inhabit and The Isolation Journals earn US$700,000 and US$600,000, respectively, in addition to others such as Parent Data, Unreported Truths, and Blocked and Reported, which also earn US$600,000 each year.
- Other examples include but are not limited to, newsletters like Racket, Dr. Mercola’s Censored Library, Culture Study, Your Local Epidemiologist, and others that receive fairly steady revenues of US$500,000 a year.
- This indicates that there are many different types of subjects and creators finding financial success on the platform.
Substack Financial Journey
- Substack statistics state that Substack just crossed a fantastic milestone of 1 million paid subscribers, but still, the profitable level has not been reached.
- The platform does not reveal its revenue or financial information, and secondary sources help in painting its performance picture.
- Substack makes a 10% commission on the subscription fees collected by the creators.
- No official figures on revenue are available, but the company told its investors that it earned US$9 million in revenue in 2021.
- Since its establishment in 2017, Substack has conducted four rounds of investment involving 15 investors for a total of US$82.4 million.
- Prominent venture capital Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) marked Series A and Series B investment rounds, injecting a total of US$80.3 million into it.
- Also, it was part of an incubator program by Y Combinator in which US$120,000 was earmarked for the pre-seed fund.
- Substack statistics show that in April 2023, Elon Musk made an unexpected offer to buy Substack after he had just taken over Twitter (now X). According to sources familiar with the conversation.
- Musk reached out to Substack CEO Chris Best with an offer to accelerate paid subscriptions on X-a platform long viewed as a "global town square" for political news and debate-would include him as CEO of the combined company.
- Substack has found life rather hard financially. The company incurred a loss of US$22 million for the year 2021 because the expenses far exceeded the revenue from subscriptions.
- The company is unprofitable, but it has achieved some success in slowing down the losses over the last two years. Substack has raised approximately US$100 million in funds, with its last value exceeding US$650 million post-money.
- Two years ago, while putting off another funding round, Substack laid off 14% of the staff and drastically cut back on its business practice of making large payouts to attract writers.
- In 2022, the company turned to its community of writers for financial support, raising US$7.8 million through a community round.
Substack Valuation
(Source: sacra.com)
- According to Substack statistics, Substack initiated an equity crowdfunding campaign through WeFunder to raise US$5 million at a US$585 million pre-money valuation in March 2023.
- This valuation represented a 30x multiple on US$20 million of trailing twelve-month (TTM) revenue.
- It was consistent with a flat valuation from their 2021 Series B round, where Andreessen Horowitz led a US$65 million investment at a 102x revenue multiple, compared with the US$6.41 billion value of the New York Times at a 2.8x multiple on US$2.31 billion revenue.
- Meanwhile, The Athletic was acquired at US$550 million on US$65 million in revenue in 2021. So, it reflected a multiple of 8.5.
- For now, it puts Substack between US$29 million at a conservative 1x multiple and US$713 million at an ambitious 25x multiple.
- This is right on the high end of the recent US$585 million pre-money valuations but is still way below the 102x multiple from the 2021 Series B round.
Substack’s Business Model Faces Several Key Risks
- For new subscriptions to paid newsletters, on average, churn levels are around 50% a year. That means their income would fluctuate quite a bit, making earning that much tougher for writers.
- For example, for an annual income of US$50,000 at a US$8 monthly subscription price, a writer would need 900 paid subscribers. Beyond that, a writer must acquire 31 new subscribers every month just to hold his income.
- There is much pressure to keep producing such high-quality writing at this rate, which leads to burnout. On a grander scale, the kind of mass burnout that can happen among writers can be such that.
- Substack might end up losing many of these writers from the user base and lose its appeal, too. Substack’s promise also lies in the reputation that generates the fine writing that attracts more writers into its fold.
- Yet, if the strongest writers – the ones that were mostly raking in the dough and contributing the most in either commissions or revenue to Substack – left this platform for DIY options or other places, it would not be good for Substack acquisition or revenue models. That can really set off a downward spiral for the platform.
Subnstack Website Traffic By Country
(Source: similarweb.com)
- Substack statistics indicate that it is not overstating that Substack’s website has significant user-directed traffic from the United States, accounting for 63% of the whole proportion.
- Percentage-wise, this indicates a growth of 10.27%. Subsequently, the United Kingdom is 7.44%, reflecting a noticeable upsurge of 7.47%, while about 5.27% of traffic is from Canada, on an uptrend by 6.41%.
- For Australia, it contributes to traffic by 2.26%, and it has the highest growth rate of 8.80%. On the contrary, India’s share is only 1.91%, showing a minor decline of 1.50%.
Substack Marketing Channels
(Reference: similarweb.com)
- Substack focuses on multiple marketing channels for user acquisition and retention.
- According to Substack statistics, the most relevant traffic source is direct, accounting for an incredible 60.05% of all visits, as evidenced by a strong user base that accesses the platform directly.
- The organic search takes up 17.25% and indicates quite a promising visibility of Substack on search engine results.
- Similarly, social media is quite important, driving 14.79% of traffic. Referrals, by definition, indicate the partnerships or just simply links from another website: they account for 7.72%.
- Email as a marketing source is more than central to Substack’s product, but only a modest 0.12% traffic source can be linked.
- Such search and display ads would only contribute to traffic totals of 0.03% and 0.04%, respectively, hence considering that paid advertising does not heavily rely on growth.
Alternatives To Substack: Medium, Ghost, And Memberful
Medium
- Despite its comparatively earlier launch, just a decade old, Medium has become an online publishing house today that is mostly home to over 100 million users, with professional writers, CEOs, novelists, and amateur authors.
- On February 23, Medium announced that they would be hosting a virtual meetup Pub Crawl event happening on March 19.
- This event will be an excellent opportunity for authors to connect, share ideas, and learn best practices through informational panels in a virtual space. Writers would participate in improved events to sharpen skills in content creation, editing, and story building.
Ghost
- Ghost is for professional writers. Ghost allows you to publish and share your writing all over the world. It will allow many newsletters to target specific audiences.
- The revenue exceeds US$25 million per year and does not charge any payment fees.
- Ghost provides a 14-day free trial and integrates with about 100 other apps and tools like Zapier, Google Analytics, Stripe, and Shopify to optimise your publishing experience.
Memberful
- Memberful launched another cool feature to keep turning free readers into potential payers early this month, on February 15.
- The new feature connects publishers with the paywall-laying free readers: a specific box for people who want to subscribe for free.
- In addition to that, Memberful allows publishers to create their own free registration form, as well as to offer public content, bolstering the case for credibility and a correct subscriber base.
Conclusion
Substack has an astounding growth stage in the year 2024; this has turned out to be an excellent platform for enabling and also meeting the needs of the readers when it comes to their demand for niche-yet-high-quality content.
According to Substack statistics, the segmented markets with increasing adoption and potential for revenue are still changing the future of digital publishing and the creator economy.
Sources
FAQ.
In 2023, Substack will generate an estimated US$29 million in revenue, which constitutes a 50% increase compared to last year. This revenue is based on a paid subscriber pool of approximately three million users at a 10% commission rate for sign-ups to writers through payments to them.
Among the richest newsletters on Substack are Letters from an American (US$5 million per annum), The Pragmatic Engineer, and Lenny’s Newsletter (US$1.5 million each), as well as Bulwark+, The Fifth Column, and others which generate between US$500,000 and US$1 million annually.
From the above statutes, it can be inferred that direct traffic gets 60.05% of total traffic, organic search 17.25%, and social 14.79%, which are all selected primary marketing channels.
High churn rates: Substack has around 50% paid subscription churn, which makes it difficult for writers to sustain steady income levels and keeps them under pressure to always produce high-quality works, which may cause burnout in some creators. Losing its top creators makes it possible for the platform to injure itself on an overall revenue model.
Substack’s valuation, at the moment, is between US$29 million at a conservative 1x revenue multiple and US$713 million under an optimistic 25x multiple. This gives Substack a position that is considerably different from that of any other media in the industry, as the New York Times has a much lower revenue multiple.
Joseph D'Souza founded Sci-Tech Today as a personal passion project to share statistics, expert analysis, product reviews, and experiences with tech gadgets. Over time, it evolved into a full-scale tech blog specializing in core science and technology. Founded in 2004 by Joseph D’Souza, Sci-Tech Today has become a leading voice in the realms of science and technology. This platform is dedicated to delivering in-depth, well-researched statistics, facts, charts, and graphs that industry experts rigorously verify. The aim is to illuminate the complexities of technological innovations and scientific discoveries through clear and comprehensive information.
