Is Substack’s subscription growth slowing down?
PLUS: The 7-figure podcast deals are flowing again.
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Is Substack’s subscription growth slowing down?
From the Hollywood Reporter:
Paid subscriptions to U.K.-based publishers and creators have officially surpassed half a million on Substack, in exclusive new data released to The Hollywood Reporter …
Globally, readers are now paying for more than five million subscriptions to publishers on Substack across entertainment, current affairs, film, finance, fashion, food and culture. Over 50 people are making more than $1 million a year on Substack, and last summer, the company reached unicorn status with a $1.1 billion valuation following its Series C funding round.
As a media analyst, I find the UK subscription number somewhat meaningless because the platform has never broken out country-specific figures before, so there’s nothing to compare it against. If the company is expanding its footprint in Europe, that’s certainly a positive sign — but we have no way of knowing whether that’s actually happening.
I think what’s more concerning is that the reporting seems to indicate Substack hasn’t yet hit 6 million paid subscribers. As a reminder, the company announced 5 million paid subscriptions in March 2025 — a shocking jump at the time, since it had revealed just a few months earlier that it was at 4 million. Before that, Substack had been adding roughly 1 million paid subscribers per year, so the 5 million announcement seemed to signal that growth was accelerating.
Now it’s a year later, and it still hasn’t hit 6 million paid subscribers*, which suggests to me that growth is decelerating.
Why is that a big deal? Well, let’s say the 5 million subscribers pay an average $100 a year. That means Substack’s revenue — after its 10% cut — is only about $50 million. But its most recent funding round valued it at $1.1 billion. That kind of valuation is a bet that Substack will see massive growth — to the tune of like 50 million paid subscribers.
(I should pause for a moment to note that I have no investing expertise, so take that last paragraph with a grain of salt.)
This isn’t to say that Substack can’t get to 50 million paid subscribers, but if it’s still only adding about a million per year, then that growth is going to be a real slog.
Earlier this week, the publication The Ankler made waves when it announced it was migrating off Substack. Whenever a big publisher leaves, it spawns a million think pieces about whether this move signals the death of Substack.
I always roll my eyes with this stuff. Whenever a publisher moves from Wordpress to a proprietary CMS, you don’t see a lot of predictions that Wordpress is dying. The same can be said for when a publisher moves its newsletters from Mailchimp to Constant Contact. Media outlets change up their tech stacks all the time.
The Ankler moving off Substack is fine for the platform as long as it has a steady flow of new creators coming on to replace it. But whether that’s actually happening, I have no idea — I don’t have access to the company’s backend analytics. That’s why I pay close attention to its publicly–announced milestones.
Of course, this entire analysis could be rendered moot if Substack simply diversifies its revenue sources. When it announced its latest investment round, it also hinted that it’s developing some sort of advertising product. That would allow it to more effectively monetize its tens of millions of users, many of whom don’t pay for a single subscription.
It could also roll out even more offerings. For instance, I’m surprised that I can’t sell digital products like ebooks and online courses to my audience. By integrating them into Substack, I could sell them at a discount to my subscribers — or perhaps even include them as part of a bundle. Substack could even launch a Tiktok-Shop-like affiliate program so its B2C creators could more effectively monetize their channels.
Meta supposedly generates $10 per user per quarter. Assuming Substack has at least 50 million users, then that same conversion would amount to $2.5 billion a year. Even if it only achieves half that amount, then that would more than justify its current valuation.
*After I posted about this on LinkedIn, Sparkloop co-founder Louis Nicholls chimed in with this observation:
To be fair they didn’t confirm that. They just said 5m+.
My reading on that comment isn’t that they haven’t hit 6m yet, it’s that they likely haven’t hit 10m yet (which would be the next big milestone they’d update the numbers for).
He’s right to call out the distinction. That being said, I’m pretty skeptical that Substack is growing so quickly that it wouldn’t celebrate million subscriber milestones, but I’ll happily post a mea culpa if it announces it hit 10 million subscribers.
ICYMI: A couple teenagers launched a media company that now drives 240 billion annual views
Pubity Group co-founder Kit Chilvers explained how the company scaled from a few Instagram meme pages to a global network.
That case study actually sits behind a paywall, but if you’re not ready to subscribe, I also included it in an ebook that you can download over here.
How Peacock won at reality TV
Vulture took a look at why NBCU’s Bravo shows have done so well on Peacock:
In 2022, NBCU took the bold step of streaming all Bravo content on Peacock the day after it aired on cable. Broadcast networks had been doing this for years, but basic cable channels were far more restrictive about giving folks outside the pay-TV bundle access to their entire content slates. Having the contemporary Bravo library as part of its offerings gave Peacock a powerful tool to attract new subscribers and hold on to the ones it already had. It also allowed Bravo franchises to stay relevant with younger audiences who would never think of signing up for cable but were interested when scandal broke out on Vanderpump Rules or Summer House.
Most of the other streamers failed at building a significant reality TV viewership. Remember, the entire thesis behind the Warner Media/Discovery merger was that David Zaslav would leverage Discovery’s low-brow reality content to keep subscribers engaged in between new episodes of premium HBO shows. We can all agree that that strategy was a huge dud.
Similarly, MTV used to be the king of reality TV back in the 2000s, and yet it’s done nothing to juice Paramount+’s subscription numbers. While Paramount is technically ahead of Peacock in terms of subscribers, that’s mostly because Peacock is primarily a US-based service. Among the truly global streaming platforms, it’s pretty much in last place (unless you count Apple TV, which doesn’t have the benefit of a deep library).
In fact, the only other major streamer that’s succeeded with reality TV is Netflix, but that company’s pretty much in a league of its own.
The New York Times leans into video
From The Wrap:
The New York Times sees video as a “big long-term opportunity” for its future growth, CEO Meredith Kopit Levien told analysts on Wednesday, as the paper more than doubled its number of reporter-led videos during 2026’s first quarter.
“What we’re really aiming for here is to establish the Times as a preferred brand for watching news,” Kopit Levien said.
Makes sense to me. The New York Times already operates one of the world’s largest news-gathering organizations, which puts it in a strong position to compete with cable news on video. And unlike outlets such as CNN, it understands that audiences are interested in far more than just politics.
In fact, I can’t help but wonder if it’s contemplating any sort of play in live streaming. That would definitely signal a huge expansion in its media ambitions.
Disney probably doesn’t need an everything app
The Verge expresses some skepticism toward Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro’s plans to cram all the company’s offerings into the Disney+ app:
The plan seems to be a unification of Disney’s various applications — like My Disney Experience and Disney Cruise Line Navigator — that would turn Disney Plus into a one-stop shop for all things Disney. But a souped-up Disney Plus that also functions as a hub for information about upcoming theme park trips and cruises does not exactly sound like something that would be very enjoyable to use.
I’m someone who thinks many media conglomerates don’t do enough to drive synergies between their various properties, but even I have to agree with this take. Most people are accessing Disney+ through their TVs, and that’s just not the ideal location for them to book a trip that will cost upwards of five figures.
Also, Disney still has so much low-hanging fruit in simply merging all its streaming audiences. I’ve always thought it absurd that it runs three streaming apps. Yes, Hulu complicated the matter because it was partly owned by Comcast, but still. Disney should start by merging Disney+ and Hulu and then incorporate ESPN as an add-on service within the combined super app. I technically subscribe to both Hulu and Disney+ but almost never browse the latter because its non-kiddie content library is too small. I fell off the latest season of Daredevil simply because I forgot to keep opening the app. That might not have happened if the show were on Hulu.
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It doesn’t matter if you’re a YouTuber, podcaster, newsletter writer, or traditional news publisher — you’re going to find strategies here that you can incorporate into your own business.
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The 7-figure podcast deals are flowing again
Bloomberg reports that food celebrity Ina Garten is shopping around a new podcast that’s receiving serious interest from potential bidders:
Offers are reaching seven figures a year with generous terms just to get a chance to be next to everyone’s favorite Hamptons chef and host, according to people familiar with the conversations, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information.
While the conversations are still ongoing, the company currently closest to scoring a deal is Vox Media, one person tells me. Vox Media declined to comment through a spokesperson.
It seems to me like we’re entering a new era of big splashy podcast deals. If you’ll remember, a podcast bubble popped a few years ago after several hugely-expensive celebrity shows failed to gain much traction. My read at the time was that companies like Spotify had thrown a lot of dumb money at A-list talent that had never shown any aptitude for audio.
So why is the deal flow heating up again? I think it’s mostly because podcasts are no longer an audio medium — they’re basically just TV now, which means it’s much easier to leverage a celebrity’s face and brand, not just through the longform episodes but also the thousands of viral clips that can be distributed through Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)
The 30-year-old PDF newsletter with a 98% market penetration rate
There’s a certain irony that one of the most influential publications covering Australia’s telecommunications industry still arrives each morning as a daily PDF. But that format has become central to the success of Communications Day, the niche B2B outlet founded by Grahame Lynch in 1994. What began as a fax-delivered newsletter covering the early deregulation of Australia’s telecom market evolved into an indispensable industry briefing read by executives, regulators, infrastructure providers, and tech companies across Australia and New Zealand. While much of digital media spent the last two decades chasing pageviews, social traffic, and algorithmic distribution, Lynch built a highly profitable subscription business by doing almost the opposite: keeping his journalism off the open web, tightly controlling distribution, and turning Communications Day into a daily habit for nearly everyone working in the sector.
In a recent interview, Lynch explained why Communications Day still distributes its journalism as a PDF despite the rise of blogs and social media, how he built a subscription business with near-total market penetration in a niche B2B sector, and why conferences now account for nearly half the company’s revenue.
Check out the interview on YouTube.
If you want to listen to an audio version, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify]