The number of Substack email newsletters earning at least half a million dollars a year in subscriptions revenue alone appears to have doubled in two years, Press Gazette analysis has found.
When Press Gazette last ranked the highest-earning newsletters on Substack in February 2023 we found 27 accounts that appeared to be generating at least $500,000 (approximately £400,000) a year in subscriptions.
This year that figure has risen to at least 52, collectively earning a minimum of $40.2m (£32.6m) a year, but the true figures will be significantly higher: Substack told The Wall Street Journal this week that the top ten accounts on the platform alone collectively earn $40m a year. However, the minimums provide a broad guide to which accounts are doing the best on Substack and a way to measure the overall growth of its high-revenue publishers.
In the period since Press Gazete last ran this analysis Substack has seen significant growth. In December, it ranked as the 26th most-visited news site in the world according to Similarweb data, attracting 95 million visits during the month — up 40% on December 2023.
Substack was given Similarweb’s “Digital Winner” award this week for its web traffic growth, which the analytics company said had been accompanied by 139% year-on-year growth in its monthly active app usage.
Numerous prominent journalists have set up on Substack over the past two years, either to launch solo newsletters or entire new publications. Journalists moving to the platform have included The Times’ David Aaronovitch and Henry Winter, former MSNBC contributor Mehdi Hasan, who launched progressive outlet Zeteo, and The Guardian’s Jim Waterson, who set up local news site London Centric.
And this month Washington Post opinion columnist Jen Rubin departed her paper over its perceived closeness to the incoming Trump administration, launching a Substack named “The Contrarian” that already has “tens of thousands” of paying subscribers according to the platform’s leaderboard.
Farrah Storr, Substack’s head of publisher partnerships, went so far as to suggest to Press Gazette’s Future of Media Trends event in October that news outlets consider encouraging their journalists to set up accounts on the platform as a supplement to their main income.
But the growth of the platform has also been accompanied by warnings that, as the number of subscription products proliferate, there are only so many £6 a month newsletters audiences will be willing to pay for at once.
How did we produce our Substack minimum revenue figures?
Substack does not publish revenue or paid subscriber figures for individual newsletters on its platform, so it is not possible to determine through publicly-available information what the highest-earning Substacks are.
However, the platform does provide a broad indication of whether a publication has, for example, “hundreds of paid subscribers”, “thousands of paid subscribers” or “tens of thousands of paid subscribers”.
Press Gazette understands from its earlier reporting that an account with more than 100 subscribers would be listed on the Substack paid leaderboard as having “hundreds of paid subscribers”, one with more than 1,000 would be listed as having “thousands” and so on.
Using these figures and the cost of an annual subscription at each of these Substacks it is possible to calculate the minimum amount a publisher is likely to be earning in a year via the platform. (All figures provided below are for gross revenue, without taking into account the 10% taken by Substack as payment for the service. They also do not take into account subscription discounts, which are widely used and will cut into the actual revenue earned by many Substacks.)
The Substack which topped Press Gazette’s last Substack ranking two years ago, historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, remains the only account on the platform to disclose there that it has “hundreds of thousands” of paying subscribers. Combined with its £40 ($50) annual subscription cost, that suggests yearly revenue of at least £4m ($5m).
However, Cox Richardson now appears to be below news publisher The Free Press — which does not directly provide any information about its subscriptions figures — on the paid leaderboard. Bari Weiss, who co-founded The Free Press in 2021, told Axios last month that the publication has 136,000 paying subscribers, which implies a minimum annual revenue of $10.9m based on its $80 yearly subscription price.
The Free Press has been excluded from the main ranking below because its minimum revenue can’t be determined from the information available on Substack, but it is likely the publisher earning the most revenue from subscriptions on the platform.
Because the figures calculated by Press Gazette are minimums, in some cases they will be significantly less than the actual amounts earned by the Substacks featured. Similarly, several accounts which are in fact earning more than $500,000 a year will be missed off the ranking.
For example, a Substack with 9,000 subscribers and which charges £100 for an annual subscription would make £900,000 a year — but it would show up in Substack’s leaderboard as having “thousands” of subscribers, so Press Gazette would only be able to establish that it’s making a minimum of £100,000 a year.
One illustration of this is entertainment industry publication The Ankler, which does not appear in the ranking because it is listed as having “thousands” of paying subscribers — which combined with its £120 annual subscription price means we can tell from publicly-available information that it brings in a minimum of £120,000.
However, Ankler chief executive Janice Min told Press Gazette in February that it had already booked seven figures of revenue in the first two months of 2024, and told Adweek in November that it was on course to book a further $10m in 2025. (The Ankler also makes much of its income from sponsorships, which cannot be captured in Press Gazette’s analysis.)
Similarly, multi-city local newsletter network Mill Media — which is currently moving its operations across from Substack to rival platform Ghost — told Press Gazette in September that across its six news newsletters it anticipates annual turnover of £1m in 2025, but the information available on Substack itself is insufficient for any of its titles to be included in the ranking.
If you are earning more than $500,000 a year on Substack and would like to be included in a ranking, you can email us at bron.maher@pressgazette.co.uk.
As of early January there are four Substacks which, based on the platform’s metrics alone, are making at least £1m ($1.2m) a year: Letters from an American, technology newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer, business account Lenny’s Newsletter and finance Substack Citrini Research. A further six earn at least £800,000 ($990,000), putting them just shy of the $1m mark.
Among the 52 publishers on the list are Slow Boring by Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, The Good in Us by Donald Trump’s niece Mary L Trump and Tipping Point Prophecy Update, a Christian newsletter about the forthcoming end of the world.
(Yglesias told Business Insider in October that he has 18,000 paying subscribers, which would equate to at least £1.2m or $1.4m.)
By far the top-performing genre among the 52 accounts we know to be earning at least $500,000 is US politics, which accounts for £14.9m ($18.4m), or 46%, of the £32.6m minimum the group earn each year.
The next highest-earning genre is finance which, like Substacks in the technology and business genres, tend to charge far more than the $50 (£40) monthly subscriptions available for many culture or politics newsletters. Three of the four highest-charging Substacks are in the finance category, with the most expensive — Citrini Research — billing £1,000 ($1,200) for a single annual subscription.
Substacks missing from the above list
Substack does not order its paid leaderboards by which accounts have the most subscribers, with some publishers described as having “thousands” of paid subscribers appearing above publishers with “tens of thousands”.
The order may be influenced by total revenue — the only Substack with just “hundreds” of subscribers to appear on the finance leaderboard’s top 20, for example, charges $120 a month, far more than those below it with “thousands”. Substack says on a blog page that an account’s number of subscribers is “the most important” factor in determining its position, but also suggests that recommendations from other accounts help to boost the ranking.
There are several Substacks that do not appear on the list above, but appear on Substack’s own paid leaderboard higher up than accounts featured in Press Gazette’s list. In these cases either it has not been possible to calculate their minimum annual revenue because of a lack of subscriber information or the information provided produces a minimum below £400,000.
Those accounts are presented below, alongside the minimum annual revenue for the highest-earning account beneath them in the Substack ranking.
Note that because Substack has not disclosed how leaderboard positions are determined, these publications do not necessarily make more than the accounts below them.
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