Substack has revealed the 50 newsletters on its platform with the most UK paying subscribers for the first time.
Michael Howell’s Capital Wars is the top Substack newsletter in the UK based on number of paying subscribers. Capital Wars is currently the fifth-ranked finance newsletter across Substack overall and is written by Howell, a former research director at investment bank Salomon Brothers.
Finance is the biggest topic vertical in the top 50, accounting for 13 publications.
Other topics represented multiple times include food and drink, fashion and beauty, news/politics and history.
In second place is Exponential View, an AI newsletter by tech entrepreneur Azeem Azhar which passed 100,000 free and paid subscribers two years ago after nine years of publishing (plus a further 200,000 who received it via Linkedin).
Third is Comment is Freed, which has more than 90,000 free and paid subscribers, by Institute for Government senior fellow Sam Freedman and his father Lawrence Freedman (emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London).
Substack already published a “bestseller” list in the US, and has now started a separate list in the UK.
It counts only paying subscribers, meaning major newsletters without paywalls may be overtaken by smaller brands with higher conversion rates.
Former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson’s local newsletter London Centric, which he started in September 2024 using a voluntary redundancy payment from the national newsbrand, has the eighth most paying subscribers in the UK on Substack.
Waterson said in May that London Centric had about 5,000 paying subscribers and was bringing in enough revenue to support two additional staff members.
Another local news publication appears further down the top 50: in 45th place is The Will Hayward Newsletter launched by the former Reach Welsh affairs editor who went solo in September 2024. He said the decision had “proved to be a bit of a no-brainer” financially and that he rebuilt his audience to the size it had been when he was at Reach within about two and a half months.
Three food titles appear in the top ten paid publications: Yotam Ottolenghi, a chef and contributor to The Guardian and The New York Times is in sixth place, Notorious Foodie is in ninth and Vittles is in tenth.
Vittles founder Jonathan Nunn told Press Gazette in March 2025, ahead of the brand launching a print magazine for the first time, that it had 84,000 subscribers of whom a tenth paid £7 per month or £59 per year.
Substack keeps 10% of all subscription revenue (and is therefore free to use for publications that choose not to implement a paywall).
The total number of paid subscriptions in the UK on Substack passed 500,000 in April. The UK is Substack’s biggest market outside the US.
One of the biggest publications on Substack in the US with 50,000 paid subscribers is Mehdi Hasan’s left-leaning politics brand Zeteo.
Earlier in June Zeteo announced the launch of Zeteo UK, slowly ramping up content output until it goes live officially with a daily newsletter in September. Due to a rush of publicity Zeteo UK is already the 36th biggest publication in the UK for paid subscribers on Substack.
High-profile names from journalism in the top 50 include: former Observer writer Carole Cadwalladr (17th), former Observer agony aunt Philippa Perry (21st), ex-Sun and GB News journalist Dan Wootton (38th) and Times columnist Melanie Phillips (44th).
Former Open Democracy editor and CEO Peter Geoghegan’s Democracy for Sale, which won the Specialist Journalism prize at the British Journalism Awards in December and has had a run of agenda-setting stories relating to UK politics and journalism, appears in 48th.
Substack also revealed a UK “rising” chart which ranks newsletters by their rate of paid subscriber growth. This list will update daily and will be far more variable.
Zeteo UK was sixth-highest on the rising chart on Tuesday afternoon.
Publications that appeared in the rising top ten and not the bestseller list included: Chinese Whispers by Cindy Yu (who has just revived the former Spectator podcast), Learning to Live Well with Ella Mills, Cult of Create by artist Tabby Booth, Learn AI With Me, Wardrobe by Louis Cheslaw and parenting title Otherlands with Emmy Watts.
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