The pitch was simple and it hit the spot because it was right in the ways that mattered most at the time. Every time Twitter changed the algorithm, it messed up the relationship with the audience. Facebook stopped delivering content reliably to people who requested it long ago. The newsletter, on the other hand, went straight to the reader’s email inbox. No algorithm mediated the delivery. No platform can arbitrarily decide to stop showing your work to people who say they want it. The email list is yours. You’ve got an audience.
Alison Roman got it. In the years since she left her cookbook empire and magazine column, she developed the newsletter Substack, which has 343,000 subscribers. Later in 2025 transferred it to Ghost. Anne Helen Petersen, one of Substack’s most prominent writers and the recipient of one of its development successes, has taken to Patreon. Lyz Lenz left, citing bot subscribers’ depressed engagement rates and describing Substack as a recommendation engine that pushes “rage, nazis, transphobia, and conspiracies.” By March 2025, Beehiiv’s self-reported numbers recorded a migration of around 3,000 creators away from Substack over a twelve-month period.
What the departures revealed, and what has become clearer since then, is that the original claim—that you own your audience in email—was accurate as a relative statement and misleading as an absolute statement. Compared to Instagram or Twitter, email gives writers more control. Unlike being on any platform, email is a distribution channel governed by a set of institutional actors, algorithmic decisions, and terms of service that the writer did not write and cannot override.
Substack layer
The first layer of platform dependency in the newsletter model is Substack itself, whose terms are more platform-like than the original voice offered. Substack’s Terms of Service governs what can and cannot be published. Its content guidelines limit advertising and commercial content outside of editorial work. Its fee structure is 10% of all paid subscription revenue—out of a subscriber’s annual revenue of $100,000, or $10,000 to the platform before any transaction costs, in addition to Stripe’s payment processing fees. These are not uncommon terms in the media platform economy. These are the terms of the platform relationship, whatever the “own the audience” framework implies, that’s what Substack is.
More specifically, Substack made product decisions that affected audience attitudes in ways the writers had no control over and, in some cases, were initially unaware of. The platform introduced a “follow” feature that allows readers to follow a publication without subscribing via email – connecting the reader to the publication in Substack’s own ecosystem rather than on the writer’s email list. For writers representing people who have opted-in to email delivery, it was a meaningful recalibration to discover that a portion of their subscribers were tracked, representing the platform rather than the email subscriptions. The list they thought they had was in part a list of people who had agreed to read on a platform they didn’t own.
Inbox layer
A more fundamental problem, and one that the original platform escape story did not adequately address, is that the email inbox is not a neutral channel. It’s a space ruled by Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Microsoft—companies with their own algorithms, policies, and incentives that determine which email reaches which reader.
Gmail’s spam filters, promotion tag classification, and tag-based delivery algorithms make decisions about each newsletter sent to a Gmail address. These decisions aren’t arbitrary—they’re based on open rates, engagement signals, spam complaints, and sender reputation—but they’re decisions made by Google about what reaches Gmail users, and the newsletter author has limited direct visibility into them, and there’s no complaint process when something goes wrong. When a substack newsletter starts landing in the Promotions tab instead of the main inbox, open rates drop, engagement rates drop, delivery reputations deteriorate, and mergers spiral. The writer did not change anything. Google systems made a decision.
Delivery is not a solvable problem in newsletter publishing — this is an ongoing technical negotiation between the sender’s infrastructure, the recipient’s email provider, and the engagement behavior of the list. Substack manages the infrastructure layer, a service it provides quite well. But it does so on behalf of thousands of publications simultaneously, meaning it has limited ability to customize the posting behavior of individual writers, authenticate their domains, or troubleshoot in ways that improve deliverability for their specific situations. A writer who is said to own an audience has outsourced some of the delivery of that audience to a Gmail outsourcing company.
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, introduced in 2021 and now widely adopted, added another layer to the problem. MPP hides whether an email is opened, makes open rates unreliable as indicators of engagement, and complicates the feedback loops that writers and platforms use to assess list health. Based on open rates, a list to be fulfilled with a 30% markup may significantly underperform; The inflation introduced by Apple’s pre-download behavior makes the signal noisy, which affects both the writer’s understanding of their audience and the delivery reputation signals that email providers use to make routing decisions.
What does “owning” actually mean?
What newsletter writers really own is data: their subscribers’ email addresses, which can be exported from Substack at any time and moved to another platform. This is a real and meaningful defense. This means that if Substack finds its terms unacceptable or collapses as a business, a writer can move their listing to another platform. Audience engagement is not entirely at the discretion of the host platform, as with a Twitter or Instagram account following. This is the legal version of an ownership claim, and is why the newsletter model is structurally more defensible than social media followers.
But owning the data does not mean owning the distribution. Email addresses are portable. What these email addresses represent—behavior, engagement, deliverability—is driven by systems over which the writer has no control. Moving a list from Substack to Ghost or Beehiiv or Mailchimp changes which platform’s rules the writer lives under and what payment structure they pay. That doesn’t change the fact that the list is still sent to Gmail inboxes filtered by Google algorithms, to Apple Mail processed by Apple’s privacy infrastructure, to Yahoo accounts governed by Yahoo’s delivery policies.
This is, in a way, a general condition of publishing in a networked environment. There is no truly platform neutral distribution. Every channel through which writing reaches readers is controlled by someone: an editor, an algorithm, a platform, an email provider. The question is never whether you are on the platform; always which platform, whose rules, and what your options are when those rules change.
What does the wave of migration reflect?
The writers who left Substack in 2025 didn’t leave because they found a channel without a platform, for the most part. They were leaving because specific aspects of Substack’s custom set of rules became unacceptable to them—the content moderation environment, the fee structure at scale, restrictions on building more complex businesses—and because the friction of moving a portable list was less than the friction of staying.
It’s a different story than the one that ushered in the newsletter era. The early Substack story was about avoiding platforms. The 2025 departures are about choosing between platforms – choosing which restrictions, fees and distribution dependencies best serve a particular type of publishing experience.
Email was always a platform. The companies that deliver it have always made decisions about what comes. Realizing this doesn’t diminish the value of the newsletter model—it remains a more defensible distribution channel than social media for writers who want to maintain direct audience relationships. What does change are framing and framing issues for authors’ decisions about where to invest in the building.
It’s not about being on the platform. The question is which platform’s interests are most aligned with yours, and what will it cost you when they diverge. These are questions worth asking before you build 343,000 subscribers on any specific answer.
