At an October 2025 launch event at Substack’s New York headquarters, the company shared a lineup that should change the way every independent publisher thinks about the platform. In the previous three months, Substack added 32 million new free subscriptions and nearly 500,000 new paid subscriptions. Most of that growth was driven by Notes and the app itself — at least according to Substack’s own data features at the creative event. The figure is provided by the company and has not been independently verified.
People were finding new writers within Substack. The platform has quietly and deliberately evolved into its own discovery engine.
This change has significant implications for bloggers. But the strategy most of them used on Substack—publish once a week, send to your list, repeat—was designed for a version of the platform that no longer exists.
What actually changed
Substack was launched in 2017 as a simple tool: write posts, create an email list, fill subscribers. For years it was, in fact. It was like a platform Sinem Gunel and Philip Hofmacher in Writing • Installation • Scale note, “essentially a simple email service provider.”
Today it is significantly more than that. Substack now offers Notes (short for social feed), native podcasting, live video streaming, an in-house recording studio for pre-recorded video chats, cross-publishing collaboration, private subscriber chats, and a mobile app with its own algorithmic feed. In March 2026 Launched Substack Recording Studio — a free built-in tool that allows creators to record video chats and automatically generate clips and thumbnails without requiring any external software.
The most visible signal of where the platform is going is the structure. Open the Substack mobile app and go to any writer’s profile. The first tab that appears is no longer an archive of their posts. This is their Notes feed – their social activity in short form. Long-form essays and newsletters now take second place.
As Write • Build • Scale observes, this is no small design tweak. Platforms do not automatically reset their base profile layout. This is a thoughtful signal of what the platform considers most important for discovery.
Data from the October 2025 creative event reinforces this signal. One creator reportedly earned $4,546 from one Note. The fashion designer attributed 30% of its subscriber growth to consistent Notes activity.
Substack also shared, citing its own internal data, that creators who used audio or video in the previous 90 days grew their audience 50% faster than those who didn’t. The figure comes from the platform itself, a clear incentive to promote multimedia adoption.
A social platform with better incentives, but still a social platform
What makes this change really interesting, and a real concern for some bloggers, is how Substack describes its algorithm. At the creative event, the company’s head of ML and AI explained that the platform is optimized for “subscriptions and payments,” not scroll time or ad impressions. This makes Substack structurally different from Instagram or Twitter, where the focus of the incentive is to maximize ad revenue.
The alignment between creator success and platform success is real: Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue, so it financially incentivizes creators who convert readers into paid subscribers. When the creator earns more, the platform earns more. This incentive structure is meaningfully better than ad-based platforms.
But as Andi Bitay observed Major substack changethe honest description is still: “an algorithm that optimizes subscriptions is still an algorithm.” It determines what remains to be seen. It still rewards certain behaviors over others. It still requires creators to engage consistently if they want to be discovered. According to Bitay, citing platform data, notes are now the dominant growth engine on the platform, surpassing even the Recommendations feature, with more than a million posts being discovered through the app every day.
“Substack is building a social platform with better incentives than Instagram or Twitter,” Bitay writes. “It’s really valuable… But it’s a social platform now. The era of ‘just a newsletter tool for writers’ is over.”
What this means for bloggers using Substack as a distribution channel
For bloggers who approach Substack primarily as a way to get their posts out to an existing audience—essentially a more polished version of Mailchimp—the evolution of the platform presents a decision point.
The publish-and-wait strategy still works in a narrow sense: your subscribers will still receive your posts via email. But it is no longer competing for new reader discovery. Writers who thrive on Substack in 2026 are those who understand that growth happens through the app and the Notes feed, not through search or passive discovery.
Write • Create • Scale’s experience shows this. The publication says it hit 100 paid subscribers within 60 days of launch and surpassed 1,000 paid subscribers within 18 months—achieving Substack’s “Bestseller” status. These figures are reported by the publication itself. Their growth charts show clear incremental increases that are directly related to specific campaigns and Notes activity, rather than single consecutive long-term releases.
For bloggers who see Substack as a platform for building new audiences rather than simply copying an existing one, the practical implication is that the required skill set now includes short-form social content. Daily or near-daily Notes. Thoughtful linking to content from other creators. An introduction to Substack’s recommendation and collaboration features. Potential video.
For bloggers who find it attractive, this opportunity is real. For those coming to Substack to avoid this kind of availability requirement, the platform is moving in an uncomfortable direction.
Structural tension is worth understanding
The creators who thrive on the new Substack are those who see it not as a newsletter platform with a social feature, but as a platform that builds relationships with a newsletter component. This framework changes the whole approach. That means appearing in Notes not just to promote long-form pieces, but to engage in real exchange, share thoughts in real time, and connect with readers as people, not subscribers.
It also means being honest about what Substack isn’t. It’s no substitute for owning your audience through a self-hosted site and a directly managed email list. Substack is more portable than most social platforms – you can export your subscriber list – but the platform still controls the infrastructure, algorithm and terms of engagement. As with every platform discussed on these pages, the bloggers with the most sustainable positions will be those who use Substack as a channel within a broader audience strategy rather than as their foundation.
Where the platform is probably going
From the available evidence, the trajectory points in several clear directions. Video will become increasingly central: The launch of Recording Studio in March 2026 and 50% faster audience growth among audio/video creators shows that Substack is actively promoting multimedia content. Brand partnerships are beginning to appear in the ecosystem, and as platforms scale, the formalization of these partnerships—with questions about disclosure and editorial independence—will become more prominent.
Creative event data shows that Substack is in what Bitay calls the “democratization phase” — the moment when the platform is actively demonstrating that ordinary creators can make real money from being used primarily by established names. One creator reportedly earned $4,546 from a single Note — no context was provided about the number the subset chose to highlight, the number of subscribers the creator had, the price point, or what made a particular Note do so unusually well.
Whether or not the majority will is a separate question, and whether an honest answer requires the same clarity that the platform’s growth figures provide. Substack’s own economics—a 10% cut of revenue and Stripe’s fees—mean that meaningful creative revenue requires meaningful subscriber revenue, which requires the trust of a meaningful following that requires consistent high-quality work over months or years. The platform’s model is better aligned with creative success than ad-based alternatives, but it’s no easier structurally than other creative businesses.
A practical question for bloggers
For bloggers currently using Substack as a newsletter delivery tool and nothing else, the honest assessment is this: this approach will continue to serve your existing subscribers, but not grow your audience. The platform’s discovery mechanisms are now native and social. External traffic from Google and social media has never been Substack’s growth engine, and it’s even less relevant now than it was a year ago.
If building a new audience on Substack is part of your strategy, with Notes — consistently, really, in a voice that reflects your real thinking rather than just promoting your content in long form — it’s now closer to the student than good. The Profile UI change makes this clear: anyone who visits your publishing page will see your Notes activity before they see your archive.
If you’re using Substack purely as a delivery mechanism for content you’ve built elsewhere, and your main development channels are your own domain, SEO, and an independent email list, the social evolution of the platform is less relevant. You can continue to use it for what it does – clean reading experience, reliable email delivery, easy subscription management – without having to connect to the Notes ecosystem.
It’s an unsuitable middle ground for bloggers serious about audience growth: using a pre-social strategy while embracing Substack as a social-era platform. The 32 million subscriptions generated within the program in three months go to writers who understand what the platform has become. Expecting this growth to come through passive publishing is, as Write • Build • Scale puts it, “leaving growth to chance.”
Substack is no longer a quiet corner of the internet for writers who want to escape the algorithm. He built one of his own. Bloggers who understand this and consciously decide how to respond are the ones who stand to benefit from what comes next.
