Publishers are ditching Substack for Ghost — and the reasons reveal something troubling about what “owning an audience” actually means.

In September 2025, Alison Roman announced that she had moved 343,000 newsletter subscribers from Substack to Ghost. The following month, Anne Helen Petersen—one of Substack’s most prominent writers and the recipient of one of her six-figure growth paths—took to Patreon.…













