We’ve been here before.
It’s not like “watching a newsletter platform grow rapidly” here. Here, as the entire blogosphere watches itself reorganize around something new, the latter promises to fix everything it broke. This happened with Facebook Pages – extraordinary reach until the algorithm changed and organic visibility collapsed. With Medium — a pure reading experience and internal discovery, until the monetization model changed and writer payments became unpredictable. With Clubhouse – not a new format at all, until then. The example is not that these platforms are bad. It was this promise and the ultimate reality that diverged, usually after investors’ timelines became more relevant than the creative economy.
Blog Herald was founded in March 2003the same year WordPress was launched – making it one of the longest-running publications dedicated to the blogging industry anywhere on the web. This archive of Technorati rankings and Mobile Type migrations, AdSense changes everything, and changes in Google’s algorithm take some of it back, back to social, back to video, back to podcasts, back to text. Digg is crashing. Google+ is closing. A medium that changes its model many times. Every wave of “blogging is what it is now.”
We claimed this heritage in 2024. What this gives us is not twenty years of coverage – it’s twenty years of industry history that we think is really instructive for what’s happening now with Substack.
So when every creative newsletter, every YouTube productivity channel, and every LinkedIn thought leader says Substack is the move for independent publishers right now, we want to offer something more useful than the hype either way. Not “Substack is great, how to grow”. “The bottom stack is a trap, that’s why.” What we actually think, based on what history suggests.
What Substack really got right
Let’s start with what’s true and good, because that’s where the real essence lies.
Substack has solved a problem that bloggers have struggled with for years: the conversion from reader to paying subscriber. The platform makes it frictionless. A reader likes your work, clicks a button, enters payment details and becomes a paying subscriber. There is no separate payment processor to set up. There is no membership plugin to configure and maintain. There is no separate email platform for synchronization. The entire pipeline—from free reader to paid subscriber—is up and running.
This is important. For freelance bloggers who want to monetize their audience directly without being a full-on technical operator, Substack has removed a real barrier. That’s why serious journalists like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Glenn Greenwald have left legacy institutions to build direct reader relationships on the platform. Not because Substack is perfect, but because it makes the economics of independent publishing more accessible than ever.
Subscriber portability is also real and worth acknowledging. You can export your email list at any time. This is not a given across platforms – this is a deliberate choice made by Substack and is important for anyone thinking carefully about platform risk.
And the recent growth numbers are really significant. At its creator event in October 2025, Substack informed the platform added 32 million new free subscriptions and nearly 500,000 new paid subscriptions in just three months — most driven by Notes and the app itself, not external traffic. These are company-reported numbers from a promotional event and have not been independently verified, but even with that caveat, they depict a platform with real momentum, not one struggling to find its audience.
What the advisory ecosystem isn’t telling you
We’re going to be straight here, because the “Starting an Alt Stack” advice that’s flooding the internet right now is often incomplete in an important way.
The first thing to advise most is that Substack’s economics only work if you can convert readers into paid subscribers – and that conversion is much harder than the platform’s success stories suggest. Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue plus Stripe’s payment processing fees. If you earn $500 a month in subscriptions, you save about $435. If you earn $5,000, you save about $4,350. This cut in scale makes sense. And getting to scale requires convincing people to pay you monthly for your writing, which is a completely different challenge than getting people to read you for free.
Second thing: Substack is no longer the silent text platform it was in 2020. We talked about this in detail recently — the platform added Notes (short for social feed), native video, live streaming, and a mobile app with its own algorithmic feed. Profile UI now shows notes activity before writer’s essay archive. Discovery is increasingly happening within the app rather than through external traffic. This means that growing at Substack now requires visibility in the social media sense—daily or daily Notes, engagement with other writers’ content, consistent visibility in the feed. It’s really worth it if that’s what you want to build. If you came to independent publishing specifically to avoid this kind of presence requirement, this is a meaningful commitment.
The third and strongest thing we feel: Substack is a platform, not a foundation. The ability to export your subscriber list is a safeguard, not a substitute for owning your audience. A Substack publication resides in Substack’s infrastructure according to Substack’s terms, formed by Substack’s algorithm. The company’s $1.1 billion valuation and $100 million Series C are investor bets on future returns, and investor-backed platforms must generate those returns at some point. What it will look like for creators in five years is really unknown.
We have seen this movie before. We watched as bloggers moved their audience to Facebook Pages because the reach was extraordinary and the tools were better than running your own site. We know how that ends. We are not saying that Substack will follow the same path. We say that the structural incentives that tend to create this path exist here as well, and that anyone building a publishing business should honestly consider.
Who should really start Substack
With all that said – and we really don’t mean this as a throat-clearing before giving up on the platform – here’s our real take on who should be on Substack at this point.
If you have an existing audience elsewhere and want a better direct monetization tool than what your current setup offers, Substack is worth serious consideration. The conversion pipeline is excellent. The reader experience is clean. Subscriber porting means you’re not locked out. This is a legitimate option for established bloggers who want to add a paid tier without building a full membership infrastructure from scratch.
If you’re a writer—not a blogger in the SEO and traffic sense, but a writer who has something to say and wants to tell it to people who care—Substack’s current growth moment is real. The platform’s built-in discovery works. The Notes feed introduces new writers to relevant readers. The growth figures from the end of 2025 are not fictitious. If you’re willing to engage with the social layer of the platform, the opportunity to build a new audience from scratch is now more secure on Substack than it has been in years.
If you cover a particular niche in real depth and have something that isn’t available anywhere else—a health policy writer with fifteen years of regulatory experience, a materials scientist explaining what’s really happening in battery technology, a local investigative journalist covering a beat no one else is funding—Substack’s subscription model rewards just that. The platform’s algorithm optimizes subscriptions more than ad impressions, which means it’s structurally incentivized to surface writers who consider people’s work valuable enough to pay for it, rather than just passing the buck.
Who should think twice
If your primary goal is SEO-based traffic and ad revenue, Substack is the wrong tool. It doesn’t help you rank in Google. Display is not integrated with ad networks. The content resides on Substack’s domain, not yours. If organic search is your primary distribution channel, a self-hosted WordPress site remains the right infrastructure.
If you’re hoping that Substack will actually solve a problem with content quality or audience relevance, it won’t. The platform’s growth mechanics are better than before, but they don’t convert mediocre posts into paying subscribers. Writers who make serious money on Substack—those at the six-figure level—tend to create work that people find really hard to get elsewhere. This is not a platform issue to be resolved. This is a writing problem.
If you’re considering Substack as your only infrastructure—a self-hosted site, a standalone email list, nothing off-platform—we encourage you to think about it carefully. Export your subscriber list regularly. Maintain a presence on the domain you own. Think of Substack as a distribution channel and monetization layer, not the entire building block of your publishing operation. The history of this industry shows that this is a posture that cannot withstand platform changes.
What would we actually say to a blogger today?
You don’t need to run the substack. We do not think that it is necessary to avoid it. We think you need to understand what it is—a social platform with a better creative economy than most, a growing built-in discovery engine, and ten percent of everything you earn—and clearly decide whether it’s right for the type of publishing operation you’re trying to build.
The blogging industry has been declared dead and reborn so many times that the declarations have become background noise. RSS was going to kill the blog. Social media would kill blogging. It would kill video blogging. AI review will kill blogging. None of this killed blogging, because what’s important—having something to say, building an audience around it, monetizing the relationship—isn’t the format. This is the experience. Experiences are not killed by platforms. They adapt to them by choice and judgment.
If Substack fits your strategy, build with it in mind. If not, don’t let the hype convince you. Either way – own your list, own your domain, and build something platform-agnostic to stay generous forever.
We’ve seen what happens when they don’t.
