If you’re still thinking of Substack as a newsletter platform with a podcast tab attached, you’re looking at a product that no longer exists. Over the past eighteen months, Substack has developed video publishing, local live streaming, an embedded recording studio, TV programming and an automatic cropping system that distributes creative content to YouTube Shorts. Whether writers welcome it or not, it’s happening – and it’s changing what the platform is optimized for.
The movement is purposeful and the pace quickens. Video downloads arrived in 2022. Live streaming and video monetization followed. In July 2025, Substack was introduced significant live streaming updates — AI-generated highlight clips, automatic promotional assets, direct guest invitations, optional automatic upload of top clips to YouTube Shorts.
In January 2026, Substack released a TV app for Apple TV and Google TV with a recommendation row structured like TikTok’s For You page—marking that it’s not only competing with Patreon and Ghost, but also positioning itself for living room viewing alongside YouTube and Netflix.
Later, in March 2026, the company launched Substack Recording Studio: a built-in desktop tool for pre-recording solo videos or conversations with two guests, complete with screen sharing, custom watermarks, and auto-generated thumbnails. External recording tools and design software are no longer required.
Alongside the launch of Recording Studio, Substack has also released a TV app for Apple TV and Google TV – a recommendation line structured like TikTok’s For You page – which shows it’s not only competing with Patreon and Ghost, but also positioning itself for living room viewing alongside YouTube and Netflix.
Numbers writers need to see
What Substack’s own data shows: Creators who used audio or video for any 90 days saw revenue 50% faster than those who didn’t. Clips created by the subset distributed to external platforms receive over 500,000 views per day and have directly generated approximately 500,000 free subscriptions across the ecosystem. Around 100,000 publications are now monetizing the platform, up from 50,000 by mid-2025.
The 50% revenue growth figure is the most important and deserves some research before jumping to conclusions. Creators who embrace video are likely to be more active, development-oriented, and more willing to experiment—so video may be a correlate of a certain creative energy rather than an independent cause of faster growth. But even adjusting for that, the direction of the data is consistent: Multimedia usage on Substack is associated with faster subscriber and revenue growth, and the association is strong enough that Substack is now building its entire product roadmap around it.
What does this mean for writers who don’t want to be in front of the camera?
The honest answer is: probably less than you fear, but more than you hope. Substack does not delete or deprioritize text. The identity of the platform – and its advantage over YouTube and TikTok – is still the direct subscriber relationship and the economics of paid subscriptions. A newsletter with 3,000 paying subscribers at $10 a month generates $360,000 a year (before Substack’s 10% platform fee). This model does not require video. It requires writing that people value enough to pay for.
But the platform is changing what it uncovers and recommends, and video has an edge in discoverability — especially through the Notes feed and TV app recommendation system. Substack clips distributed to YouTube Shorts generate free subscription conversions at scale. For writers who rely on the platform’s organic discovery for growth, the question of whether single text will continue to be as discoverable as it used to be is a real one.
The writers who will most successfully navigate this change are not necessarily video adopters, but those who actually understand what they’re selling. If readers pay for your thought, voice, and attitude, video can amplify that. If they’re paying for the format, it’s a much more dangerous position.
An opportunity that most copywriters miss
The most practical result of Substack’s video push doesn’t require any cameras: the clip-to-subscribe pipeline. Substack’s automatic trimming system converts live broadcasts and recorded videos into short-form clips optimized for external distribution. These clips manage free subscriptions, which can then be converted to paid. For writers already comfortable with audio, many of whom write podcasts or have experimented with voiceovers, the step to spoken video is not a big one, and the upside of distribution is now built right into the platform.
There’s also a more subtle shift worth watching. The fastest growing writers on Substack right now aren’t necessarily the best writers—they’re the ones who build the most readable public presence across formats. Video accelerates that readability. It compresses the credulity that the text slowly makes into something that the audience can appreciate in a matter of minutes. A reader who watches you think out loud about something you care about for three minutes is at a lower level than a reader who reads three of your posts.
None of this means that text in Substack is dead. This means that text is no longer the only format the platform is optimized to power. Writers who see it as a threat will adapt more slowly than writers who treat it as a tool—another surface, another way to reach the same people they’ve always tried to reach.
