Top substack newsletters free#
(The company won’t disclose the number of free subscribers.) A hiring spree hopes to net more than a dozen engineers, product managers and other specialists. Paid subscriptions to its hundreds of thousands of newsletters exploded to more than one million late last year from 50,000 in mid-2019. The good news for the company, five years old this summer, is that it is still growing. “Substack is at a pivot point where it needs to think about what it’s going to be when it grows up,” said Nikki Usher, an associate journalism professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. And many popular writers left, such as the associate English professor Grace Lavery and the climate journalists Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt, often complaining about the company’s moderation policy or the pressure to constantly deliver. Consumers who loaded up on newsletters during the pandemic began to scale back. Tech giants, news outlets and other companies have released competing newsletter platforms in the past year.
Depending on whom you talk to, those challenges are either standard start-up growing pains or threats to the company’s future. Flush with venture money, the start-up was said to be “ the media future.”īut now, Substack finds itself no longer a wunderkind but a company facing a host of challenges. Not long ago, Substack haunted mainstream media executives, poaching their star writers, luring their readers and, they feared, threatening their viability. “I looked at a few options that people were talking about.” She now pays $780 a year to publish through Ghost, but said she still made roughly the same in subscriptions. Han moved her newsletter, We, The Citizens, to a competing service. She also didn’t like earning $20,000 in subscription revenue, and then giving up $2,600 in fees to Substack and its payment processor. The hands-off content moderation policy, which allowed transphobic and anti-vaccine language, did not sit well with her. She disliked how the platform portrayed itself as a haven for independent writers with fewer resources while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men. They just aren’t enough to outweigh the downsides.
There are things that the newsletter writer Kirsten Han misses about Substack.
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