Substack is seeing explosive subscriber growth this year, with the crazy political environment and a strategic push into audio and video helping it do so.
Substack co-founder Hamish Mckenzie tells The Hollywood Reporter that the platform has passed 5 million paid subscribers. That is up from 4 million just four months ago, and 3 million a year ago.
A year ago, Substack says that half of its top 250 creators used audio and video as part of their regular content. Now that number is 82 percent, underscoring just how much audio and video content have transformed the platform.
“There’s been a large, big start of the year because of the political volatility. So there’s a bunch of people looking to make sense of what’s going on. There’s a bunch of either anti-Trump sentiment or pro-Trump sentiment that is driving people to look for new voices, and a bit of a shake up from mainstream media institutions that are not doing as well as they once were,” McKenzie says. “That’s across TV, like Jim Acosta leaving CNN, Joy Reid leaving MSNBC, Jen Rubin leaving The Washington Post, Paul Krugman leaving The New York Times. And all of this has accelerated growth that was already happening, that’s probably brought forward that 5 million milestone a bit earlier than it would have otherwise.”
Indeed, a number of high-profile former TV news hosts have recently joined Substack, often leveraging video to great effect. Joy Reid launched her Substack just a week after her final MSNBC show, while Jim Acosta launched his the same day his CNN exit was announced. Mehdi Hasan used his exit from MSNBC to develop an entire news brand, Zeteo, that uses Substack’s platform.
And with the future of TikTok still unclear, other social-first creators are beginning to take a hard look at where they post their content.
“The uncertainty around the status of TikTok, whether it’s going to be banned or not, created this moment that highlighted the importance of creators owning their relationship with their audience and not being totally dependent on those platforms and their rules changing,” McKenzie says. “So we’ve already been building more and more features to support people who like to express themselves in video, and often cases, that’s people who like to do writing and audio and video. But increasingly, we’re making Substack more friendly to the people who spend all their time on mobile and spend all their time on places like TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, and that might mean that they never touch a desktop computer in their daily lives, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not smart. It doesn’t mean they don’t care about culture. And so we’ve been directly addressing that crowd and building for them. And it’s paying off.”
Substack is also embracing one of the things that makes cable news unique, albeit with a twist. Substack live, in which creators host live videos and bring on guests to discuss what’s happening, have seen explosive growth in recent weeks, McKenzie says.
“A cool part of that new feature is that you can go live with someone else, you can collaborate on a live. It’s almost like a public Facetime call,” he says. “Paul Krugman did one with Noah Smith, these are happening all the time.”
It’s a dynamic similar to what we see in the podcast space, where podcast hosts and creators frequently go on each other’s shows to drive viewer and listener engagement. Substack says that more than 50 percent of its subscriptions, and 30 percent if paid subscriptions come directly from its own network.
“It’s getting exposure to that other person’s audience, which is similar to that theory of how podcasts grow,” McKenzie says.
Ultimately, the company is trying to build out the infrastructure where creators of all stripes will have a Substack that can live alongside their content elsewhere, be it on X, YouTube, or TikTok.
“We think that if you create a home on Substack and build your own autonomy, this is a place where you have a direct relationship with your audience, and you can make money from those direct subscriptions and it tends to monetize really well,” McKenzie says. “Then those other places can start to become in service of you, rather than owning and controlling you.”
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