Substack announced a $100M funding round that raised its valuation to $1.1 billion. Substack built a new media ecosystem enabling reporters and influencers to monetize audiences seeking long-form writing. Creators and readers engage with hundreds of newsletters, including Newcomer, The Free Press, The Ankler, The Pragmatic Engineer, Lenny's Newsletter, and Slow Boring. Many projects evolved into mini-media companies with staff, effectively rebuilding previous publications. More than 50 creators earn millions annually on the platform. The company reports 500,000 creators, over 5 million paid subscribers, and about $45 million in annual recurring revenue, with domain traffic surpassing major news sites in June 2025. Original promises of audience portability changed after an app launch in March 2022 that consolidated subscriptions.
Substack has built an entirely new media ecosystem by enabling reporters and influencers to monetize their audience longing for long-term writing. People share links and discuss pieces from Eric Newcomer's Newcomer, Bari Weiss's The Free Press, Richard Rushfield's The Ankler, Gergely Orosz's The Pragmatic Engineer, Lenny Rachitsky's Lenny's Newsletter, Matthew Yglesias's Slow Boring and thousands of other blogs. Many of these projects have grown into mini-media companies with staff, essentially rebuilding the publications their founders once left.
Another way we do that is we mean it when we say we're helping writers go independent, and they own their content and they own their contact point with their audience, which means that you can leave. If you're a writer and you build up your following and your subscriber base on Substack, you can take it away. <…> Start a blog, an email newsletter, have people subscribe directly to somebody you trust. You own your content, you own your audience.
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