And, of particular note to investigative journalists, Substack offers a support program called Defender, which provides free assistance with things like pre-publication legal review and responding to cease-and-desist letters - although this feature is currently only available for US-based users who use the platform for professional work. It also has built-in support for design and analytics. (This handy tool estimates how much publishers can make per month by letting you adjust subscription numbers and paywall prices - for instance, 200 subscribers paying US$5 a month would net US$811 a month.) Publishers can choose to keep some content free, or none.īut Substack differs from pure newsletter marketing platforms such as Mailchimp, because its content exists on a homepage in addition to appearing in email inboxes. In addition, Substack’s partner payment service, Stripe - which makes payouts to publishers’ bank accounts - takes about 2.9% of the billing rate monthly, and 30 cents per transaction. Substack is free for publishers to use until the launch of any paywalls, then the site takes 10% of any revenue. It’s drawn criticism as a platform that allows for publishing unvetted information or outright misinformation, for amplifying writers or figures with extremist agendas, and for poaching high-profile journalists and columnists from legacy media by paying them to publish on their platform. However, Substack has also made the wrong kind of headlines at times. According to the Press Gazette, the 27 highest-earning email newsletters on the platform generate at least US$22 million in revenue annually. In early 2023, the company announced it had reached two million paid subscriptions and claimed 50.4 million total monthly visits. During the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Substack CEO Chris Best said that readership and writership doubled. Its popularity grew rapidly early on and its potential impact on the future of journalism seemed profound. Since then, however, Substack’s reputation has been on something of a rollercoaster. GIJN spoke with journalists who both use the platform to publish original investigative reporting, and who are not part of a larger news or media organization. In 2017, a new publishing and newsletter platform, Substack, was launched based on a simple bet: if authors had the financial and editorial freedom to create high-quality content, readers would follow - and pay for it.
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