substack

You don’t need to think of Substack as social media to get value from it. Many people come to the platform simply to publish and receive posts, and that works just fine. But when Substack also functions as a network—as a place where people gather—it offers a cultural counterweight to the endless-scroll platforms.

As the best of these voices succeed and grow on Substack, we provide them with infrastructure that flexes to meet their growing ambitions. Substack integrates web, newsletter, podcast, video, and community tools seamlessly with an app that helps startups. We handle hosting, payments, analytics, and support so founders can focus on their business.... See more

The Free Press is one such institution, and it is one among many on Substack, collectively accounting for millions of paid subscribers. Among this new class are Sarah Longwell’s politics collective The Bulwark, Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim’s Drop Site, Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen’s The Contrarian, Richard Rushfield and Janice... See more

These founders are building here because they can enjoy the distribution benefits of the Substack network—which drives more than 30% of all paid subscriptions across the platform—without compromising their vision. That network growth and discovery via the app means a media business can now scale faster, and more cost efficiently, than ever before.

So, yes, Substack is social media, but it’s more than that, too. It’s a media system built with a different outcome in mind: not an endless scroll, but a culture worth participating in.

Here, you have a media ecosystem with a different set of rules that serve you . This is a place for real human relationships built around stories and culture. The feed is designed to lead you to deeper experiences. Meaningful connection—not shallow attention—is the fuel for the whole machine.

On Substack, journalists are also able to find financial freedom. As Substack CEO Chris Best has said, the overarching goal is “to allow writers and creators to run their own personal media empire.” While Substack takes a 10% cut of earnings and payment company Stripe takes another 3%, writers pocket the rest. But the opportunity to find financial... See more

The founders of The Free Press and Zeteo didn’t need to hire developers, wrestle with a dated content management system, or stress about subscriber profile management. They can instead dedicate almost all of their focus to the work that matters most: their journalism.

We’re also seeing the emergence of new models that take advantage of Substack’s network-centric design and flexible features, including Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist, which recently sprouted local variants in California and New York, and spinoff publications created and funded by individual writers who have found success on the... See more