Despite the surprise, Ms. Hermann-Johnson didn’t consider culling her list. As she read through her paid newsletters — among them from Nora McInerny, a grief writer; Laura McKowen, a sobriety writer; and Catherine Newman, a memoirist and novelist — there were no surprises. All were writers she read, loved and felt good about giving money to.
“I just want to support them and their work, and that’s how I feel like I can do it,” she said.
A Relatively New Spending Category
Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s founders, wrote in a Substack post last year that Ben Thompson, a tech analyst who writes the blog Stratechery, had inspired an early version of his company. Mr. Thompson added a paid membership option to his blog in 2014, and within six months, 1,000 subscribers were paying him at least $100 a year for premium content. (Mr. Thompson refers to his own publication as a “subscription-based blog, newsletter and podcast.”)
When Mr. McKenzie founded Substack with his colleagues Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi in 2017, their first recruit to the platform was Bill Bishop, whose free newsletter, Sinocism, had 30,000 subscribers. On his first day publishing it on Substack, he brought in $100,000 in subscriptions. Substack, then as now, took 10 percent.
Today, many platforms and products, including Beehiiv, Kit, Memberful, Ghost, Lede and Patreon, help writers create paid publications. But Substack is widely considered to be the largest, with over 50,000 revenue-earning publications. The company reports that it has tens of millions of active subscribers and five million paid subscriptions. It declined to share concrete subscriber numbers, including the number of paid subscribers.
Because the category is relatively new, there isn’t enough public data yet on who is paying for newsletters, or how many they are paying for.
