Why Is Everyone Suddenly on Substack?

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Jim Acosta, the former CNN anchor known for antagonizing President Donald Trump during his first term, did not know what Substack was two months ago, when he was suddenly on the outs with the network he had called home for nearly two decades. Today, he has more than 280,000 subscribers on the platform.

"I called him after his last sign off from CNN, and it turned out he did not own his own computer for 18 years. CNN owned his computer," Catherine Valentine, Substack's head of politics, told Newsweek. "But when he left CNN, he had to turn in his computer. He did not know what Substack was, he just knew that there was this opportunity for independence."

Acosta's decision to launch a newsletter on Substack rather than seek another cable news gig reflects a growing consensus among journalists: the traditional media landscape is disintegrating, and it's increasingly every man and woman for themself.

The New, New Media
Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and Vox cofounder Matthew Yglesias are all on Substack. So are FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer, veteran journalist Dan Rather and Aaron Rupar, an independent journalist who has nearly a million followers on X, formerly Twitter, for his video clips documenting political events from a progressive angle.

"Journalists have lost a lot of faith in Meta, Twitter and Google searches," Valentine said. "They've seen their own work suffer. Unless they text their stories to their friends or do their own PR around this, no one is going to see it. That's forcing publishers, for the first time, to want complete ownership of their work and the complete ability to reach people."

"When people come to Substack and they see the power of subscriptions and what it's paying them directly, their eyes just open," she said.

Substack, a San Francisco-based tech platform launched in 2017, is currently home to 50,000 publishers who monetize their content on the site. The top 10 publishers collectively bring in more than $40 million a year. In the Politics and News categories, more than 30 publications make at least $1 million annually.

Number three on Substack's U.S. politics leaderboard is The Bulwark, the media company founded by never-Trump conservatives Bill Kristol, Sarah Longwell and Charlie Sykes.

With tens of thousands of paid subscribers, each paying $10 a month for access to its suite of content, The Bulwark brought in $6 million through Substack last year.

"We've had a lot of growth over the last year, which is exactly what you'd expect in an election year," Jonathan V. Last, who serves as editor of The Bulwark, told Newsweek.

"We saw hockey stick-like growth all through 2024. We've never gone backwards. We've been growing since we started, which, to me, just says we're still finding the audience of people who are interested in the kind of thing we're doing—and we haven't bumped up against that ceiling yet."

The Trump Bump
Substack says it had its biggest week during the 2024 presidential election, with an 82 percent jump in paid subscriptions and a 25 percent increase in app activity. All of that was by design.

In April 2023—a year and a half before the election, X owner Elon Musk reportedly wanted to buy Substack. The platform's chief executive declined to entertain an offer from him, but a new business objective materialized. By September of that year, Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie told staff that he wanted 2024 to be "the Substack election."

Valentine, who joined as Substack's head of politics in August 2023 to help lure political junkies away from X, recalled that "the entire ecosystem" had been different. At the time, publishers had been relying on their talent to push stories to their millions of followers on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Journalists, however, felt they were losing their audiences, just as X was "throttling" links to outside sites, including Substack. And with Facebook and Instagram leaning out of politics, there wasn't really anywhere for these folks to go.

All of those factors, plus TikTok's collapse, has created an environment where reporters, journalists, anchors, politicians are really looking to be able to reach their audiences, their constituents, their readers, and they're increasingly...limited in what even their mothers can see, of what they're doing and what they're working on," Valentine said.

"Substack has become kind of a saving grace for everyone with an important political message or just an important story to share," she added.

Since returning to power, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to not only federal bureaucracy, but also the D.C. press corps.

In the last six weeks, his administration has kicked the Associated Press out of the White House, added a "new media" seat that has welcomed more Trump-friendly faces into the briefing room and wrested control of the presidential pool back from the 111-year-old White House Correspondents' Association. "All of those factors are just leading people to say, 'independence on Substack is the only thing that kind of guarantees my career survival,'" Valentine said. "And they're not wrong."

Traditional media outlets may have expected to see a boost in news consumption with the new administration, but Substack may be capturing that boost better than cable news or mainstream outlets.

"The Trump bump that I think CNN and MSNBC expected, it really came to Substack," Valentine said.

She suggested much of that bump has been driven by decisions from mainstream news outlets that are trying to appease Trump in fear of retaliation or losing access, pointing to decisions like ABC settling a multi-million dollar lawsuit with the president and cable networks like MSNBC and CNN reportedly cutting their contributors' deals in half.

"That's all driving subscribers to read Substacks in droves," she said. "And they're not just signing up for one, they're signing up for five or six Substacks."

Jennifer Rubin, a popular liberal columnist for The Washington Post, and Norm Eisen, who frequently appeared on MSNBC, both left those positions in January to launch The Contrarian on Substack. Within 12 hours, they reached 10,000 paid subscribers. Today, they have more than 536,000 subscribers (it is not clear how many of those are paid).

Ann Telnaes, who worked as a Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist for the Post since 2008, also resigned earlier this year after the paper killed one of her cartoons that satirized the paper's owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Telnaes turned to Substack, where her political cartoons now have 85,000 subscribers.

"The collapses of these mega-journalism institutions is sending subscribers in droves to Substack and the lack of faith in broadcast journalism right this second is driving so many subscribers to independent journalists," Valentine said.

"It's weird," said Last, of The Bulwark. "When Biden won in 2020, in 2021, I assumed we would plateau or go backwards. I thought, 'OK, we'll go back to something that looked normal,' because we had huge growth during COVID, which was both COVID and an election year. I assumed we would go backwards as people went back to normal."

"We didn't. We kept growing all four years, which surprised me. Then we got into the 2024 election year and it went into the way it was in 2020, which is just the way all political press functions," he said. "But it hasn't tapered off for us."

Finding Community
And yet, it goes beyond growth for Substack publishers. Yes, the most popular writers may be getting paid more handsomely for their work (Valentine said they take home 90 percent of profits, with Substack taking a 10 percent cut). Yes, they're getting more eyeballs on their work (the platform's internal recommendation engine drove over half of new subscribers and more than 30 percent of paid subscribers last year). But more than any of that, publishers have been able to find a community with their readers.

"Our reader base on Substack is a very real community," Last said. "It's an actual community of people and they talk to each other on the page, and they find each other. We do live shows where 500 to 600 people come out to see us, but they're not really there to see us. They're there to hang out with all the other people who they kind of know from Substack."

The way that Last describes his audience on Substack is similar to how TikTok influencers have described the platform in relationship to Instagram. For many, TikTok became something of a safe space where comments were usually supportive and reassuring. On the other hand, the same content posted to Instagram was more often subject to greater scrutiny, snark and criticisms in the comments.

"I sound like a ridiculous person here, but it's really, really nice," Last said of his experience engaging with Substack readers. "The audience feels to me like they are really amenable to direction. We really try to curate the comments and curate the community, and have expectations for how we treat each other and stuff, and people are just super into that."

He called it the "most surprising thing" he's noticed since starting The Bulwark.

"They're interested in shaking your hand and saying 'thank you,'" Valentine added.

Everything that Acosta has published since joining Substack has been for free. When his readers write in to him, it's to do exactly what Valentine conveyed—to thank him.