Substack Is Having a Moment—Again. But Time Is Running Out

WIRED

8 hours ago

Jun 27, 2025 2:29 PM While star reporters continue to flock to Substack, subscription fatigue is only getting worse. The Substack homepage on a smartphone. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:Before June 8, the skilled and respected ABC News television journalist Terry Moran was neither a household name nor political lightning rod. That changed abruptly when Moran posted on X that Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was 'a world-class hater,' followed by an addendum that the president was a hater as well. (The post was later taken down.) While the statements were certainly defendable, they apparently violated ABC policy, and Moran was suspended, then dismissed. Moran, though, had one move left. On June 11, he started writing on Substack.
Moran was joining a movement based on a dream: Journalists could start a Substack newsletter and garner subscription fees that would match or exceed their previous salaries. And they would be editorially liberated! No editors to screw up copy, no censorship from bosses when advertisers complain, no corporate overlord to fire you when you say the president of the United States is a hater. Substack says that some people are indeed living the dream. CEO Chris Best recently boasted in a speech that 'more than 50' of its users were pulling in a million dollars in revenue.
As more journalists get pushed out of their jobs, get fed up with their bosses, or just want to breathe the cool air of freedom, they now have what appears to be a viable escape hatch. Recently a lot of them are taking advantage of it. Jeff Bezos has been good to Substack: The Washington Post editorial page's apparent recent disinterest in stopping democracy from dying has led popular opinion writer Jennifer Rubin to start a publication called The Contrarian, and censored editorial Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes now publishes on Substack as well. Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan started his own publication. Even Chuck Todd has gone indie.
You might be tempted to think that the Substack revolution is shaking up the foundations of journalism, agreeing with Substack star Emily Sundberg that newsroom leaders everywhere should be barring their doors to prevent further defections. Well, not so fast. The Substack model may work very well for a few, but it's not so easy to march in and match a salary. Readers have to pay a high price for a voice that they once enjoyed in a publication they subscribe to. And writers have to get used to the idea that the breadth of their wisdom is limited to a small percentage of patrons. Is Substack sustainable for writers addressing a general audience?
Just in the last week or so, a cluster of critics have been publishing that the platform may be on shaky ground. It started when Eric Newcomer—posting on his own successful Substack—celebrated Substack's recent influx of big names and reported that the platform told investors it was taking in $45 million a year in revenue. He claimed it was seeking a new investment round which would value the company at $700 million. (Substack did not confirm those numbers.)
This is an essay from the latest edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter.
SIGN UP for Plaintext to read the whole thing, and tap Steven's unique insights and unmatched contacts for the long view on tech.
But then Dylan Byers of Puck (a publication on Substack) looked at those numbers and wondered whether the bottom line valuation was actually less than in the previous rounds. Byers, like other critics, charged that once you get past the few real big earners, the platform was full of low-flying mediocrities: 'The truth is that the vast majority of the content on Substack is boring, amateurish or batshit crazy,' he wrote. His conclusion was that Substack was a media company trying to be valued as a tech company, which is a familiar fail point for similar companies. (WIRED itself once failed at an IPO for that very reason.)
Ana Marie Cox, who once enjoyed blogging fame as Wonkette, is even grimmer, writing in her newsletter that Substack 'is as unstable as a SpaceX launch.' She wasn't impressed with the more recent influx of name writers. 'How many Terry Morans does Substack have room for?' she wrote. 'Is there even a public appetite for a dozen Terry Morans, each independently Terry Moran-ing in his own newsletter?'
Cox is referring to subscription fatigue, which is something I think of every time a sign-up page pops up when opening a new Substack. Typically, Substack pros solicit a monthly fee of $5-10 or an annual rate of $50-150. Usually there's a free tier of content, but journalists who hope to make at least part of their livelihood on Substack save the good stuff for paid customers. Compared to subscribing to full-fledged publications, this is a terrible value proposition. After leaving The Atlantic, celebrated writer Derek Thompson started a Substack that cost $80 a year—that's one penny more than a digital subscription to the magazine he just left! (The Atlantic will probably spend $300,000 to replace him with someone else worth reading.) It doesn't take too many of those subscriptions to match the cost of The New York Times, which probably has 100 journalists as good as Substack writers, and you get Wordle to boot.
Those fees can pile up. I asked one news-junkie pal of mine how many indie subs she was paying for, and a quick audit showed 31 subs costing over $2,000 per year. But my friend is the exception who actually pays. The vast majority of subscribers on Substack don't. The cost emphasizes the non-egalitarian nature of the independent concept. While I love the idea of liberated journalists speaking out, the fact is that compared to a bundled package known as a publication, the lone-voice model monetizes by delivering full content only to patrons who can afford it. It's a downside for writers, who typically want to reach wider audiences.
'I'm guessing a lot [those writers] don't like not being in the broader conversation on a regular basis, even if they're getting paid more,' says M.G. Siegler, who writes tech commentary on Spyglass, his own free-and-pay indie column.(You will note that this newsletter, and this writer, are delivered to you as part of a larger legacy media stack, That's a conscious choice.)
Substack prefers to dwell on its success stories. Look what happened to Casey Newton. In 2020, he left the Verge and started Platformer, and it's still going strong with a six-figure number of subscribers, some thousands of whom actually pay him real money for all his posts. 'Platformer succeeded beyond my expectations,' he told me. 'It let me buy a house in San Francisco. I'd honestly never thought I'd be able to do that.'
But Newton no longer publishes on Substack. Platformer is now on another platform called Ghost. It's a choice that a number of successful indie journalists have made, mainly because alternatives don't take a tenth of revenues. (Newton left Substack mainly because he said he was unhappy that the founders didn't sufficiently condemn Nazi-oriented content.) Substack says that it uniquely offers journalists access to a broad community and has offered a social-media-like feed that's sort of an internal Twitter, but I don't sense that those features have taken off. Other potential Substackers, like former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy, have chosen a platform called Beehiiv.
Unless they already have huge, passionate followings, newly independent journalists have a tough time rounding up enough subscribers to pay for even a fraction of a decent legacy media job. Newton says that early adopters like him had an easier time.
'Substack was shiny and new, and people were warming up to the idea,' he explains. He says that the decline of Twitter is another disadvantage for newer Substack writers. 'There was nothing like Twitter in the old days for finding new customers,' he says. 'Taking that away has made it meaningfully harder to promote their stuff.'
Even Sundberg, who advised legacy media to sound the alarm about the Substack exodus, told a writer for Status that the window of opportunity for newbies might be closing. 'I wouldn't want to be starting now,' she says.
For its part, Substack seems to be pivoting away from its roots. I first met the founders when they were going through Y Combinator's boot-camp-like experience, and they eagerly pitched me on their crusade to improve journalism. But now the Substack 'about' page promotes the site as 'the home for great culture,' describing itself as 'a new media app … [where] you can discover world-class video, podcasts, and writing from a diverse set of creators.'
Note that 'writing' comes last in that hierarchy of creator output. Does Substack really think that its creator videos can compete with TikTok and Meta? (Substack did not make its executives available to comment.)
Meanwhile, Moran is off to the races, posting anti-Trump comments without worrying about his job. He has over 100,000 subscribers, though it's not clear how many pay him. I read his comments and view his video posts via his free tier. No way will I pay him: I've already got ABC News on my cable, paid subscriptions to nearly a dozen publications and, yes, a bunch of Substack subs that I or my wife get billed for yearly or monthly. These include James Fallows, Jonathan Alter, Joyce Wadler, and Gregg Easterbrook, during the months he writes Tuesday Morning Quarterback.
Even though the price is high for one single voice, I find those writers worth the cost. But I wish the legacy publications they once wrote for still employed them so I wouldn't have to pay a la carte.
Don't miss future subscriber-only editions of this column. Subscribe to WIRED (50% off for Plaintext readers) today.