# Substack The subscription-newsletter platform founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi, on a simple deal: a writer keeps the list, sets the price, and gives Substack 10% of paid revenue. That deal is why it became the destination of the post-2020 media exodus in every direction — [[Bari Weiss]] and [[Matt Taibbi]] leaving legacy outlets on the right-heterodox side, [[Heather Cox Richardson]] building the largest political newsletter in the country on the other, [[Paul Krugman]] after the *Times*, [[Scott Alexander]] after the *Times* tried to name him, [[The Bulwark]] as a Never-Trump institution. By March 2025 the platform passed **5 million paid subscriptions** and its writers had earned roughly $450 million in aggregate; a July 2025 Series C of $100 million led by BOND and The Chernin Group valued it at **$1.1 billion**, with [[Andreessen Horowitz]] an investor since the 2019 Series A. Revenue is a fraction of that headline — Sacra's estimate is about $45 million annualized at mid-2025 — because the take rate is thin and the top writers are the ones with leverage to negotiate. ## Why it matters here **It is the infrastructure of unbundled political media.** The [[Conservative Media Ecosystem]] used to run through institutions — a network, a magazine, a talk-radio syndicator — that could be pressured, bought or captured. Substack moves the relationship to the individual writer and their list, which is portable. That cuts both ways: it is how [[Heather Cox Richardson]] reaches millions with no editor and no owner, and how the [[Twitter Files]] authors could publish a corporate-sponsored document dump as independent journalism. [[Media Theory and the Right-Wing Media Apparatus]] treats it as the platform-era form of what Harold Innis called a "monopoly of knowledge" breaking. **The moderation fight defined its politics.** In November 2023 *The Atlantic* found openly Nazi newsletters on the platform, some monetized; 247 writers signed a letter asking Substack to act, and McKenzie answered that the company would not remove content it found "wrong" because "censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem worse." A handful of publications left (Platformer among them); Substack removed five newsletters and kept the policy. The episode fixed the platform's identity as the free-speech-absolutist home of the anti-"woke" diaspora, which is what made it the natural landing place for [[Glenn Greenwald]]'s February 2026 return and for the [[1789 Capital]] investment thesis that treats "parallel" media as an asset class. **It is becoming a media company.** Notes (a Twitter-like feed, 2023), video and live streaming, a 2026 desktop recording studio and a TV app moved Substack from a payments layer toward a platform that recommends — and therefore shapes — what its readers see. The recommendation network is now the main growth engine for new writers, which means the company that promised writers independence from platform algorithms now runs one. See the [[Substack Timeline]] for the year-by-year chronology. ## See Also - [[Substack Timeline]] · [[Conservative Media Ecosystem]] · [[Media Theory and the Right-Wing Media Apparatus]] · [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]] - [[Bari Weiss]] · [[The Free Press]] · [[Matt Taibbi]] · [[Glenn Greenwald]] · [[Heather Cox Richardson]] · [[Judd Legum]] · [[Paul Krugman]] · [[Scott Alexander]] · [[The Bulwark]] - [[Twitter Files]] · [[1789 Capital]] · [[Andreessen Horowitz]]