Substack now pulls in roughly 47.6 million unique visitors a month, and that figure jumped nearly 66% in a single year. That’s not a niche newsletter habit anymore. It’s a distribution channel brands are quietly building into their media mix, often without telling anyone outside the marketing team.
The Numbers Behind the Quiet Rise
For years, Substack was filed under “email platform” in most brand marketing decks, somewhere between Mailchimp and an afterthought. That framing is outdated. Substack has grown into one of the fastest-growing newsletter platforms, with more than 35 million active subscriptions and over 5 million paid subscriptions. Traffic tells an even sharper story: in September, Substack recorded 47.6 million visitors, up 65.85% from the previous year.
What’s driving that curve isn’t just writers chasing subscription revenue. It’s readers migrating their attention away from algorithmic feeds. Sprout Social’s Q2 2025 Pulse Survey found that 41% of global social users plan to spend more time on Substack, a figure that rises to 52% for Gen Z and 53% for Millennials. That’s a demographic most brand marketers would kill to reach with any consistency, and it’s showing up on a platform most media plans still don’t budget for.
A platform that was 47.6 million unique visitors a month, growing 65% year over year, is no longer a side experiment. It’s a reach channel brands are underpricing in their media plans.
None of this is accidental scale. It tracks with broader shifts happening across the creator economy, where audiences are rewarding direct, owned relationships over rented reach on platforms they don’t control.
From Email to Full Media Stack
Call it feature creep or call it strategy, Substack stopped being just a newsletter tool a while ago. The platform now bundles text, podcasts, live video, group chat, and a social discovery layer called Notes into a single publishing interface. In January, Substack pushed further, launching a dedicated TV app for Apple TV and Google TV. The company framed the launch as giving thought-provoking videos and livestreams a natural home on the television, where subscribers can settle in for extended viewing.
For brand marketers, the practical implication is simple: a single Substack publication can now carry a newsletter, a monthly video interview series, and a podcast, all distributed to the same owned subscriber base without licensing three separate tools. The TV app features a TikTok-like “For You” row that highlights videos from creators along with algorithmic recommendations, which means brand content that performs well can surface to audiences who haven’t subscribed yet. That’s organic discovery most owned-channel marketing never gets.
This matters for budget conversations too. Instead of licensing separate podcast hosting, video infrastructure, and email software, teams can consolidate production into one workflow, a version of the operational efficiency play that shows up across content reuse strategies brands are increasingly forced to formalize as formats multiply.
What Brands Are Actually Doing With It
The real signal isn’t platform stats. It’s who’s showing up and what they’re publishing. Brands and brand founders are increasingly turning to platforms like Substack, and in recent months Madewell, American Eagle, Billboard, Rare Beauty, The RealReal, Bandcamp, and Tory Burch have all launched newsletters on the platform.
American Eagle’s “Off The Cuff” is the case study everyone cites, and for good reason. Within six weeks of its debut, the newsletter gained more than 2,000 Substack subscribers, built around guest editor Casey Lewis, a writer with an existing Gen Z following. The brand’s CMO has been explicit that the goal isn’t transactional. As Craig Brommers put it, TikTok, Instagram, and Snap each express a different version of the brand, and Substack is another opportunity to express themselves and fit into the culture. American Eagle isn’t alone in treating the channel as brand-building rather than performance marketing. Hinge took a campaign-specific approach, partnering with established Substack writers for a short story series, and the first iteration of that campaign increased brand consideration in the U.S. by 10.5%, according to Hinge.
Not every experiment sticks, though. American Eagle’s early newsletter activity went quiet during the brand’s Sydney Sweeney campaign backlash, a reminder that Substack still requires sustained editorial investment, not a one-off launch press release. The brands getting it right, Rare Beauty, Madewell, The RealReal, treat the publication like an editorial product with a dedicated owner, not a repurposed marketing asset bolted onto an existing content calendar.
The Compliance Wrinkle Nobody’s Pricing In
Here’s the part that should matter most to risk-averse marketing leaders: Substack doesn’t run a self-serve ad marketplace, and its culture is openly hostile to anything that reads as advertising. Brand sponsorships and creator partnerships on the platform are negotiated directly, off-platform, with no standardized rate card, no mediated contract terms, and no built-in disclosure enforcement. That puts the compliance burden entirely on the brand and the creator to self-police FTC disclosure requirements, the same tension already playing out across platform-specific disclosure rules on more established social channels.
Regulated industries should take particular note. Financial services firms, which have largely sat out Substack despite the platform hosting a deep bench of investing and personal finance writers, face the same review and recordkeeping obligations that have already pushed finance brands to rebuild their influencer playbooks around compliance first. A newsletter platform with no native ad-approval workflow is not a shortcut around that process. If anything, it raises the stakes, since content lives as a permanently indexed, searchable URL rather than a disappearing social post.
Measuring ROI Without an Ad Auction
Substack doesn’t offer the clean, dashboard-ready attribution marketers get from paid social. There’s no CPM, no pixel-based conversion tracking baked into the platform, and no standardized reporting layer for sponsored content. Brands have to build their own measurement framework, usually leaning on subscriber growth rate, open rate, click-through rate on outbound links, and qualitative engagement like comments and replies.
That’s a harder sell to a CFO used to the kind of fast, clean attribution brands now demand elsewhere. It’s the same pressure reshaping how teams approach short-window attribution on performance campaigns, and Substack sits at the opposite end of that spectrum. It’s a brand-equity channel, not a direct-response one, and marketers who force transactional KPIs onto it tend to kill the very trust that made the channel work in the first place.
Is Substack Right for Your Brand?
Not every brand needs a Substack. But the calculus is shifting for a specific group: B2B companies and executive thought leadership programs. Substack content is increasingly surfaced inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, a distribution pathway that didn’t meaningfully exist a few years ago. For brands already investing in executive-led creator content for AI visibility, a well-run Substack publication is a natural extension, one indexed URL per post, custom domain support, and a direct line to a self-selected, high-intent audience.
For consumer brands, the use case is narrower and less transactional: community, tone, and long-form storytelling that doesn’t fit a 30-second video. If your team can’t commit to a consistent publishing cadence and an editorial voice distinct from your other channels, skip it. A dormant Substack is worse for brand perception than no Substack at all.
FAQs
Is Substack a good channel for B2B brand marketing?
Yes, particularly for executive thought leadership and niche buyer personas. Substack content is increasingly cited by generative AI search tools, which gives B2B brands a discoverability advantage that traditional gated content and PDFs don’t offer.
Can brands run paid advertising on Substack?
Not through a self-serve platform marketplace. Substack does not operate standardized display ads or auction-based placements. Brand sponsorships happen through direct negotiation with individual creators, which means pricing, disclosure terms, and creative approval are all handled off-platform.
How should a brand measure success on Substack?
Subscriber growth rate, email open rate, and click-through on outbound links are the core metrics, alongside qualitative signals like comment volume. Brands expecting the kind of direct-response attribution common to paid social will be disappointed. Substack performs better as a brand equity and community channel than a conversion engine.
What compliance risks should brand and legal teams watch for?
FTC disclosure requirements still apply to sponsored Substack content, but the platform provides no built-in disclosure enforcement or contract mediation. Brands, especially in regulated industries like finance and healthcare, need their own review workflow before any sponsored post goes live.
Does a brand need its own Substack, or should it partner with existing creators?
Partnering with an established creator is usually the faster path to credibility and reach, since you borrow an existing, trusted audience. Launching an owned publication takes longer to build traction but gives the brand full control over voice, data, and long-term subscriber relationships.
Next step: Before greenlighting a Substack program, audit whether your team can sustain a genuine editorial cadence and a disclosure review process, not just a launch announcement. The brands winning on this channel treat it like a media property with an owner, not a repurposed marketing asset.
Top Influencer Marketing Agencies
The leading agencies shaping influencer marketing in 2026
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Moburst
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The Shelf
Boutique Beauty & Lifestyle Influencer AgencyA data-driven boutique agency specializing exclusively in beauty, wellness, and lifestyle influencer campaigns on Instagram and TikTok. Best for brands already focused on the beauty/personal care space that need curated, aesthetic-driven content.Clients: Pepsi, The Honest Company, Hims, Elf Cosmetics, Pure LeafVisit The Shelf → -
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Viral Nation
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Ubiquitous
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Obviously
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