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The launch of Substack in 2017 transformed the newsletter landscape.
The significant interest in Substack also inspired the development of other newsletter platforms and tools.
Today, Substack has more than 35 million active subscriptions, including more than 3 million paid subscriptions. There are thousands of writer who get paid.
Intrigued by these statistics, I decided to dive deeper into the data.
I pulled data of 74,858 Substack newsletters, which are publicly accessible and analyzed it.
This report will be a gold mine for you to:
87.2% of the newsletters are in English, which is the biggest group.
Monthly publishing is the most preferred frequency (24%) followed by weekly newsletters (21%) among 75k newsletters.
On the other hand, only 3% of newsletters have a daily publishing.
36% of the newsletters offer a paid plan, which makes up 27K newsletters among 75k newsletters.
45% of newsletters is inactive. That means there are 34K inactive newsletters out of 75K newsletters.
Among 20K active newsletters that offer paid subscription, the average subscription prices are:
Avg. Monthly Price: $10
Avg. Yearly Price: $96
Avg. Founding Price: $310
When we look at subscriber range and publishing frequency together among, the top three largest groups:
1K-2.5K subscribers & weekly (15.1%)
1K-2.5K subscribers & multiple times a week (10.5%)
1K-2.5K subscribers & monthly (9.8%)
73% of 27K paid newsletters shared at least one post on Substack Notes, which is higher than both the overall average (56%) and free newsletters (47%).
Almost half of the newsletters (44%) never posted a note.
Some other key highlights:
● 82% of 75K newsletters have less than 10K subscribers.
● There are 212 newsletters with 100K or more subscribers.
● There are 4 newsletters with 1 million and more subscribers.
● Running a newsletter is a solo business. There is one creator behind 95% of active newsletters, which is valid for both paid and free newsletters.
● The more frequent the publishing schedule, the higher the paid subscription ratio is. Paid subscription is highest among active newsletters with ‘a multiple times a week’ (71%) and ‘daily’ (72%) publishing schedule.
These are just the tip of the iceberg. Read the full report now to uncover all the insights and see comparisons with easy-to-read charts.