In August 2020, Substack’s own numbers put its total paid subscriber base at just over 100,000, spread across every newsletter on the platform combined. That was the entire pool of paying readers, for every writer, on every topic, anywhere on the site. Five years later, that pool had grown into millions of paying subscriptions, and a new kind of number had shown up alongside it: individual writers pulling in seven figures a year, on their own, from a single newsletter.
The person who said so out loud was Chris Best, Substack’s co-founder and CEO. Speaking onstage at The Information’s Future of Influence event in Los Angeles in June 2025, Best said “more than 50 people” were making over $1 million a year on the platform. The comment came out unscripted, in the middle of a conversation, the kind of figure a company usually keeps close until legal and marketing have signed off on the wording. It landed the way unplanned numbers tend to land: fast, and everywhere, within hours.
The moment it slipped out
The clearest sign that this was an unplanned disclosure came from inside Substack itself. Within hours of Best’s comment making the rounds online, Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s other co-founder, posted a note of his own: “Oh shit, didn’t realize we were disclosing this.” McKenzie’s note reads like genuine, in-the-moment surprise at watching a private number go public, posted the same evening Best said it.
That kind of reaction rarely happens by accident. Companies generally control what gets said about their own revenue and their own top earners, especially when the number is this flattering. A co-founder’s half-panicked note is a small, human confirmation that the figure was a real answer to a real question, given by someone who hadn’t quite worked out yet what happens once a number like that gets loose in the world.
What five years actually did
Whatever prompted the disclosure, the underlying shift is real, and it shows up in the platform’s own subscription numbers. Axios reported that Substack’s paid subscriptions grew from about 100,000 in July 2020 to more than 5 million by March 2025, roughly a fiftyfold increase in five years. That’s a jump big enough to turn a promising, unproven place to write into one where a few dozen people can apparently run a media business at seven-figure scale, without a network, a studio, or a masthead behind them.
Five years ago, the honest answer to whether someone could make a living writing a newsletter was maybe, for a handful of already-known writers, if the timing worked out. The honest answer now comes with a number attached to the top of that range, and the number is high enough to change what “maybe” means for everyone still climbing toward it.
Why now, and not five years earlier
Part of the answer is timing that had little to do with Substack itself. Newsrooms spent the years between 2020 and 2025 cutting staff on a scale that pushed a lot of experienced reporters and columnists to look for income that didn’t depend on one employer’s ad budget. A subscription newsletter, paid for directly by a few thousand readers instead of approved by an editor, was one of the few options that let an established writer keep a byline and set their own terms.
The other part is simpler. Five years ago, asking a reader to hand over a monthly card payment for a newsletter was still a hard sell, competing against a habit of expecting most writing online to be free. By 2025, that habit had loosened enough that a reader already paying for three or four other subscriptions barely noticed adding one more. Substack didn’t create that shift by itself, but it built the checkout button that a critical mass of readers were, by then, willing to click.
Fifty people, or fifty small operations
It’s worth being precise about what Best’s number does and doesn’t describe. “More than 50 people” earning over $1 million a year is a statement about income at the top of the platform. It says nothing about how that income gets produced. Some of those newsletters are probably one person handling everything: writing, editing, answering comments, running the business side alone. Others are more likely small operations, with an editor, a researcher, or a couple of contributors splitting the byline and the workload. A seven-figure newsletter run by four people and a seven-figure newsletter run by one person both count toward the same total, and they represent very different amounts of individual effort.
That distinction doesn’t make the figure less real. It changes what the figure is evidence of: a ceiling that’s newly reachable on the platform, not a job description that applies evenly to everyone chasing it.
The number also says nothing about how long any of those fifty-plus newsletters will stay above the line. A newsletter’s income depends on renewals, and renewals depend on readers deciding, year after year, that the writing is still worth the price. Crossing seven figures once, in 2025, is not the same as staying there in 2030.
A number that didn’t exist to report
What makes this moment different from a routine growth statistic is that five years ago, there was no comparable figure available to disclose, flattering or not. A platform can’t reveal that dozens of independent writers cleared $1 million a year when the entire platform hadn’t yet proven a handful of writers could clear six figures. The number Best said onstage only became sayable because enough individual newsletters had already gotten there first, one subscription at a time.
Whether that pace holds for the next five years is an open question, and Substack itself doesn’t seem to have a rehearsed answer, going by how quickly its own co-founder reacted to the number getting loose. What’s confirmed for now is narrower and more specific than any claim about the future of media. A threshold nobody could point to in 2020 has a number attached to it in 2025, and that number came from the person best positioned to know it.
For anyone weighing whether to start a newsletter of their own, that number is worth reading as a ceiling rather than a floor. Most writers on Substack do not clear six figures, let alone seven, and the platform has never claimed otherwise. What changed in five years is that the top of the range moved somewhere it hadn’t been before, far enough that even a skeptical audience had to notice.
