If you still think of Substack as a newsletter platform with a podcast tab bolted on, you’re looking at a product that no longer exists. Over the past eighteen months, Substack has built out video publishing, native livestreaming, a built-in recording studio, a TV app, and an auto-clipping system that distributes creator content to YouTube Shorts. Whether or not writers find this welcome, it is happening — and it is changing what the platform is optimised for.
The move is deliberate and the pace has been accelerating. Video uploads came in 2022. Livestreaming and video monetisation followed. In July 2025, Substack rolled out significant livestreaming updates — AI-generated highlight clips, automatic promotional assets, direct guest invites, optional auto-upload of top clips to YouTube Shorts.
In January 2026, Substack released a TV app for Apple TV and Google TV — with a recommendation row structured like TikTok’s For You page — signalling that it is not just competing with Patreon and Ghost, but positioning itself for living room viewing alongside YouTube and Netflix.
Then in March 2026, the company launched the Substack Recording Studio: a built-in desktop tool for pre-recording solo videos or conversations with up to two guests, complete with screen sharing, custom watermarks, and auto-generated thumbnails. External recording tools and design software were no longer required.
Alongside the Recording Studio launch, Substack also released a TV app for Apple TV and Google TV — with a recommendation row structured like TikTok’s For You page — signalling that it is not just competing with Patreon and Ghost, but positioning itself for living room viewing alongside YouTube and Netflix.
The numbers writers need to see
The 50% revenue growth figure is the one that matters most, and it merits some scrutiny before drawing conclusions. Creators who adopt video are likely also more active, more growth-oriented, and more willing to experiment — so video may be a correlate of a particular kind of creator energy rather than a standalone cause of faster growth. But even adjusted for that, the direction of the data is consistent: multimedia use on Substack is associated with faster subscriber and revenue growth, and that association is strong enough that Substack is now building its entire product roadmap around it.
What this means for writers who don’t want to be on camera
The honest answer is: probably less than you fear, but more than you might hope. Substack is not removing or deprioritising text. The platform’s identity — and its advantage over YouTube and TikTok — is still the direct subscriber relationship and the economics of paid subscriptions. A newsletter with 3,000 paid subscribers at $10 a month generates $360,000 a year (before Substack’s 10% platform fee). That model does not require video. It requires writing that people value enough to pay for.
But the platform is changing what it surfaces and recommends, and video appears to have an advantage in discoverability — particularly through the Notes feed and the TV app’s recommendation system. Substack clips distributed to YouTube Shorts are generating free subscription conversions at scale. For writers who have been relying on the platform’s organic discovery to grow, the question of whether text alone continues to be as discoverable as it once was is a real one.
The writers who will navigate this shift most successfully are not necessarily the ones who adopt video, but the ones who understand what they’re actually selling. If readers pay for your thinking, your voice, and the relationship — video can extend that. If they’re paying for the format, that’s a more precarious position.
The opportunity most text writers are missing
The most practical implication of Substack’s video push is one that requires no camera at all: the clip-to-subscription pipeline. Substack’s auto-clipping system turns livestreams and recorded videos into short-form clips optimised for external distribution. Those clips drive free subscriptions, which can then be converted to paid. For writers who are already comfortable with audio — many of whom record podcasts or have experimented with voice notes — the step to talking-head video is not large, and the distribution upside is now built directly into the platform.
There is also a subtler shift worth tracking. The writers currently growing fastest on Substack are not necessarily the best writers — they are the ones building the most legible public presence across formats. Video accelerates that legibility. It compresses the trust-building that text does slowly into something audiences can assess within minutes. A reader who watches three minutes of you thinking out loud about something you care about is further down the relationship curve than a reader who has read three of your posts.
None of this means text is dying on Substack. It means text is no longer the only format the platform is optimised to amplify. Writers who treat that as a threat will be slower to adapt than writers who treat it as a tool — another surface, another way to reach the same people they’ve always been trying to reach.
