At a creator event at Substack’s New York headquarters in October 2025, the company shared a number that should have changed how every independent publisher thinks about the platform. In the preceding three months, Substack had added 32 million new free subscriptions and nearly 500,000 new paid subscriptions. The majority of that growth was driven by Notes and the app itself — at least according to Substack’s own characterisation of the data at a creator event. The figure is company-reported and has not been independently verified.
People were finding new writers inside Substack. The platform had, quietly and deliberately, become its own discovery engine.
That shift has significant implications for bloggers. But the strategy most of them are using on Substack — publish a post once a week, send it to their list, repeat — was designed for a version of the platform that no longer exists.
What actually changed
Substack launched in 2017 as a straightforward tool: write posts, build an email list, charge subscribers. For years, that was essentially what it was. The platform was, as Sinem Günel and Philip Hofmacher at Write • Build • Scale note, “basically a simple email service provider.”
Today it is substantially more than that. Substack now offers Notes (a short-form social feed), native podcasting, live video streaming, a built-in recording studio for pre-recorded video conversations, cross-publication collaborations, private subscriber chats, and a mobile app with its own algorithmic feed. In March 2026, Substack launched the Recording Studio — a free built-in tool that lets creators record video conversations and automatically generates clips and thumbnails, requiring no external software.
The most visible signal of where the platform is heading is structural. Open the Substack mobile app and navigate to any writer’s profile. The first tab visible is no longer their archive of posts. It’s their Notes feed — their short-form social activity. The long-form essays and newsletters are now in second position.
As Write • Build • Scale observes, this is not a minor design tweak. Platforms don’t restructure their core profile layout arbitrarily. It’s a deliberate signal about what the platform considers most important for discovery.
The data from the October 2025 creator event reinforces that signal. One creator reportedly earned $4,546 from a single Note. A fashion creator attributed 30% of her subscriber growth to consistent Notes activity.
Substack also shared — citing its own internal data — that creators who used audio or video in the preceding 90 days grew their audiences 50% faster than those who didn’t. The figure comes from the platform itself, which has a clear incentive to promote multimedia adoption.
A social platform with better incentives — but still a social platform
What makes this shift genuinely interesting — and genuinely uncomfortable for some bloggers — is how Substack describes its own algorithm. At the creator event, the company’s Head of ML and AI explained that the platform optimises for “subscriptions and payments,” not scroll time or ad impressions. This positions Substack as structurally different from Instagram or Twitter, where the incentive is to maximise attention and therefore advertising revenue.
The alignment between creator success and platform success is real: Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue, so it is financially motivated to surface creators who convert readers to paying subscribers. When a creator earns more, the platform earns more. That incentive structure is meaningfully better than ad-driven platforms.
But as Andi Bitay observes in The Great Substack Shift, the honest description is still: “an algorithm that optimises for subscriptions is still an algorithm.” It still determines what gets seen. It still rewards certain behaviours over others. It still requires creators to engage consistently if they want to be discovered. Notes is now, according to Bitay — who cites platform data — the dominant growth engine on the platform, outperforming even the Recommendations feature, with over one million posts reportedly discovered through the app daily.
“Substack is building a social platform with better incentives than Instagram or Twitter,” Bitay writes. “That’s genuinely valuable… But it IS a social platform now. The ‘just a newsletter tool for writers’ era is over.”
What this means for bloggers who use Substack as a distribution channel
For bloggers who have treated Substack primarily as a way to deliver their writing to an existing audience — essentially a more polished version of Mailchimp — the platform’s evolution creates a decision point.
The publish-and-wait strategy still works, in a narrow sense: your subscribers will still receive your posts by email. But it no longer competes for new reader discovery. The writers who are growing on Substack in 2026 are the ones who understand that growth now happens through the app and Notes feed, not through search or passive discovery.
Write • Build • Scale’s experience illustrates this. The publication reports hitting 100 paid subscribers within 60 days of launching and crossing 1,000 paid subscribers within 18 months — reaching what Substack designates as “Bestseller” status. These figures are self-reported by the publication. Their growth charts show clear step-change increases that correlate directly with specific campaigns and Notes activity, not with consistent long-form publishing alone.
The practical implication for bloggers considering Substack as a platform for building a new audience — rather than just migrating an existing one — is that the required skill set now includes short-form social content. Daily or near-daily Notes. Thoughtful engagement with other creators’ content. Familiarity with Substack’s recommendation and collaboration features. Potentially video.
For bloggers who find that appealing, the opportunity is real. For those who came to Substack specifically to escape that kind of presence requirement, the platform is moving in an uncomfortable direction.
The structural tension worth understanding
The creators who are thriving on the new Substack are those who treat it as a relationship-building platform with a newsletter component — not as a newsletter platform with a social feature bolted on. That framing changes the whole approach. It means showing up in Notes not just to promote long-form pieces but to have genuine exchanges, share real-time thinking, and engage with readers as people rather than as subscribers.
It also means being honest about what Substack isn’t. It is not a replacement for owning your audience through a self-hosted site and directly managed email list. Substack is more portable than most social platforms — you can export your subscriber list — but the platform still controls the infrastructure, the algorithm, and the terms of the relationship. As with every platform discussed in these pages, the bloggers with the most durable positions will be those who use Substack as one channel within a broader owned-audience strategy, not as its foundation.
Where the platform is likely going
The trajectory from the available evidence points in a few clear directions. Video will become increasingly central: the Recording Studio launch in March 2026 and the 50% faster audience growth among audio/video creators suggest Substack is actively incentivising multimedia content. Brand partnerships are beginning to appear in the ecosystem, and as the platform scales, the formalisation of those partnerships — with the attendant questions about disclosure and editorial independence — will become more prominent.
The creator event data also signals that Substack is in what Bitay calls its “democratisation phase” — the moment when a platform transitions from being used primarily by already-established names to actively showcasing that ordinary creators can build real income. One creator reportedly earned $4,546 from a single Note — a figure Substack chose to highlight, with no context provided on the creator’s existing subscriber count, pricing tier, or what made that particular Note perform unusually well.
Whether most will is a separate question, and an honest answer requires the same clarity the platform’s growth numbers warrant. Substack’s own economics — a 10% revenue cut plus Stripe’s payment fees — mean that meaningful creator income requires meaningful subscriber revenue, which requires meaningful audience trust, which requires sustained high-quality work over months or years. The platform’s model is better aligned with creator success than ad-based alternatives, but it is not structurally easier to earn from than any other creative business.
The practical question for bloggers
For bloggers who currently use Substack as a newsletter delivery tool and nothing more, the honest assessment is this: that approach will continue to serve your existing subscribers but will not build your audience. The platform’s discovery mechanisms are now native and social. External traffic from Google and social media was never Substack’s growth engine, and it is less relevant now than it was a year ago.
If building a new audience on Substack is part of your strategy, engaging with Notes — consistently, genuinely, in a voice that reflects your actual thinking rather than just promoting your long-form content — is now closer to a requirement than a nice-to-have. The profile UI change alone makes this clear: anyone landing on your publication page will see your Notes activity before they see your archive.
If you are using Substack purely as a delivery mechanism for content you’re building elsewhere, and your primary growth channels are your own domain, SEO, and an independent email list, the platform’s social evolution is less immediately relevant. You can continue to use it for what it does well — clean reading experience, reliable email delivery, easy subscription management — without needing to engage with the Notes ecosystem.
What isn’t viable, for bloggers serious about audience growth, is the middle position: treating Substack as a social-era platform while using a pre-social-era strategy. The 32 million subscriptions generated inside the app in three months are going to writers who understand what the platform has become. Waiting for that growth to arrive through passive publishing is, as Write • Build • Scale puts it, “leaving your growth up to chance.”
Substack is no longer the quiet corner of the internet for writers who wanted to escape the algorithm. It built one of its own. The bloggers who understand that — and decide consciously how to respond — are the ones positioned to benefit from what comes next.
