In April 2026, The Ankler, Janice Min’s Hollywood-trade newsletter turned 18-person media company, moved its core operation off Substack and onto Passport, a paywall platform run by Automattic and media analyst Ben Thompson. At the time of the move, The Ankler had roughly 150,000 paid subscribers, about $10 million in annual revenue, and 13% year-on-year subscriber growth, publishing 15 newsletters plus podcasts, video, and live events.
Min’s explanation was blunt: “Substack is an incredible launchpad, but we reached a point where it wasn’t built for what we were becoming.”
That is a specific, checkable complaint, and it is not the same complaint as “the rules keep changing under me.”
What actually left, and what didn’t
The Ankler’s departure wasn’t a clean break. The outlet said it would keep a weekly newsletter and live video presence on Substack even after moving its primary infrastructure to Passport — a hedge, not a divorce. That distinction matters, because the same caution applies to the other names attached to this story.
The Bulwark, Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, and Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me have been reported as privately frustrated with Substack and quietly exploring alternatives, but none has announced a move.
Treating all four as already gone overstates what’s actually happened; only one has.
Why the math changes as a newsletter becomes a media company
Substack takes a 10% cut of subscription revenue. On a solo newsletter earning $50,000 a year, that’s a rounding error. On an operation earning eight figures with a payroll to cover, it becomes real money fast: media reporter Oliver Darcy, writing in his Status newsletter and relayed by The Wrap, estimated the cut runs to “hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not north of a million each year” for top-tier outlets. Ten percent of The Ankler’s roughly $10 million in revenue lands right in that range. What’s driving the frustration is that a percentage that made sense when the business was one person and an email list stops making sense once the business has 18 salaries to fund.
What Substack is actually offering in return
Substack’s counter is that the fee buys distribution as well as infrastructure: the company says its discovery and recommendation tools drive roughly 30% of new paid subscriptions for creators on the platform. That’s a real number worth taking at face value. The publishers pushing back aren’t disputing it so much as arguing they’ve outgrown its value relative to its cost — they want customization, product control, and a design system that doesn’t make a seven-figure media brand feel like one of, as reporting has put it, the platform’s “sub-brands within its own ecosystem.”
The difference between this and a rules problem
It’s tempting to file this next to YouTube’s monetization-bar increase as another case of platform-dependent creators getting burned by rules changing underneath them. The reporting doesn’t support that comparison. Nothing here describes Substack changing its fee, its recommendation algorithm, or its terms unannounced. What’s described is a handful of publishers outgrowing a fee structure and a design ceiling that were built for a smaller kind of business than the ones they’ve become. That distinction — outgrowing a fee structure versus getting blindsided by one — is what determines whether your own platform risk looks like The Ankler’s or looks like YouTube’s.
Who this actually applies to
For the overwhelming majority of people writing on Substack, this fee fight changes nothing. A newsletter earning $50,000 or $200,000 a year is nowhere near the point where a 10% fee competes with payroll, and the platform’s discovery tools are still doing exactly the job they were built for at that scale. This is a top-of-the-market story about four publications that grew past being newsletters, not a warning sign for the thousands of writers who haven’t.
Ten percent of $10 million is roughly $1 million a year, the size of the line item that turned a platform fee from a rounding error into a decision. The Ankler is the only one of the four so far to act on it.
What this means for anyone building past a one-person operation
The lesson generalizes past media trades and Hollywood newsletters. Any blogger, YouTuber, or newsletter writer who starts as a one-person operation eventually faces the same fork The Ankler did: the platform fee, ad-network cut, or marketplace commission that was invisible at $50,000 a year becomes a line item worth renegotiating once there’s a staff to pay. The math here isn’t really about fairness — a 10% subscription cut, a 30% app-store fee, and a marketplace’s take rate are all defensible prices for the discovery and infrastructure they provide at small scale. What changes is leverage: a platform’s audience-finding tools matter less to someone who already has 150,000 people showing up directly, and that person can afford to pay more to own the relationship outright instead. The useful test isn’t “is this fee too high,” it’s “would I still need this platform’s discovery tools if my audience doubled” — and for most writers, the honest answer is yes, for a long time yet.
