Substack Names Its Top Earners. The Rest of the Distribution Is Quieter.

What Substack Has Said, on the Record

Substack launched in 2017 and has, over time, made selective disclosures about creator earnings — always at the top of the distribution. In 2023, the company announced that its top ten publications collectively earned more than $25 million annually, a figure cited in its own press materials. The platform has also named individual milestones: political newsletter The Dispatch and finance publication Chartr have been publicly discussed in Substack's promotional context, and the company has pointed to the milestone of more than a million paid subscriptions on its network as evidence of creator viability.

Substack's pitch to writers rests partly on its fee structure: the platform takes a flat 10% of subscription revenue, leaving 90% to the publication owner, minus Stripe's payment-processing fee of roughly 2.9% plus thirty cents per transaction. The arithmetic is straightforward. What is less clear from public disclosures is how many publications generate enough revenue for those percentage points to matter.

Where the Public Record Stops

Substack has not, as of mid-2025, published a median monthly revenue figure for active paid publications, a distribution table showing what the fifth through fiftieth percentiles earn, or a count of how many publications have zero paying subscribers versus the headline cohort. This is a meaningful gap. The top-ten-publications figure tells a reader what is possible at the extreme right of the distribution. It says nothing about what is typical.

The pattern is not unique to Substack. Creator-economy surveys commissioned by Adobe and Linktree have drawn scrutiny precisely because their published averages are pulled upward by a small number of high-earning accounts, making the resulting figures unreliable guides to what a new entrant should expect. Substack's selective disclosure works by a different mechanism — the platform publishes totals and maximums, not distributions — but the informational effect is similar: a reader learns what the ceiling looks like without learning where the floor is or how many people are standing near it.

The Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking has consistently found that a majority of adults who report earning income through online platforms earn relatively modest sums from those activities — figures that complicate the narrative of widespread creator-economy prosperity. Substack's publications are a distinct category from gig-platform work, but the distributional dynamics that the Fed survey captures apply broadly.

What the Absence of Data Does and Doesn't Mean

The absence of a published median is not, in itself, evidence that median earnings are low — though it is consistent with that possibility. Platforms across the creator economy have declined to publish lower-percentile figures. Twitch's disclosed revenue-share data, for example, has focused on the structure of its splits rather than on what mid-tier streamers actually take home. The FTC's Business Opportunity Rule requires sellers of business opportunities to disclose earnings data in a standardised format before any money changes hands — a requirement that is triggered when a seller makes earnings claims to prospective buyers — but that rule applies to defined business opportunity sellers, and Substack operates as a publishing platform, placing it outside that regulatory perimeter.

Substack has made one structural argument in lieu of distributional data: that writers who build a paid audience own that audience, meaning subscriber email lists are portable if a writer leaves the platform. This is a meaningful distinction from some other creator platforms, where follower relationships are mediated entirely by the platform's algorithm. Whether it translates into higher earnings for mid-tier writers is not something the public record answers.

What the record shows is a platform that has been transparent about its fee structure, outspoken about its highest-earning publications, and quiet about everything below them. That combination — a clear take rate, a celebrated ceiling, and an unpublished floor — is a fair description of how Substack's public disclosures currently stand.