🔎 Which Substack Publications Make the Most Money (And What's Driving Their Revenue)

An analysis of the 33 highest-earning Substack publications

This article is part of a series on Substack. Subscribe to access the full series.

---

Welcome back to Really Good Business Ideas. We’re spending several weeks exploring Substack as a business opportunity.

So far, we’ve looked at the most expensive publications and the most popular publications. This week, we’ll dive into the publications that earn the most revenue and see if any of them overlap with the other two lists.

Today’s list includes 33 publications whose minimum annual subscriptions revenue is at least $500K USD.

This charts is using a log scale to improve readability.

New Metric: Subscriber Value

Before we dig into the key insights this week, I want to introduce a new metric that may not be familiar to everyone here: subscriber value.

Subscriber value (SV) refers to the average amount of annual revenue that each email subscriber contributes. It’s calculated by taking your annual revenue, and dividing it by your total subscribers (paid and free). So, for example, if you had an annual revenue of $100,000 and 50,000 subscribers, you would calculate your SV as $100,000/50,000 = $2.

Subscriber value is a really useful metric for understanding how efficiently a newsletter monetizes its subscribers, as well as for comparing different newsletters. Another name for this metric is revenue per subscriber.

Key Insights

Alright, let’s get into the key insights. A more detailed look at individual publications follows, and the assumptions and limitations of the analysis are at the end, as always.

🔎 Total subscribers is a bigger revenue driver than subscription cost.

While there are a few outliers, most of the highest-earning publications have low monthly subscription fees. In fact, nearly half only charge the minimum $5 required by Substack and the median price across the group is only $6.

This chart is using a log scale to improve readability.

On top of that, almost half of the highest-earning publications also appeared on the most popular publications list because they have 200K subscribers or more.

Finally, the highest-earning publications also have very high numbers of paid subscribers. All have at least thousands of paid subscribers and most have at least tens of thousands.

Recommendation: If you want to make a lot of money with your publication, it’s generally more effective to focus on building a popular publication by keeping prices low than to charge a smaller audience a higher price.

🔎 The highest-earning publications publish frequently with 80% publishing more than once a week.

Just like the most popular publications, which overlap a lot with today’s list, the highest-earning publications also publish often.

Recommendation: Publishing more frequently is a good way to increase your reach, helping you grow a bigger audience that can contribute to your revenue.

🔎 Politics categories are over-represented in the highest-earning publications.

Once again, just like the most popular publications, nearly half of this list is in “Politics” categories. High numbers of subscribers are really paying off when it comes to revenue. As I’ve mentioned before, politics has become very polarized and polarizing content tends to get more traction online compared to more moderate or balanced content.

Recommendation: If you want to create a very popular publication that earns a lot of money, be bold with your point of view. Even if you upset some people, they will still help create awareness. And the people that agree with you will love you even more. By the way, having a strong point of view doesn’t need to negate being thoughtful and fact-based with the information you share.

🔎 The highest earning publications have high subscriber value compared to industry averages.

Until the past few years, most media newsletters did not have monthly subscription fees and revenue was earned through ads and affiliate links. When I started my career, $1 SV was a standard benchmark for estimating a newsletter’s revenue. These days, with a lot more competition in online content, many ad-based newsletters are earning only cents per subscriber. But as you’ll see below, subscription fees enable others to earn several dollars per subscriber—sometimes much more than that.

This chart is using a log scale to improve readability.

Recommendation: High subscriber value is another reason why more people should consider hosting their newsletter on Substack (or another platform that supports subscription fees). With higher subscriber values, it’s much easier to earn a decent income from a smaller audience.

Top 33 Highest Earning Publications Breakdown

Here’s the full list of the highest-earning publications including revenue ranges.