A look at Substack in the wake of the pandemic's “rocket ship growth”, given fresh competition from WordPress, Beehiiv, and Ghost, the Twitter feud, and more
Joe Pompeo / Vanity Fair : Twitter: @vanityfair and @joepompeo See also Mediagazer Twitter: @vanityfair : Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie says the Substack network is “coming out of defensive mode” these days. “The numbers are still growing,” he tells @joepompeo. https://vntyfr.com/l7T1GAx Joe Pompeo / @joepompeo : Fun little tidbit in this column: Substack believes Twitter is still trying to screw with its accessibility by imposing a four-and-a-half-second delay on links to Substack posts. https://www.vanityfair.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after Chris Best described pandemic-era growth of 60% revenue and doubled readership in a Q&A on the lockdown boom, Substack's arc has bent: talks to raise $75M-$100M at a $750M-$1B valuation ended with the company quietly dropping the fundraise last year, with 2021 revenue reported around $9M.
Since then the ground has shifted twice — Twitter started marking Substack links as potentially spammy in April, drawing a public rebuke from the founders, and WordPress, Beehiiv, and Ghost are now pitching writers directly. Cofounder Hamish McKenzie's claim that the network is "coming out of defensive mode" lands against all three fronts at once.
First-order effects
- Writers choosing a newsletter home for the first time no longer face a default option: Beehiiv, Ghost, and WordPress offer credible alternatives, forcing Substack to justify its cut through its recommendation network rather than inertia.
Second-order effects
- The alleged four-and-a-half-second delay on Substack links gives rival platforms a concrete talking point — platform risk on rented social distribution strengthens the case for moving lists to tools where writers own the subscriber relationship outright.
Third-order effects
- If competition plus platform hostility holds, the newsletter market consolidates into two camps — networked platforms like Substack versus self-hosting stacks — with the sovereign-writer thesis framed by Stratechery in 2021 tested by which model actually retains top earners.
The trend: Newsletter publishing is splitting between rented-network convenience and writer-owned infrastructure, with social-platform interference accelerating the shift.