Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie is launching a biweekly column on Lachlan Cartwright's Breaker, a publication hosted on Substack rival beehiiv
Good day to be the CEO of beehiiv. — ∙ Paid — Good morning everyone. Your song of the summer might be Sabrina Carpenter's Manchild or Morgan Wallen's What I Want. See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The move lands in a newsletter market where Substack's post-pandemic growth has been met by competitors including beehiiv, WordPress, and Ghost, as documented in an earlier assessment of Substack's widening competitive field.
Beehiiv's later profile emphasizes a different commercial model—monthly fees rather than Substack's revenue share—making a prominent Substack founder's byline on a beehiiv-hosted publication a visible example of creators' platform flexibility. Beehiiv's subscription-fee approach is part of the competitive backdrop.
First-order effects
- Breaker gains a recurring, high-profile contributor, while Hamish McKenzie extends his publishing presence onto a rival platform without changing his Substack co-founder role.
- Beehiiv gets a credible signal that its hosted publications can attract contributors closely associated with the market leader.
Second-order effects
- The appearance makes platform affiliation less exclusive at the contributor level, raising the value of editorial brands and audience relationships relative to any one newsletter host.
- Substack and beehiiv face added pressure to compete on creator economics and publishing tools, not simply on the prominence of writers using their platforms.
Third-order effects
- If cross-platform participation becomes routine, newsletter infrastructure may increasingly resemble interchangeable back-end services while publication brands retain the primary reader relationship.
- The durable contest is likely to center on how platforms package monetization, support, and distribution for independent publishers rather than on locking individual creators into a single ecosystem.
The trend: Newsletter platforms are shifting from winner-take-all creator destinations toward competing infrastructure providers serving portable publication brands.