Why Substack — and newsletters — are booming

For a society often mocked for having the attention span of a goldfish, we seem surprisingly drawn to long-form content — thoughtful, deep, and driven by credible authorial voices. In recent years, we’ve witnessed the proliferation of ever-longer podcasts and the rise of creators on platforms like YouTube who produce mini-documentaries, reportage, and investigations across every imaginable topic.

Yet if there’s a medium that best embodies this “return of attention” — symbolically as well as practically — it’s the newsletter. Their rise isn’t new: since at least 2015, analysts have discussed the ascent and potential of this intimate digital format, which uses the inbox as a refuge from the chaos of the online world.

The real explosion came during the pandemic. Not only because we were spending more time online in general, but because newsletters emerged as the best way to access filtered, trustworthy, and non-sensationalist information. And unlike other lockdown-era trends that disappeared as quickly as they arrived (remember Clubhouse or virtual “Skype happy hours”?), newsletters kept growing.

The most well-known newsletter platform — Substack, launched in 2017 — now counts 50 million subscribers, more than double its audience just two years ago and still accelerating. Despite fears of saturation, we may in fact be entering the “early majority” phase: expansion is less frantic, projects are more structured, but peak adoption is still ahead.

Is it really a paradox that a society overwhelmed by two decades of social media, compulsive scrolling, fleeting news bites, misinformation, and a rising tide of AI-generated slop — low-quality, low-effort content — is increasingly embracing a medium that represents the exact opposite? Or is it less a paradox than an inevitable reaction against the technology that tried to hack our brains — training us to crave dopamine hits, feeding dissatisfaction, and fueling levels of toxicity, polarization, and conflict that have long passed the point of no return?

Data suggests social media fatigue is no longer anecdotal but measurable. After years of uninterrupted growth, average daily time spent on social media worldwide has begun to fall: from a record 151 minutes per day in 2022, down to 143 in 2023, and dropping again to 141 in 2024. It’s the first multi-year reversal ever recorded — hard proof that something fundamental is shifting.

At the same time, user numbers and engagement are also declining. The reaction of major platforms — aggressively pushing “engaging” posts, often AI-generated, the aforementioned slop — risks becoming a cure worse than the disease, accelerating burnout and driving audiences away.

This doesn’t mean social media is dead. Their scale — in users, minutes consumed, and revenue — still dwarfs newsletters and podcasts. But the rope, stretched as far as it can go to squeeze more profit from declining loyalty, is beginning to fray. Sure, social feeds remain a primary news source — but only a third of U.S. users (and even fewer in Europe) say they trust what they read or watch on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

That erosion — and the extraordinary crisis of trust surrounding social media — is the foundation of the newsletter boom. As philosopher Gloria Origgi wrote in 2018, “We are moving from the information age into the reputation age, in which information will only have value if filtered and commented on by people we trust.”

Drowning in infodemics and navigating a historically turbulent era, we’ve turned to newsletters to escape misinformation and sensationalism — choosing instead authors who filter the noise for us, whom we trust, and to whom we willingly devote our time and attention.

Newsletters also differ from social platforms in one central way: ritual. Social media still occupies enormous portions of our day — but in fragments, consumed in seconds, filling dead space. Instead of staring into the void, we stare at our screens — and the quality of attention barely changes.
Newsletters, by contrast — with their regular cadence and arrival in the calmer landscape of the inbox — create rhythm and ritual.
It’s no coincidence that many land early in the morning or on Fridays for weekend reading: traditionally newspaper time, now reclaimed by slow, intentional reading. Podcasts fill dead time — commutes, workouts, chores — but newsletters demand and reward focused attention.

There’s also the relational component. Subscription to a newsletter is an active choice — the opposite of passive, random exposure on social media. Over time, we build parasocial relationships with the writers we follow: we recognize their tone, their voice, their quirks; we comment on editions, support their side projects, and reserve a corner of our day because we know it’s worth it.

Evidence that this is no passing trend lies in the growing number of alternatives nearly ten years after Substack’s launch: Ghost, Beehiv, Kit, Patreon’s newsletter tools, LinkedIn, plus a wave of legacy outlets and digital-native publications investing heavily in newsletters — from the New York Times to Axios, The Atlantic and beyond.

Another sign: the money. Paid newsletter subscriptions on Substack total five million — ten times the number in 2021 and more than double compared to just two years ago. Substack is now a meaningful income stream for journalists, bloggers, and creators. As of early 2025, dozens of newsletters surpass six-figure annual revenues, and the platform’s top authors collectively earn tens of millions of dollars a year.

Some of the most successful newsletters are even taking on collective forms — like The Every, The Atlantic’s newsletters ecosystem, or emerging collaborations where multiple writers share a single subscription. These so-called “bundles” effectively recreate the oldest mass-media format we know: the newspaper.

And so, with newsletters turning into newspapers and newspapers turning to newsletters, the loop may finally close. It took nearly three decades — and the partial implosion of traditional journalism under the logic of social media — but perhaps the information ecosystem has found a path to thrive in the digital age.

Opening Images:Courtesy Substack