The Bulwark and Zeteo Might Leave Substack?!

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Some big news actually came out of the Substack world. The Ankler, which is a Hollywood trade publication run by Janice Min and Richard Rushfield, the two of them announced publicly that they are departing the Substack newsletter platform, going to this new one um with Ben Thompson, a tech journalist.

[00:00:20]Um but that raised a lot of questions about what is going on at Substack, why a publisher like themselves would depart. They have over 100,000 subscribers, I believe was one of the numbers that was thrown around out there. Um but we learned this week that The Ankler is not the only major publisher on the platform that's thinking about also its future there, whether it should still be on Substack, whether it makes sense for their business and maybe should depart. Um we exclusively reported that The Bulwark, Mehdi Hasan's Zeteo, Emily Sundberg's Feed Me, wow, uh among others, Heather Cox Richardson expressed some frustration about the platform, and others are all sort of thinking about their futures there.

[00:01:05]Should we be here? Does this even make sense for us anymore? What What's going on? Why do you Why are you Why are we seeing this I mean, literally, these are the top four out of five biggest news publishers on the platform. Why are they looking at the exits? Well, John, just to be full full disclosure here before we even start, Status is published on Substack's, I guess you could call it a rival platform. We use uh Beehiiv's technology to power Status and on on the web and our email. So, just putting that disclosure out there, I think a lot of Substackers, prominent Substackers, are not super thrilled with the platform these days. Uh if you are a major publisher, let's say you are The Bulwark, okay? And you are bringing in well into this, you know, seven figures in revenue every single year. So, millions and millions of dollars. You owe Substack at the end of the day 10% of that revenue. That is a significant slice of the revenue that you're bringing in that you are just handing over to Substack. I mean, that's a huge tax on any small business. 10% of your revenue just disappears. And that is going to Substack. That's that how much they charge to allow you to use your their platform. And so, I think that would be fine with a lot of publishers if they felt like they were getting um the value of that back at them. But, there haven't really been, I think, a lot of technological updates that these publishers are looking for uh in the last couple of years. I mean, honestly, the platform looks basically the same today, for the most part, as it did a couple years ago. A lot of these publishers, they want enterprise features. They want custom websites, right? They want to build features specifically that cater to their audiences. They want to control the experience. So, when you go to the Bulwark or Zeteo, you can, you know, have a different experience than when you go to another website. It's pretty common features. I mean, one of the reasons we're publishing on Beehiiv is we want Status to have its own unique look and feel.

[00:03:03]Um and they're not getting it from Substack. And they're still paying, you know, if you make $10 million a year, let's say you're the Bulwark and you're making, I assume, at least $10 million a year. That's $1 million in revenue you're giving every single year to Substack, and you don't feel like you're even getting a custom website for that.

[00:03:18]I think that would lead to some natural frustrations. And so, a lot of these major publishers, they are quietly exploring or have quietly explored, would it make more sense for us to just leave and build our own website? If we're spending a million dollars a year on Substack technology, certainly, you could probably spend a million dollars a year or less building your own custom website and having your own tech stack, right? Are there Is there Is should they go to Beehiiv, right? Which doesn't take a 10% cut, which charges a monthly fee depending on how big you are, how many emails you're sending. You know, it's very strange I will say that Substack doesn't have an enterprise plan. Most companies, like web companies like this, you know, depending on your scale, you get charged more money for the features or for the services. In In Substack's case, you get charged 10% whether you are, you know, a um small legal blogger in let's say the middle of the country or whether you are one of the biggest publishers on Substack, there's no difference in the pricing, which is a little strange. So, anyway, I think I think it's not going to happen tomorrow. It's not like the Bulwark and the Dispatch are leaving tomorrow, but I do wonder in 5 years, in 10 years, are these major publishers going to still be happy on Substack? Are they still going to be on Substack? Or are they basically maturing past the point where Substack can actually offer them the services that they need to take their business to the next level. And if they leave, that's a huge problem for Substack because these are the biggest publishers on the platform. And I assume they're the biggest revenue drivers, but also they are the ones recommending other newsletters. So, it's part of the recommendation algorithm. If you lose your biggest players in the recommendation algorithm, that's a big problem. And so, I'm curious how Substack's going to address this all.

[00:05:05]Yeah, I mean, you bring up a really good point with the the the algorithm in recommending others. This that feels like it has been the biggest feature for independent media outlets to join Substack in the first place. It's really tough to get noticed out there in the wilderness, and so many journalists and reporters and media figures who have left other platforms and starting their own ventures can go to a platform like Substack and immediately get plugged in with others and find a big audience and be able to engage it like you would a social network. And it is been built recently like a social network. Substack has put a ton of cash into their app as a magnet to where you as the end user go to that. You launch the Substack app, and there you find Sunberg, you find The Bulwark, you find Heather Cox Richardson. It's all right there. It's kind of like instead of having the X app on your phone, you now have the Substack app, and it's a gateway into all these these platforms and or sorry, these publishers.

[00:06:04]But I I agree, it raises the question of if you're paying Substack as your web provider um thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, um it does feel like you're not getting what you as an individual outlet need versus what they want. Janice Min said, she's the CEO of The Ankler, she said in a statement to us this week, "As we grew into a bigger, broader media business, we needed more flexibility and control across products, revenue, and audience relationships than the platform allows."

[00:06:40]And I think she really nails it on the head there, which is that they I think big publishers on these outlets or sorry, on these platforms, they're sort of misaligned in what it is that they need versus what Substack needs. And I think Substack, which has built out a really tremendous uh network and podcasting, video elements that you can gatekeep. So, like our show right now that you might be watching on YouTube, we might be able to pay wallet on Substack, you wouldn't be able to watch it.

[00:07:08]Um they've built in a lot of these features that are pretty cool for, let's say, a smaller uh group of folks with a smaller following than The Bulwark, which I just looked has 999,000 subscribers. That's a massive publication. Or Ziteo that has over 650,000 subs. These are full-blown media businesses, and it's hard to imagine that they're getting the specific catering uh and and individuality that they desperately need. They don't want to be associated with worse Substackers.

[00:07:40]That's right. That minimizes your business. Like this is a these are legitimate seven, eight-figure businesses now that uh in recurring revenue that you can't imagine they want to go around and tell people, "Oh yeah, we're on Substack." How are you going to drive like an advertising business? You want to be able to say, "We have an independent growing media outlet that competes with the likes of MS now in the world in in this brave new world." That competes against the Megyn Kelly's and the Ben Shapiro's in this space. The uh on the leading edge. And and I I I suspect that we're going to see actually more of these outlets uh depart. I would be surprised if they're all on the Substack platform in a few years, unless Substack really rolls out some serious enterprise-grade features and caters to their big publishers. Now, Substack, for what it's worth, they gave me a statement and they said that, you know, quote, "Many publishers continue to benefit meaningfully from the broader Substack ecosystem."

[00:08:39]Uh and it goes on to say that they find their network currently drives 30% of new paid subscriptions across the platform. Uh for many publications, the distribution and subscriber acquisition value meaningfully offsets the platform's fee over time. Of course, what they don't say in there is that if you weren't paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars, these guys could run their own paid marketing campaigns on Google, YouTube, uh Instagram, you know, name it, LinkedIn. It's not like there are shortages of bigger platforms than Substack where you could take a lot of marketing dollars. If you're pay If you're paying Substack a million dollars a year, you could take half of that, $500,000, let's say, and run a massive campaign on YouTube or on on Meta. That would also drive growth. And so if again, if you are a big publisher, it's I don't know.

[00:09:29]I mean, I think you might actually get a lot more value probably out of a campaign on Meta where you can really advertise your company, target the audience to people who are like-minded against different, you know, who have similar interests, and you could probably actually find it might be more fruitful to do that than giving away Substack $500,000 to randomly recommend your newsletter to others. So, anyway, I think that there are some issues there. I'm curious whether Substack, which just got this big $100 million investment from led by Chernin and Bond, whether they are going to figure out how to keep their big publishers happy. I think the Anker leaving was a big warning sign for them, and they have a couple ways they can respond. They can just say that this is a great deal for people and ignore the feedback they're actually getting from publishers, or they can say, "We have an issue here.

[00:10:21]We need to make sure that these guys are happy. We need to get them those enterprise-grade features, and we'll see what happens." Thank you for watching Power Lines. For more analysis and insight, subscribe to our YouTube channel down below, like this video, and you can watch more of us right over here.