Tangent: I was curious about your estimates of the top 1% and top 0.1% figures—so I looked into it. Somewhat also thinking about Erik Hoel’s essay about successful authors being about as rare as billionaires. [link]
Some estimate ~45 Substacks at >$1M/y [link] - that roughly fits with Substack’s reported total subscription revenue at ~$450M/y. (Officially reported at 30 in 2024 [link])
Reasonable to estimate 100-1000 Substacks at >$100k/y
How many “bloggers” exist?
Substack reports 50,000 Substacks w/ at least one paid sub [link]
Very closely supports your 0.1% and 1% estimates TBH!
There are about ~500M wordpress blogs on the Internet (???)
I’m not sure what the right vibe is here: I could buy anything from 50,000 to 5M.
There’s good numbers from Substack: this probably gets a lot weirder off-Substack.
It does seem reasonable to say that “of Substackers that get to their first paid subscription, 1% get to ~$100k/y, and 0.1% get to ~$1M/y”
There might still be some other weirdness here ~ top Substacks often look not that much like blogs.
Tangent: I was curious about your estimates of the top 1% and top 0.1% figures—so I looked into it. Somewhat also thinking about Erik Hoel’s essay about successful authors being about as rare as billionaires. [link]
Some estimate ~45 Substacks at >$1M/y [link] - that roughly fits with Substack’s reported total subscription revenue at ~$450M/y. (Officially reported at 30 in 2024 [link])
Reasonable to estimate 100-1000 Substacks at >$100k/y
How many “bloggers” exist?
Substack reports 50,000 Substacks w/ at least one paid sub [link]
Very closely supports your 0.1% and 1% estimates TBH!
There are about ~500M wordpress blogs on the Internet (???)
I’m not sure what the right vibe is here: I could buy anything from 50,000 to 5M.
There’s good numbers from Substack: this probably gets a lot weirder off-Substack.
It does seem reasonable to say that “of Substackers that get to their first paid subscription, 1% get to ~$100k/y, and 0.1% get to ~$1M/y”
There might still be some other weirdness here ~ top Substacks often look not that much like blogs.