Category: In the News

Despite previously stating it’s an ad-free zone, Substack — like many other platforms before it — is no longer ruling out advertising.

“For us, advertising is an interesting business,” Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s co-founder and chief writing officer, told Digiday. “Maybe some way off in the distant future.”

Call it a reality check — a realization that growing a platform is an expensive business, even one that takes a 10% cut of the money subscribers pay their favorite writers. There’s only so much growth that can come from reader revenue. Whereas ads, when done right, promise scale, margins and the kind of financial upside that’s hard to ignore for long.

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It’s been a tough three months for publishers, according to executives who spoke during a closed-door town hall session at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, last week.

“Not a great quarter. Traffic’s down. Advertisers are very timid in spending. They’re in a wait-and-see mode. So this is definitely the downslope. We expect it to come back, but definitely not a great quarter,” said one publishing exec.

Q1 is typically a slow quarter for ad revenue, as post-holiday spending slows and new ad budgets get reset. But the exec said the downturn they’re experiencing now contrasts with the same period in 2024, which was their company’s “best quarter … ever.”

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