Substack “Best in Class” Information, Scenarios & Dynamic Scenario Projection Model Generation Data for 2025Q3 (2/2)

Now, take your plans developed in Part 1 and generate a Dynamic Scenario Projection Model to play around with & identify their sensitivities. Set your 2026 benchmarks!

Special acknowledgement again: Remember, kudos and MANY thanks to Jeremy Camilloni who has no clue that he randomly spurred me quite a few hours ago now to research and write this analysis. On his Substack channel, Jeremy writes about building the fastest, smartest, and easiest way to explore AI. He’s not just listing AI tools, he is redefining how the world discovers them. Go give whatisthat.ai a look and then become a PAID SUBSCRIBER to it posthaste!

Now, let’s dive into numbers, bar charts, and scenarios . . .

Part 1 gave you many options, parts, and pivoting potentialities. You need to take your initial plans from that and generate a Dynamic Scenario Projection Model to play around with & identify your plans’ sensitivities. You have to set your 2026 benchmarks like ordinary course businesses do. YOUR Substack is YOUR business already or soon will be!

“Best in Class” / Top 1% on Substack Data

Based on available data and recent 2025 analyses, here’s what’s known and can be reasonably inferred about the number of active, paywalled Substack channels with more than 50 or 100 paid subscribers:

• Substack supports over 5 million paid subscriptions across the platform as of early 2025.

• Analysis of Substack’s leaderboard and API indicates that newsletters with over 100 paid subscribers are categorized as having “hundreds” of paid subs. Those with more than 1,000 appear in the “thousands” tier. We’ve all seen the various types and colors of marks used to indicate those achievement levels.

• Out of tens of thousands of active newsletters, only a relatively small fraction have crossed those paid subscriber thresholds. A recent independent analysis looked at 75,000 Substack channels and found that, while most have only a handful of paid subscribers, there are "thousands" that now have over 100 paid subscribers. (Even my The Second Bill of Rights Substack channel with its two paid subscribers (as of right now) garnered in the past 17 days since its paywall first went up are counted in the full Substack “paid subscriber” denominator.)

• Peer and writer-led analyses estimate that about 2–3% of active, paywalled channels on Substack exceed 100 paid subscribers, meaning the likely figure is somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 active newsletters above that threshold, given ~75,000+ active newsletters with a paid option.

• For the 50+ paid threshold, the number is of course higher: likely several thousand channels (estimated in the 4,000–6,000 range platform-wide), but these are still a minority compared to the total paying-enabled newsletters.

• The majority of Substack newsletters have fewer than 50 paid subscribers.

• Estimates about “paid channels as a percent of all Substack newsletters ever created” are very misleading, since most on the platform are abandoned, never published, or purely free.

In summary:

• Current best estimates: 2,000–3,000 Substack newsletters have more than 100 paid subscribers, and 4,000–6,000+ newsletters have more than 50 paid subscribers.

These figures are grounded in recent data studies, Substack’s own “tiers,” and a variety of independent analyses from 2024–2025.

Want a Bar Chart of All This Data?

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This Part 2 of the report, beyond its paywall, contains a further 1,650 words of bar charts, analyses, scenarios, and the precursor data you can use to generate your own dynamic scenario projection model like all ordinary course businesses have to have.