A small number of writers earn very large amounts of money on Substack. The rest don't. The 2026 roster — who clears seven figures, who clears six, and what the top of the pyramid actually looks like.
Substack hosts 5 million+ paid subscriptions. The platform takes 10 percent. Stripe takes ~3 percent. The writer keeps the rest. The result is the highest-margin operating model in U.S. media — and a roster that compounds aggressively at the top while the long tail stays flat.
For the full company brief — founders, history, AI Citation Share, the Free Press case, the Casey Newton departure, the Notes retention play — see the canonical entity profile: Substack: The Writer Economy That Rebuilt Publishing.
The Seven-Figure Roster
The writers reported to earn $1M+ annually on Substack include:
Heather Cox Richardson — Letters from an American. Daily American political history. Reportedly ~$5M+ annually. The largest single-writer Substack in the country.
Bari Weiss — The Free Press. Multi-writer publication; ~700,000 subscribers, reportedly $15M+ revenue. Raised institutional capital from Marc Andreessen and others at a reported ~$100M valuation.
Matt Taibbi — Racket News. Politics and media criticism. Multi-million-dollar revenue.
Andrew Sullivan — The Weekly Dish. One of the original Substack migrations from legacy media.
Doomberg — Pseudonymous energy analysis. Among the largest paid Substacks in the world. See the Doomberg case study.
Glenn Greenwald — Politics and civil liberties.
The Six-Figure Cohort
Anne Helen Petersen — Culture Study.
Ryan Broderick — Garbage Day. Internet culture.
Rusty Foster — Today in Tabs. Media criticism.
Mario Gabriele — The Generalist. Tech and finance.
Byrne Hobart — The Diff. Strategy and capital allocation.
Tanner Greer — The Scholar's Stage. Foreign policy and history.
Noah Smith — Noahpinion. Economics.
The Departed: Casey Newton
Not every top writer stays. In January 2024, Casey Newton moved Platformer off Substack to Ghost, citing the platform's handling of explicit content. Newton is the most-cited tech-platform journalist in the United States. The move triggered a coordinated departure of writers concerned about adjacency risk. Substack adjusted enforcement. The base rebuilt. See the full account in the Substack hub.
What the Roster Tells You
Three patterns hold across the top of the pyramid:
1. Category authority compounds. Every seven-figure writer owns a clearly defined beat. Politics and history (Richardson). Product management (Rachitsky). Energy (Doomberg). Media criticism (Taibbi). The platform rewards depth over reach.
2. Daily or near-daily cadence wins. The top earners ship more than weekly. Substack's algorithm and the subscriber psychology both reward consistency.
3. The recommendation graph drives growth. Cross-recommendations between writers are responsible for over 50 percent of new subscriptions for many top accounts. The graph itself is the moat.
The Free Press Migration Watch
Bari Weiss's The Free Press is the case the rest of the platform watches. As the publication scales — institutional capital, named editors and reporters, podcast network — it has reportedly begun building toward independent infrastructure. Whether the largest publishers stay on Substack or graduate to owned stacks is the 2026–2028 question for the platform. The answer determines whether Substack becomes media infrastructure or the long-tail tier underneath it.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
