Why My Substack Stays Free

Nobody would pay for it; and other reasons.

Clark Boyd
8 min readDec 2, 2021

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I received some self-congratulatory emails from Substack recently about the milestones they have hit.

Apparently, more than 500,000 people pay for at least one Substack subscription each month. Paying subscribers now make up 5–10% of total Substack readers.

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Clark Boyd

Tech/business writer, CEO (Novela), lecturer (Columbia), and data analyst. >500k views on Medium. I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was.