The new features that Substack will offer to its creators starting Wednesday will enable them to publish video podcasts, create interactive AI-generated transcripts and customize shareable clips to cross-post across social platforms. The viewing experience will also change for subscribers, with an expanded video player that places video at the forefront of the post.
Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie said expanding beyond writers was always the plan. “In its early days, Substack was often described as a ‘newsletter tool,’ but that’s a misconception,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the video offerings. “The core idea behind Substack is much bigger. Substack is about creating a media system that’s based on different rules from today’s dominant platforms. It is about starting a movement away from platforms owning people, and toward people owning platforms. That movement began with writing, but it quickly evolved into much more than that.”
McKenzie said that although Substack will be directly competing with video-first platforms like YouTube and TikTok, it won’t fall victim to the same incentive structure that rewards views above all else, because Substack is based on subscription revenue, not advertising dollars.
“This model rewards different types of work than the ad-based, attention economy model supports,” he said. “New and interesting things become possible when a creator is producing work for an audience that already knows them and is supporting them with their money, and when the standard rules of the ad game no longer apply.”
A number of creators plan to launch original shows on the platform as a result of the shift.
Director and actress Amber Tamblyn is introducing a show called “Further Ado,” where she speaks with high-profile guests including actress Blake Lively and author Janet Fitch. Former CNN commentator Chris Cuomo will be launching a show that will provide an “up-close view of politics, global affairs, and American culture.” Recipe developer Caroline Chambers is launching a show, “So Into That,” which will interview people about their obsessions. She said she’s excited to develop a Substack offering where subscribers don’t have to go to a separate app to see her face.
“When the world first started shifting for video I hated it,” Chambers said, “and now I actually find it so much quicker and more fun and engaging to crank out video. So I’m all-in on video.”
Other Substack creators said they viewed the expanded video offerings more as an add-on rather than something that would take precedence over their other content.
“We’re not Logan Paul,” said Henry Abbott, co-founder of TrueHoop, a sports media company on Substack, referencing the famous YouTube star. “We’re just sort of adding an easily consumable version [of content] to people who consume that way.”
Casey Newton, a journalist and founder of Platformer, a technology news website that runs on Substack, said the platform’s embrace of video was inevitable. “Substack’s long-term future will require them to grow their market,” he said. “A few years into their experiment, they’ve captured some significant percentage of all the writers they’re ever going to capture and they’re operating at a time when preferences are shifting toward consuming video.”
Substack launched in 2017 as a newsletter platform aimed at helping independent writers monetize. The company generates revenue by taking a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue generated on the platform. Substack newsletters now have more than 35 million active subscribers collectively, and the top 10 writers on Substack make more than $25 million annually.
After initially introducing video in 2022, Substack introduced chat functionality in November of last year. Substack Chat allows content creators to host their own private group chats with subscribers.. In April, Substack introduced its Twitter competitor, Substack Notes. Notes gained so much traction in its initial days that X CEO Elon Musk banned all links to Substack on his platform.
Still, Newton said Substack faces challenges in an already crowded video-based social media landscape.
“It’s just an open question as to how many video creators will come to Substack when YouTube exists and has figured out this thing pretty well,” he said.
