Substack Release Notes

More ways to connect with your audience, get paid for your work, and be in control of your feed

Our latest product updates give everyone more ownership over what they read, listen to, and watch on Substack and give creators more ways to connect with their audiences and turn that connection into long-lasting support, including paid subscriptions.

Here’s the latest.

Chat channels

Publishers on Substack are building large, vibrant communities with Chat. You can now create multiple subscriber group chats—“channels”—within a publication to focus on specific topics, like a TV series, sporting event, or AMA.

As a creator, you control who can join, post, and reply in subscriber chats. You can make a channel available to all subscribers or reserve it for paying subscribers. You and your subscribers can now tag other participants using their Substack handles (and edit your messages so the conversation is free of typos).

We recently spoke to Sean Ross, cohost of popular TV watch-along podcast Drop Your Buffs, about how he turned his obsession with Survivor and its fandom into a podcast and chat community. You can read more here.

Learn more about chat channels in our Help Center.

Lists

Yesterday, we launched lists, the next generation of recommendations on Substack and a new way to showcase the work you care about.

Curate your list, give it a name and a description, and write a short blurb for each publication so people know why you selected it. When someone opens your list, they’ll see each publication with your blurb, plus the chronological feed of posts from everyone on the list under the Activity tab.

Learn more about creating lists in our Help Center.

Freewalls

Freewalls help you turn a reader’s passing interest into a direct relationship by asking readers for their email address before they can read a full post.

On Substack, you own what you create. You can export the email addresses of both your free and paid subscribers to give them another way to engage with you and support your work.

Learn more about freewalls in our Help Center.

Metered paywalls

With metered paywalls, you can give free subscribers access to a set number of paid posts each month. You decide how many paid posts free subscribers can access each month and which posts are included. Metered paywalls help you deepen your relationship with your readers by allowing them to experience the value of being a paid subscriber.

When readers reach the limit you’ve set, you can encourage them to subscribe for full access to your work.

Learn more about metered paywalls in our Help Center.

Discounts

You can now create a discount to incentivize your monthly subscribers to upgrade to an annual subscription.

This much-requested feature gives you a way to encourage your biggest fans to commit for the long term.

Learn more about discounts in our Help Center.

Games category

The Games community is already home to standout writing, podcasts, and videos. As it continues to grow, we’re excited to give its creators a dedicated place to be discovered.

If Games is a fit for your publication, switch your primary category in your publication dashboard, and check out the new Games leaderboard.

Schedule ad hoc emails

Previously, you could use the subscriber dashboard to send an email to a subset of your subscribers. Now you can schedule emails containing special offers, event reminders, or other targeted messages to specific segments of your audience.

Learn more about scheduling ad hoc emails in our Help Center.

Podcast updates

In September, we launched the Podcast tab to support the thousands of podcasters making Substack their home. Podcasters on Substack collectively earn over $200 million a year. In the past month, we’ve added even more features to help you run your podcast business on Substack. Here are a few standouts:

YouTube multicasting

Your livestreams can now reach your audiences across both Substack and YouTube. Connect your YouTube account to Substack, and your video posts will upload automatically to YouTube when you publish. You can also start or stop the YouTube stream partway through or end it without ending your Substack stream, to keep your Substack community front and center.

Learn how to connect your YouTube and Substack accounts in our Help Center.

IAB Tech Lab certified and more complete data

Substack’s podcast download measurement is now IAB Tech Lab certified. IAB Tech Lab sets the standard for measuring downloads and is trusted by advertisers and sponsors across the industry. This certification makes it easier to report on your show’s growth and pitch to sponsors.

Spotify downloads are now included in your Substack podcast data, too.

We’ve also upgraded post stats so you can track engagement over time, with separate stats for live viewers and people who watched the recording. This helps you understand how your audience engages, whether it’s with a livestream, audio podcast, or video podcast.

Together, these updates offer a more complete picture of how your work resonates with your audience, so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Voiceovers

Posts with voiceovers can now be experienced like a podcast. With author-read voiceovers, your subscribers can choose to read or listen to your post. Posts with voiceovers are also eligible for Podcast tab rankings, which gives your written work more ways to be discovered.

Simon Haisell, the publisher of Footnotes and Tangents, has added voiceover to all of his posts. He told us that despite not always liking the sound of his own voice, “recording my voiceovers has been a revelation. You’re asking a lot from readers to sit down and read a 3,000-word article. But a voiceover lifts your words off the page, letting listeners take you anywhere.”

And he added that “as the internet becomes saturated with AI-generated content, this is honestly the easiest way to let readers know that they are engaging with another human.”

Listen to Simon’s posts on James Joyce’s Ulysses here.

Learn how to add voiceover to your posts in our Help Center.

Automatic downloads

Subscribers can set up automatic downloads of recent posts from individual publications or across their subscriptions. They can take your articles or podcasts with them, whether they’re commuting without service or traveling and out of their regular routine.

By default, only the audio from video posts will download to save data, but subscribers can enable video downloads for individual publications.

And a bonus: customized cursor

Your Substack is yours, right down to your cursor. You can now create a custom cursor by going to Publication Dashboard → Settings → Custom Cursor.

If you have a story about how a specific feature or best practice helped you grow your Substack, let us know in a Note, in a post, or by restacking. Thanks for being here.

Original source

Gather the writers, podcasters, and publishers you love into a shareable list with its own chronological feed, and save the lists others make

Today, we’re launching lists, the next generation of recommendations on Substack and a new way to showcase the work you care about.

Each curated list comes with its own activity feed: a stream of the latest posts and Notes from the featured creators in chronological order. The lists are dynamic: when a curator adds a new publisher to one of their lists, anyone who has saved the list will see that publisher’s new material in their feed, annotated to show which list it appears on.

In other words, you can curate your own feed, and save those that others create.

The thinking behind lists

Recommendations have long been a core way that publishers grow on Substack, and one of the primary ways the communities around them take shape. When you point your audience to someone you trust, it provides additional value for them and is a generous way to help another creator. Curated lists make that generosity more personal and specific. And recommendations on Substack are free—nobody pays to be on a list—so a spot on one carries real weight.

With this update—which makes lists more prominent and accessible, particularly in the app—we’ve made it easier than ever for people to discover new writers, podcasters, and publishers from the trusted recommendations of creators they already know and love.

Plus, they’re fun to curate. Share your expertise, show off your taste, and highlight the hidden gems you wish more people knew about. For every list, you can add a name, a description, and an easy-to-share link. You can also see how much traffic your list has sent to each writer you’ve included.

Make your first list

Find lists on your recommendations dashboard. Curate your list, give it a name and a description, and write a short blurb for each publication so people know why it’s there.

When someone opens your list, they’ll see each publication with your blurb, plus the chronological feed of posts from everyone on it under the Activity tab. Lists can be saved, shared on Notes—where they appear as a card in the feed—or shared off Substack with a link.

Learn more about lists here.

You know your audience better than anyone, and we’re excited to see the lists you come up with for them: the niche, the timely, the zany, the tactical, and all the other ways you might introduce the writers, podcasters, and creators you love.

Original source

“I’m certainly not afraid of [AI]. With any new instrument, you can make bad sounds, and then someone figures out how to do it well.”

In this special edition of Model Behavior—our series that asks top thinkers, writers, and creatives how they consider and use AI—Substack founder Chris Best speaks with legendary music producer Rick Rubin. Rick writes The Creative Act: Thoughtforms & Innerworks on Substack, where he shares reflective insights and practical creative exercises drawn from his approach to art and awareness.

Rick had questions for Chris about Substack’s decision to introduce the Pangram integration, a tool that lets readers check whether text was likely written by hand or with AI assistance. Chris, in turn, took the opportunity to ask Rick where he lands on AI in his own creative life, from writing to music. Along the way, they get into which genres AI music might be most successful in, the story of the discarded wah-wah pedal that helped define Jimi Hendrix’s sound, Rick’s slow conversion to Nine Inch Nails, and a sci-fi scenario where every album and film could be made for an audience of one.

What follows is a lightly edited version of their conversation.

Chris Best:

I’ll be honest about where I am on AI writing, AI generation, and AI creative assistance: I don’t know what any of the answers are yet. This stuff is hitting the world like a tidal wave, and I don’t think anybody knows exactly what to think. There’s such a wide range of perspectives. And I’m building a platform, so I don’t want to wait until every answer is figured out before we make it good. I’d love to hear where your head is at.

Rick Rubin:

It’s so early. We have no idea how AI will influence writing, or whether it will ever be good, or what its strengths and weaknesses will be. It’s a brand-new tool, like fire for the first time. Fire is dangerous and can burn down your house, but do we pretend it doesn’t exist, or make it illegal? I don’t know. It’s very powerful, and it can do a lot of things.

I’m curious about it, and I’m interested in interacting with it to understand it. But I don’t have a good grasp of how it works or where it’s strong or weak. Most of the time, the results I get back aren’t satisfactory. Even for something as simple as a Google search, I don’t feel great about what I’m getting. That said, it’s a cool new tool that keeps getting better, and I believe at some point we’ll find a really good use for it.

Chris:

In the software industry, we’re already there. My co-founder and CTO Jai [Jairaj Sethi] has gone from sitting at a screen typing all day to managing a fleet of robots. He says, “Hey, fix this. Hey, make this good” and gets back a video of the thing working. It’s transformational in software, which is different from creative work.

Rick:

If there were a machine that could tell how much of your coding was done with AI’s assistance and that were somehow vilified, what would you do?

Chris:

I see two perspectives developing very loudly online. One is a shrieking anti-AI view: this is the devil, and anybody who so much as touches it is ritually impure. The other is that AI can do no wrong, it’s already the greatest, it should do everything, and if I send you a message that’s AI-generated and you have complaints, it’s because you’re a Luddite who just doesn’t believe hard enough. I know people I love and respect in both camps. But I think a lot of people are in the middle, working to figure it out, grateful that we’re trying something.

If I use your fire analogy, we’ve got a powerful new tool that gives people incredible superpowers. It lets you do things you never could have done before, and things you could have done before much more easily, which makes new things possible with fewer people. It also gives you amazing new ways to be annoying on the internet. The overwhelming feeling, for me and I think for others, is that we’ve created an avalanche of stuff that isn’t coming from any particular perspective. It’s not that those people shouldn’t be allowed to do that. The question is what I want as a reader, or as someone trying to find good things, and what expectations I should have.

Rick:

But isn’t finding good things a human reaction? If an AI tells me something was made using AI but I like what I read, what does that mean? Does it matter?

The reason I like the artists I like is that I’m interested in their point of view. It’s not because they sound a certain way. It’s because they see the world a certain way. AI doesn’t have a point of view, so it can’t show me one. It can make something sound like something else, but it can’t give me a point of view, and in music that’s what I’m always looking for.

Chris:

Something has been happening to me online, and to a lot of people I know who are discerning readers and are very pro-AI. I’ll start reading something, and a few paragraphs in, it seems interesting. Then I realize, with no Pangram and no tool of any kind, that it’s another one of these. There’s a bit of an Invasion of the Body Snatchers feeling. I think, why am I spending my time on this? I signed up to get somebody’s perspective, and now that I realize it’s fully generated, something in my reaction switches. It discourages me from reading that piece, and it discourages me from fishing in that same pond.

Rick:

That’s good information, and you got it without the device. What you learned is that this writer writes in a way that seems like it’s using AI, and whether it is or not, it’s not for me, so I’ll look elsewhere. That sounds healthy. The bigger issue is when there’s a rating system, and how that changes the way we interact with the material.

When you first told me you were bringing on this service, I thought you’d see a rating at the top of each article telling you the percentage. I thought you might even up-regulate things made without AI and throttle things made with it, even if they were good. That raised all these questions about what we’re trying to get to.

If the reader gets to choose whether they see a score, that seems okay to me. I’m less offended by that than by a rating on every article, which is what I thought it was going to be.

Chris:

We definitely wouldn’t do that by default. That’s how the Pangram browser extension works for people who use it. I have zero interest in telling people what they can and can’t write or what tools they can and can’t use. That’s central to Substack’s philosophy. It’s up to the reader to decide what they value and what they want to spend time with. We can add some value by helping readers make that choice in a more informed way. We would never say, “You’re not allowed to write about politics,” but I would absolutely give readers a filter that says, “Today I don’t want to read about politics.” Maybe it’s an imperfect automatic politics detector. If I’m subscribed to what I’m subscribed to, that’s great, but when I’m out browsing and foraging, I have my own biases and desires, and I should be allowed to use my own agency to choose what to spend my attention on. That feels important to me.

Rick:

If the reader could select a button that says, “I only want to see non-AI material,” that seems okay. It has to do with the reader having the choice.

Chris:

We’re not stapling anything onto anything you don’t want. As a writer, you can opt out. As a reader, you can go and find out, and maybe if you’re browsing and discovering, you can choose to see less AI-generated work and prefer human work. Or you might do the reverse and say, “I love this AI stuff. Show me the best of it.”

Rick:

All slop all the time.

Chris:

Or maybe, to your point, it’s not slop. The most important limitation of Pangram and all AI detectors isn’t false positives. It’s that the thing they’re detecting isn’t whether something is slop or good or has a human perspective in it. They only detect the last mile: did the final form of this text come out of the machine or not?

There’s a feature of the modern internet, and you see it on LinkedIn, where most of the content that’s completely generated isn’t deep, thoughtful work crafted with care. It’s somebody saying, “Toss something off for me” or “Write 10,000 viral posts and make my thing go.” I think people are developing a visceral dislike of that, partly because of the experience they have everywhere else online. After we shipped this feature, LinkedIn took away their “Rewrite with AI” button and added a “Report as AI slop” option. Snapchat announced it wouldn’t allow AI video in its main Discover feed. Platforms are navigating what people want and care about even before we know the philosophical answers.

Motown was a kind of music factory at one point. It wasn’t the artist spilling their guts. I can’t name a record made that way that speaks to me, but it speaks to a lot of other people. I think of them as two different worlds: music made by the artist, and a commercial world of music that’s more about making something popular. I haven’t played that game, but I wouldn’t take it away from anyone.

Rick:

I don’t use AI for writing, and I don’t use it for music, but I’m not closed to the possibility that it could be a useful tool at some point.

Chris:

Have you tried AI for music?

Rick:

I’ve only seen a demonstration of Suno, and it wasn’t to my taste.

Chris:

Right. It sounds superficially slick, but there’s nothing underneath.

Rick:

The reason I like the artists I like is that I’m interested in their point of view. It’s not because they sound a certain way. It’s because they see the world a certain way. AI doesn’t have a point of view, so it can’t show me one. It can make something sound like something else, but it can’t give me a point of view, and in music that’s what I’m always looking for.

Chris:

That strikes me as the deep philosophical question underneath all of this, and I don’t think we can solve it as a platform feature. It’s true in writing as well. Will an AI be a better writer than a human? In a narrow sense, that seems pretty likely: you can make it sound like something else, or make it sound good. The question is whether an AI can replace having a point of view, and where the line falls between those two things.

Rick:

There are also different genres of music where the rules are different. The music I like tends to be a singer-songwriter spilling their guts. But K-pop is hugely popular, and it’s made in a more cookie-cutter, manufactured way.

Chris:

My kids like KPop Demon Hunters. If there were an AI version, they’d probably like it.

Rick:

People like it, and it may not be so different from AI in the way it’s created. Motown was a kind of music factory at one point. It wasn’t the artist spilling their guts. It’s a different thing. I can’t name a record made that way that speaks to me, but it speaks to a lot of other people. I think of them as two different worlds: music made by the artist, and a commercial world of music that’s more about making something popular. I haven’t played that game, but I wouldn’t take it away from anyone.

Chris:

Could you imagine a world where you couldn’t tell the difference just by listening? Would you still think they’re two different things?

Rick:

Absolutely, I can imagine that. In the end, you either feel it or you don’t. There are people who make music on the feeling side that I like, but 99% of it I don’t like either. If a song got through that was made in a different way, that wouldn’t be a negative for me. When the drum machine came along, a lot of musicians said, “If you use a drum machine, you’re not doing music anymore.” There was a huge movement when people left analog for Pro Tools: “Sellout, that’s not how we do this.” Sampling was another big change. I can’t say one is right or wrong. It’s just another tool.

There’s a story about the ’60s band Love, with Arthur Lee. Their lead guitarist, Johnny Echols, told me that Vox came out with a new machine called the wah-wah pedal. It was one of the very first guitar pedals. Vox gave it to a few key professional musicians to try, including Echols, who was a great studio musician, and a guitarist named Jimmy James, who played with Little Richard. Jimmy James wasn’t really Little Richard’s guitar player. He was his driver, but he could play, and when Little Richard needed a guitarist, he sometimes played. The pitch for the pedal was, “This will make your guitar sound like a trombone,” because a trombone mute goes wah, wah, wah, and the pedal does the same thing to a guitar.

Echols took the pedal and threw it in the garbage. He thought, “If I want to learn how to play trombone, I’ll play trombone. I don’t want a pedal to make my guitar sound like one.” A year or so later, a friend in San Francisco called and said, “There’s an amazing new guitar player named Jimi Hendrix who just came from England. You’ve got to see him. He’s playing tomorrow night.” So Echols and his friends drove up to San Francisco, the show started, and the guy who walked out onstage was Jimmy James, the driver for Little Richard.

Echols had thrown away the box. Jimmy James, now Jimi Hendrix, adopted it. Echols said the entire sound of Jimi Hendrix was based on that new box. Hendrix was curious enough to experiment with it, and he became Jimi Hendrix, while Echols kept playing the way guitar had been played before.

I think that’s somehow related to AI. I don’t know exactly how, but there’s a new technology, and we don’t yet know what it can be. We tend to think in terms of all or nothing, or substitution. I’m not saying that. I’m asking whether this tool could help a great writer become an even better writer. We don’t know yet. I think it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater to put a big X over it too soon, when it may have incredible uses, as it already does with code. I don’t know what they are yet, but I’m certainly not afraid of it. With any new instrument, you can make bad sounds, and then someone figures out how to do it well.

Here’s an example from my own taste. For a time, I never liked electronic music. Someone told me I’d like Nine Inch Nails, when their first independent record had just come out. It sounded like industrial music, and I’d heard industrial music and didn’t like it. Because it was wrapped in the technology of a kind of music I didn’t like, my first instinct was that it wasn’t for me. It took about a year before I realized it was one of my favorite bands. The technology went from a negative to a positive once I recognized how phenomenal the songwriting and singing were. I thought it was slop at first because it was just machines. It felt too easy and didn’t have the human touch. Then I understood the power of the songs and the lyrics, and I saw them live and felt the energy, and they became my favorite group. It’s hard to judge these things too quickly. There will be a use where you’re happy to have it in your toolbox and it makes things better. I don’t know when that’ll be.

Chris:

So here’s what I hear you saying, and I find it interesting. This is a new tool, and the chance that it can make something great at some point is pretty high, so we should be open to that possibility. A lot of what gets made right now may not be good, and it’s reasonable to say, “I don’t want any industrial music in my playlists when I’m discovering new things.” But we should guard against that hardening into a prejudice.

Rick:

Exactly right.

Chris:

Because there’s a lot of bad slop on LinkedIn. But if we close our hearts completely to AI writing, AI music, and the rest, we risk becoming the lesser Jimmy who threw away the wah-wah pedal.

Rick:

We’d be missing an opportunity. One of the beautiful things about AI is that it democratizes the landscape. If you weren’t a great writer before, or you were afraid to pick up a pen, maybe getting comfortable with AI lets you express yourself in a way that wasn’t possible. Many more people may get to share their creative selves, maybe not so successfully in the beginning, but that’s better than being afraid to share what you think is beautiful, which is where most people are. Most people will tell you, “I’m not creative.” At some point, most people had someone tell them, “You can’t sing” or “Better if you didn’t do that” or “You’re not good at sports,” and they shut down. This is a tool that lets people who’ve shut down experiment in areas they’ve never considered. I’m excited to see what they come up with, because those are voices that would otherwise be silent.

People are hungry for something grounded and communal. It’s why they’re going to church and why people are reading the Bible. It’s the most in 70 years, especially among young people, and I think it’s a reaction to social media.

Chris:

Can I give you a sci-fi scenario and get your reaction?

Rick:

Please.

Chris:

Imagine the AI gets so good that you’re reading things and thinking, “This is better than everything else. I get the human perspective.” You’re listening to music and thinking, “This is way better than Nine Inch Nails. This is the greatest thing.” Whatever media you consume, the AI has made it the best for you, and you’d choose it every time over the alternative. And here’s the catch, if it is one: all of it is completely personalized. The AI is making a feature film just for you every time, an album just for you every time, and you’re off on your own island experiencing a world of ideas and cultures, while every other human you know is on their own island experiencing something perfect for them. Am I describing utopia?

Rick:

I don’t know. It’s like a dream. We all have our own dreams, and I don’t know that it would be better if we all shared the same ones. The idea of personalization is interesting, and I’m not against it. I think we’ll always have the choice, though maybe there will be a point where we choose personalization the way someone might always choose the vegetarian menu.

Chris:

The dream comparison is the one I’ve used in my own mind when people share their AI text with me. It feels like someone describing their dream. Your own dreams are very interesting to you. When someone else describes theirs at length, you think, why are you telling me this? There may be people who can do it well, but usually it’s hard to care.

That, to me, is the big question. I think a purely personalized world has something dystopian about it. Maybe not for everything, and I wouldn’t want zero of it. It’s great to have personalized music in certain situations. But a world with no shared culture, where you aren’t participating in a larger world of ideas, pushing and pulling and acting back on the world, feels like we would have lost something important.

Rick:

I agree, and we’re already kind of there without AI. When I was a kid, The Godfather came out, everyone I knew saw it, and then it won the Oscar for best picture. This year there will be 10 movies up for an Oscar, and you haven’t seen any of them. I haven’t. No one you know has. That’s not AI. The culture has bifurcated into this on-demand world, where you don’t just watch the three networks. You pick, and you binge-watch the thing you like.

Chris:

So AI might not be a difference in kind, but a massive acceleration. Instead of a niche film that only a few people watch, you’re off in your own complete dreamland.

Rick:

But things often have to go very far in one direction before the pendulum swings back. Vinyl is more popular than it’s been since it was the only format. People are hungry for something grounded and communal. It’s why they’re going to church and why people are reading the Bible. It’s the most in 70 years, especially among young people, and I think it’s a reaction to social media. Social media is so devoid of connection to anything that people are hungry for something real, or something timeless.

AI tools are in their infancy, and while the norms around their use and disclosure are evolving rapidly, we think it’s important to ask writers, creators, and thinkers about their work, their businesses, and how they intersect with where technology stands today. In Model Behavior, we’ll continue to ask candid questions about the tech industry, AI pet peeves, and how AI is affecting writers’ sense of identity and livelihoods. From anti-AI purists to power users, we’ll get into the prompts they choose, their tool stacks, or their 100% analog workflows. More soon.

Last week, Substack released new content preferences that include filters for topics like politics and allow you to see more or less video, chat, audio, and longform writing in your feeds. Read more about feed controls here.

Original source

Dynamic ad insertion, paid subscriptions, and community, all in one place

Podcasts are one of the most intimate forms of media. Hosts immerse listeners in the story of a college football underdog’s improbable rise, take them into the kitchens of New York’s best restaurants, and reveal the strategy behind history’s most lopsided battle. As listeners return week after week, they form a deep connection to the voices who narrate their daily lives.

But the podcast tech stack supporting these stories has never lived up to its potential.

Hosting platforms distribute podcasts to the world, but they do little to help podcasters know their listeners. Companion newsletters and communities bring hosts and listeners together but are siloed from where audiences follow their favorite creators. Ad marketplaces help podcasters monetize, but they don’t let podcasters reach new audiences. As a result, ambitious podcasters must use multiple tools just to run their business.

Substack has a different vision for podcasting, where community, paid subscriptions, and audience ownership work in concert. Podcasters, including Split Zone Duo, The Dwarkesh Patel Podcast, and Pantsuit Politics, are using Substack to build both their shows and communities that extend beyond the podcast feed.

Subscriptions remain the foundation, but sponsorships give creators another way to fund ambitious work. Substack’s Head of Sponsorships, Dan Robbins, outlined how sponsorships can enable creators to grow sustainable, independent media businesses. As we continue to build our native sponsorships program, we’re excited to share that sponsorships will soon be coming to podcasts hosted on Substack.

Podcasters will remain in control: they will choose whether to participate in sponsorships, what tools to take advantage of, and the types of sponsor partners they are comfortable working with. We’re building our podcast monetization toolkit around creators’ needs, and today we’re offering a preview of that vision, beginning with three capabilities.

Dynamic sponsorships across your podcast catalog

Until now, podcasters on Substack have had to record sponsorships directly into episodes. With dynamic ad insertion, podcasters will be able to run campaigns with their own sponsors and update ads across their back catalog without re-editing episodes. Today, we’re announcing signups for early access.

We also recently earned IAB Tech Lab certification for podcast download measurement, giving podcasters industry-standard data they can use to pitch sponsors and report on their shows’ performance.

An option to fill ad breaks through sponsorship marketplaces

If you’d rather not find sponsors yourself, you’ll soon be able to tap into third-party sponsorship marketplaces to fill the ad breaks you mark in your episodes. Participation will be completely optional, and you set the guardrails: how many ads run and which types of sponsors you’re comfortable with. Use one approach, the other, or both.

An ad-free community for your biggest fans

The most enduring podcasts are built on community and subscriptions, which are both central to our podcasting vision. Publishers like Scott Galloway publish bonus and ad-free episodes to their paid subscribers on Substack, while Shea Serrano invites his paid subscribers into the conversation with Substack Chat. And podcasters can now organize those communities into channels, as Drop Your Buffs described.

The days of piecing together a hosting platform, advertising marketplace, newsletter service, independent website, and community platform are over. Podcasters can have it all on Substack.

Sign up for early access to dynamic sponsorships, and be among the first to try what’s coming next.

Request early access

Original source

Lore drops, investigative (Survivor) journalism, and talking through a new chat channels strategy with the host of TV-watch-along podcast Drop Your Buffs

SEAN ROSS AND BAILEY DUNN

OCT 20, 2026

Sean Ross started watching the reality TV show Survivor at 14, and became an early lurker in the fandom. Years later, he met cohost Evan Ross Katz, and they turned their obsession with the show into the popular podcast Drop Your Buffs. As the show grew, they joined Substack to offer their listeners a community space for it. Today, they have a bustling subscriber-only chat, covering Survivor, The Traitors, The White Lotus, and other pop culture topics with increasingly (and humorously) tenuous connections to Survivor.

Drop Your Buffs has cracked the code on building a community layer for a podcast on Substack: a booming, eventized, subscriber-only space that spawns lore, memes, friendships, and threads that regularly run to thousands of comments at a time. Survivor already has one of the biggest and most crowded fan communities on the internet, so we were curious how Drop Your Buffs managed to carve out a corner that people are happy to pay to join. Substack’s entertainment partnership manager Bailey Dunn—also a massive Survivor fan—spoke with Sean about their chat strategy, the show’s origin story, and how he’s thinking about Substack’s new chat channels to help organize and grow an audience that’s taken on a life of its own.

BD: What first made you decide you wanted to bring people together around Survivor?

Sean: It was the pandemic. There was a huge swell of people discovering Survivor during the pandemic, as they did with so many other shows, but there was something about Survivor that captured the imagination when people were locked at home. One of those people was my cohost, Evan Ross Katz, who I’d met through another podcast I was doing about the daytime talk show The View. Then I saw he tweeted, “Watching Survivor, should I start?” And I was like, slow down. Let me guide you through this process. As he watched, almost every episode, he would send me a voice note about his thoughts and questions, and I would voice note it back. We were getting into territory where we were basically podcasting over voice note. Around the time he reached season 15, he said, why don’t we just start a podcast about this?

I was very hesitant, because the Survivor podcasting world is extremely oversaturated. There are so many Survivor podcasts, and I thought, what are we possibly going to add? There’s the angle of doing a queer Survivor podcast, but even those existed. There were multiple. He really pushed me. He said, I think we could get big guests, I think we could pull people out of retirement to talk about this show. What got me was Courtney Yates, from Survivor: China, Season 15. I started talking to Courtney, and she said she would go on our podcast. So I thought, this is now just an opportunity for me to meet my favorite Survivor players. That’s why we started it, really.

Evan is so funny, because he treats the Substack-exclusive paid content like it’s the Situation Room, like nobody can access it. It’s a $5 fee a month. The price of a coffee. You will get Evan’s most unhinged, unfiltered takes.

BD: You and I met a year and a half ago, when Drop Your Buffs was on Patreon and you moved over to Substack. What was that experience like for you?

Sean: We were podcasting, and we didn’t have any social media presence. We didn’t have a Drop Your Buffs Instagram page or Twitter account. People started messaging us on my personal account and on Evan’s. They wanted to chime in and have their voices heard. We started doing call-in shows where people could drop voicemails. As the show grew, that became difficult to run from a personal account. So I thought, we need to set up spaces for these conversations to happen. We created the Instagram account, which blew up, and that became unwieldy too, because there were too many people and too many messages. It could have been a full-time job to go through the inbox.

We also wanted to start monetizing the podcast, because it takes a lot of effort and money to run. We wanted to get some of that back, and if we could make money, great. That’s why we went to Patreon. Then we saw Substack’s community features—the chat in particular was a big selling point, because we realized it could solve one of our problems. All of these people want to be heard, and they’re listening to this podcast, and podcasting can often feel like you’re speaking into the void. You say words into a microphone, it goes out, maybe you get a message, maybe you don’t even see those messages on Instagram. The comments on Patreon were kind of popping off, but I thought there might be a better space. That was a big selling point for moving to Substack.

When we joined, we turned the chat on, and it immediately went wild. I didn’t know anything about the chat features at that time, so I had it set up so anybody, even a nonsubscriber, could go in and chat. That was really fun but a little bit Wild West. So I started to refine it, and now the chat is paid-subscriber exclusive.

I think it’s a great perk, because we’ve sort of eventized the chat. Our biggest chat threads are the live watch parties, as we call them. As Survivor airs on Wednesday night, we do an East Coast and a West Coast chat, and everybody can be in there reacting live to the episode. Live-tweet parties on Twitter used to be a big thing, say when an album would drop, or when an episode of TV that everybody’s watching was airing. But those spaces are difficult now, because algorithmically you’re not getting a real-time reaction anymore. That’s been lost from social media. In the Substack chat you get real time, and it’s fast and furious. One of the listeners was trying to find the stat for our biggest live watch party night. I think it was something like 3,200 comments within the span of an hour, which is insane.

It’s so fun, because so much of the lore of Drop Your Buffs and its listeners is created and evolves in the chat. If you’re not in the chat, you’re getting half the story. So much happens there. So many inside jokes, so many memes originate there. People get to know each other, they have nicknames for each other, there’s teasing. Friendships have been made in the chat, and all of this happens because we’re watching a TV show at the same time, basically.

BD: Survivor has hugely engaged fans on Reddit and other places on the internet. How does your Substack community compare?

Sean: It’s completely different. Sometimes people say that the outside world is like the Twilight Zone. The Survivor Facebook page is the dregs of society. It’s never a place I want to be. Honestly, the Survivor community on Reddit, on Facebook, even sometimes on Twitter, is super toxic, misogynistic, homophobic. The people who have found our podcast and resonate with it, to the point that they’re willing to subscribe and support it, those are your people. We’ve found this niche pocket within an already niche community of people who all get each other’s humor and points of view. I think that’s how we set ourselves apart.

I can’t even really influence [the chat] anymore. If I try, I get roasted. They want to talk about their lives. People are talking about their pregnancies, their marriages, their pets. They’re meeting up: “I’m coming to New York, who’s in New York? Let’s go get lunch.”

BD: Drop Your Buffs is also active outside of Survivor seasons. What else are you guys talking about?

Sean: We’ve expanded our coverage. When Traitors popped up as a new show, from season one we said, there’s already a crossover. Cirie is on this show, Stephenie LaGrossa is on this show. We have to cover this. We had no idea how popular The Traitors was going to become, so we started covering it as a paid exclusive, and it turned out to be huge. We love doing The Traitors because you get this mix of all different reality spheres colliding, which is interesting on its own. We also cover The White Lotus, because there’s a Survivor connection: Mike White was a Survivor player before The White Lotus premiered, and he put Survivor players in every season. It’s also fun to touch on scripted TV sometimes. Another scripted show we covered was And Just Like That. We’ve also covered things like The Challenge. Whatever pops up that we’re kind of interested in. I certainly think we’ll probably cover the Girls reboot. We’re both big Girls fans, and there’s an And Just Like That kind of adjacency to that show, so that makes sense to us. We usually try to find some kind of Survivor connection, however loose it may be. We did actually find one for And Just Like That.

BD: What was it?

Sean: A Survivor player from Cook Islands, Sundra Oakley, was in an episode of Sex and the City, because she was an actress. If you can believe that.

Chat channels

Chat channels let you split your community into as many as 16 subscriber chats. Maybe that’s a free chat for everyone and a paid-only space next door, or a dedicated room for each topic you cover or city your community is concentrated in. Each chat gets its own name, photo, audience, and posting permissions.

Learn more about setting up chat channels here.

BD: We just launched this new way to segment your chat—we’re calling them chat channels—so you can have different levels of group chats in Substack. How are you thinking about splitting up your chat so there are sub-pockets and communities for different portions of the Buffies?

Sean: The chat has taken on a life of its own, to the point where I can’t check everything. I can’t be in every thread. I get pinged with “Sean Ross, can we please have a thread about whatever?” Great British Bake Off is a new one. I don’t want to do a thread about that, but that’s what the people want, and I should just let this community grow organically however it wants.

BD: Let them cook!

Sean: Let them cook. Let them bake. There’s a lot they want to talk about. Right now I try to fulfill that by creating new threads. We do a thread for every episode of TV we cover. But people also want to watch The Traitors, and American Traitors, Canadian, Australian, U.K. Traitors, so it gets unruly. I’m excited about making that more manageable, both for myself and for subscribers, so they can find what they’re looking for easily and keep the conversation to the people who are having that conversation.

What comes to mind immediately is a dedicated Survivor chat group, where we do our new episodes and our rewatch episodes, because we rewatch old seasons too. I think The Traitors deserves its own, given there are so many international versions and everybody’s watching them. Then I think we’d have a general discussion group.

What I’m most proud of with Drop Your Buffs is the community that has grown around this show. It has taken on a life of its own. I can’t even really influence it anymore. If I try, I get roasted. They want to talk about their lives. People are talking about their pregnancies, their marriages, their pets. They’re meeting up: “I’m coming to New York, who’s in New York? Let’s go get lunch.” It’s heartwarming. So I think we need a catch-all group chat: What’s on your mind? What else are you watching? What video games are you playing? What books are you reading? People want to talk about that, and I think having a space for it is a good idea.

BD: You could make a channel or threads just for founding members! Shea Serrano, who we spoke to recently, does a lot of chat threads only for his founding members, and he pulls them in on questions like “What should we watch next?” There’s growth potential in thinking about how you advertise new portions of the community features to founding members only. It’s almost like an advisory council. You could even get creative, like they’re your “jury” or something. Pantsuit Politics calls their founding members “Executive Producers,” and when they do live shows, they bring all the Executive Producers in the audience up on stage and thank them and make them feel included.

Sean: Let’s say we did a founding members group chat. Can I open it up so anybody can start threads? I think if I gave them the opportunity to go ham in a group chat, they would like that.

BD: Yes! And I agree. You don’t have to check it. It becomes like an iMessage group chat, basically.

Sean: Totally. I think that could be cool.

BD: Tell me about the live show you recently hosted in New York.

Sean: We’ve been promising a live show for at least four years. We’re a little over five years old. We’d been promising it for years and years, and it became a running joke in the chat that it would never happen. There was a meme: there’s not going to be a live show. So we finally got it off the ground. We said, this is the year we’re going to do it. We set a date. Then it was pure chaos leading up to it, because none of us had ever done this. There are all these little things you don’t know. Three days before, we’re asking, do we need insurance? Anyway, we got the live show off the ground, and it sold very quickly. It was amazing because everybody got really hyped. We got great guests, very Drop Your Buffs–coded: Jerri Manthey, Parvati Shallow, Ozzy [Lusth], Sophie Clarke. And we surprised everybody with Richard Hatch.

BD: The first winner of Survivor!

Sean: He’s a controversial figure. He looms large, I would say. Almost like the father of reality TV. If Richard Hatch didn’t win season one, I don’t know that Survivor would still be on TV. He was in prison for five years because he didn’t pay taxes on his million-dollar win.

BD: Oh my god, Sean, I totally forgot about that.

Sean: And he still hasn’t paid it, and now he owes something like $4 million because of interest. He needs to go back on Survivor, or try to win again so he can pay that off. Literally. He’s kind of persona non grata for Survivor. Anyway, one more thing about the live show, related to the chat. I was watching the chat the day of the live show, and I noticed as the tickets were selling that a lot of people had bought single tickets. I thought, interesting, and they’re not from New York. I saw people making their travel plans: “I’m coming to this alone. My husband doesn’t watch Survivor, my friends don’t watch Survivor, but I have to be there.” I thought, I guess that happens. But the chat allowed all these people to find each other. There was a massive group lunch or drinks before the show. At the after party, there was a group of, I don’t know, 12 to 15 people who had all met up because they came alone, and they’re friends for life.

BD: Maybe one of your group chats, Sean, should be Survivor Singles.

Sean: That’s the last thing I need.

BD: Sorry, this is now a matchmaking service! I love that story about people finding friends from the group chat in real life. What did it feel like seeing your people in person?

Sean: It was wild. Even with the chat and the community, it can still feel not real. It’s words on a screen, and it’s hard to put faces to names. To see a room full of these people made the whole thing very real. This five-year journey of podcasting is real. People showed up, they spent their money, they flew across the country to come to this thing. It was a pinch-me moment. Podcasting is such a solo experience. You have a cohost, but it’s a bit of an isolating exercise, so to see it bear fruit in the real world is really rewarding.

BD: What else is next for Drop Your Buffs? Do you have any big wild dreams?

Sean: First of all, we’ve decided to no longer recap new Survivor episodes on the main feed. We’re only talking our shit about Survivor 51 and beyond behind the paywall, Substack exclusive. If people want to hear our real, unfiltered takes, we do a series called After Dark. For every Survivor episode, there’s a Drop Your Buffs After Dark episode that accompanies it. That’s where we’re at our meanest. People love that.

BD: If you want to be a hater, you’ve got to pay up.

Sean: Exactly. Evan is so funny, because he treats the Substack-exclusive paid content like it’s the Situation Room, like nobody can access it. It’s a $5 fee a month. The price of a coffee. You will get Evan’s most unhinged, unfiltered takes, so I think it’s very much worth it. We’re going to keep doing that.

BD: Lastly, do you have an all-time favorite player?

Sean: I think I have to go with Amanda Kimmel, who has disappeared. Part of the reason she’s so interesting is how elusive she is. She plays three seasons, 15, 16, and 20, in a very short span of two to three years. Then after 20, she disappears off the face of the earth. She defined the golden era of Survivor in such a profound way, and the fact that she’s vanished from pop culture is so fascinating to me.

BD: You guys have made some really good memes on Drop Your Buffs about what she’s up to.

Sean: We found her in Montana! We did track her down. We actually had a text exchange with her, because when we did our live show we thought what a gag it would be to have fog machine smoke and Amanda Kimmel walks out.

She said, thank you, but no [laughs].

Original source

New content preferences let you see more or less video, mute keywords, prioritize longform, and more

Today, we’re launching new content preferences: a set of dials that put you in charge of what your feed shows you.

Almost exactly a year ago, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote, “Substack is social media. Yes, okay. It is.”

We started Substack in 2017 as a response to the ways social media was warping culture, so it might seem odd that we’ve somehow built … a social media app. But that doesn’t capture the whole story. Traditional social media apps are designed to lure us into an attention game that keeps us locked in an endless scroll. It can be fun, but it’s often maddening and divisive.

We’re building a new kind of social media—or maybe what social media should always have been. Here, you have a media ecosystem with a different set of rules that serve you. This is a place for real human relationships built around stories and culture. The feed is designed to lead you to deeper experiences. Meaningful connection—not shallow attention—is the fuel for the whole machine.

In short, the Substack feed isn’t built to maximize time spent scrolling but to get you to the work you’ll care about—work you’ll stick with and, ideally, pay for. And we have evidence that it’s succeeding. In the past six months, the Substack app has driven nearly 800,000 paid subscriptions and more than 80 million free subscriptions to writers and creators. More than half of paid subscriptions from the app came directly from the Notes feed.

It’s also fun. Open Substack and you’ll find good acupuncturist merch. A celebration of soup season. Photography from Kyoto Station. A founder’s review of Dostoyevsky. A haiku for every World Cup game. It’s a place to dive deeper into the stories of the day and to find and support the culture you care about.

The new dials—which you can find in the content preferences section of your settings—let you shape your feed the way you want it. See more or less video, audio, longform, or community features; mute specific keywords and phrases; fine-tune the topics you follow; and automatically label AI-generated material.

Want to hear more about baseball while the playoffs are on? Feel like snoozing politics for a week? How about seeing more community chatter—like the chat thread debriefing the latest episode of your favorite podcast—or less video in your feed? You get to decide.

This level of control serves both the creators who share their work here and the people who come to discover and enjoy what they publish. We’ve heard that both sides of the relationship want less noise and more help connecting readers with work that they’ll find meaningful. These updates aim to do exactly that.

On Substack, you’re in control: of the culture you support, the audiences you build, and now, the feed you scroll.

Learn more about how to control what you see on your feed here.

Original source

Today at Advertising Week

Today at Advertising Week, we’re unveiling the next phase in our Sponsorships program: three new formats to help participating publishers earn more and reach new readers, plus new ways for brands to measure the trust, awareness, and consideration these partnerships build.

“Tonight, we’re getting Boston Market and going clubbing,” my mom would sometimes say when I got off the school bus.

On club nights, the lights went all the way down and the music all the way up. Our family climbed onto the couch and jumped up and down to ’90s dance hits that insisted tonight was everything: Jennifer Lopez’s “Waiting for Tonight,” Amber’s “This Is Your Night,” Real McCoy’s “Another Night.” My mom—a librarian just over five feet, a former COBOL programmer, a New Yorker who never wears patterns, florals, or logos, whose currency of love is warmth and worry, who describes her midlife crisis as switching from Diet Pepsi to Diet Coke—would fly off the couch like a confetti cannon.

I loved club nights for the reasons people have loved dancing forever: it’s silly in the most serious of ways and never gets old. Once, my dad came back from a trip to London with new records by Portishead and Massive Attack. My brother and I marveled at the meteorite that crashed into our living room. (Concussive breakbeats! Spacey reverbs!) And the club came alive anew.

Often I’d ask to turn a car radio to KTU (“The Beat of New York!”). The station’s DJs came from the warehouses in Chelsea and the Meatpacking District, and their mixes reminded me of home. It was a request sometimes met with bemusement—the look that adults might give an unsupervised child, like the time I showed up on Halloween in fifth grade dressed as a can of Budweiser.

I was always thankful to Boston Market because of club nights. We didn’t need to order dinner to dance, but having nothing to cook or clean made it easier. And I stayed fond of the chain even after I learned that it resembled neither “Boston” nor a “Market,” and that its Caesar salad had more calories than a Big Mac.

What is the difference between an ad and a sponsorship?

An ad grabs you by the collar; a sponsorship is the wind at your back. The campaign, the infrastructure, the idea—these things alone don’t determine whether something is an ad or a sponsorship. Like an algorithm, advertising tech itself is neutral. A sponsorship business can standardize and scale just as an ads business can. Ultimately, the difference between the two lies more in effect than intent. Advertising captures attention, whereas sponsorship empowers experience. Boston Market was a sponsor.

Since joining Substack this year to lead sponsorships, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with publishers, marketers, and agencies about how to support the thousands of subscription businesses being built here.

In June, we announced the first phase of our native sponsorships program and introduced Creator Kits for Substack bestsellers, a customizable media kit that can help brands understand a publication and its audience. Over the past few months, we’ve been testing new ideas with brands like Balenciaga, Uber, and T-Mobile so that we can create more opportunities for publishers to earn money while preserving the direct subscriber relationship. Publishers choose whether they want to participate in sponsorships, and can opt in through their Creator Kit. It’s one part of our broader investment in making Substack the best place to build a sustainable, independent media business.

We’re still early in this process and learning what works. At the same time, we’re bringing more brands into the program and building a growing pipeline of campaigns across different categories. Today, I’m heading to Advertising Week to share some of what we’ve been building. We wanted to give you an early look at what we’ll be announcing.

Pioneering new sponsorship formats

We’re not just trying to recreate existing advertising models. Instead, we are focused on a new economic engine for culture, creating trust for publishers, subscribers, and brands alike. That thinking is behind three new formats:

The upgrade

A brand provides a month of paid access for a publisher’s free subscribers, giving them access to the publication at no cost. Readers get to experience the full publication and can become paying subscribers when the sponsored month ends. The brand earns goodwill with key audiences by giving them more of the writing they love.

The unlock

A brand sponsors one of a publisher’s paid posts, making it free for everyone to read. The publisher gets paid for their work and can reach new readers who may go on to subscribe, or even become paid subscribers. Readers get to try a post that would otherwise be behind the paywall.

The masthead

A brand partners with writers and creators to present work on a theme in a dedicated destination on Substack. Think of it as a digital zine, like a retail brand collecting gift guides, a hotel brand highlighting ambitious travel writing, or a tech brand selecting the best writing about the future. For most brands, it’s a stronger starting point than launching their own publication: they’ll partner with publishers that people already follow and tap into a built-in audience.

Measuring more than attention

The better we can demonstrate the value of these formats, the more opportunities we can create. Often, creator marketing is measured only by impressions and clicks, not by the real impact of developing trust, credibility, and authority.

To present a more well-rounded picture, we’re now offering Kantar studies for large-scale campaigns, supporting meaningful measurement through independent, privacy-safe surveys that track changes in brand awareness, perception, and consideration.

Where we’re going

What’s our vision for the future of sponsorships?

For publishers, a world where ads work for writers instead of writers working for ads. A world where subscriptions are the floor, but not the ceiling. A world where any creator who opts in can get the income to go all-in.

For brands, you can earn real standing instead of shouting through feeds and swipes. Get the space to go deep, to say thank you, and to back communities that will grow your business.

And for subscribers, it’s less “there’s an ad” and more “that’s interesting” or “they made this possible.”

Right now, our team is bringing small groups of bestsellers and brands together as we test and learn. If you’re a brand interested in sponsorships, please reach out to [email protected] or sign up here. If you’re a bestseller interested in sponsorships, turn on your Creator Kit to let us know you’d like to be considered for potential opportunities.

If you’ve already turned your kit on and haven’t heard from us, know we’re still early in that process and look forward to bringing more publishers into the program soon.

We’re excited to keep building with you.

Original source

We know that finding the right audience and then giving them compelling reasons to continue to support your work is core to being successful on Substack. The features we launched this month allow you to do both these things: reach new subscribers and create richer experiences for your existing ones. Here’s the latest.

Creator match

Starting today, all publishers have access to creator match, a new feature that helps you easily find relevant collaborations with other publishers. Creator match identifies writers and creators with similar audience sizes and interests, then curates them for you, ranked by how promising the collaboration could be for both of you. You can find the feature in your publisher dashboard.

Collaborating with other Substack publishers is one of the most powerful routes to grow on the platform, and it’s how many Bestsellers got their start. Lenny Rachitsky of Lenny’s Newsletter and Elena Verna of Elena’s Growth Scoop; Packy McCormick of Not Boring and Noah Smith of Noahpinion have collaborated via cross-posts, recommendations, and podcast episodes, or shared each other’s work in a Note. These collaborations put your work in front of like-minded audiences and give new readers a reason to subscribe: they’re discovering you via a publisher they already trust.

You can message fellow publishers directly from the creator match dashboard to initiate a collaboration.

Segments and tags

Instead of seeing your audience as one big subscriber list, you can now use segments and tags to connect with specific groups directly. Target a post to a segment, such as readers in Alaska, or tag people who attended your last event, and give them more of what they like about your work.

Justin Welsh, publisher of the saturday essay, assigns tags to new subscribers as they come in. He then uses those tags to create segments and send posts selectively to those audience subgroups.

Learn more about segments and tags in our Help Center.

Audience-specific content blocks

You can now tailor sections of a post for different groups without creating separate posts for each one. You can add personalized content blocks to written, podcast, or video posts that are visible based on a reader’s subscription status, including free, paid, or founding subscribers.

Cool Stories About Art uses audience-specific content blocks to tailor calls to action based on who’s reading.

Learn more about audience-specific content in our Help Center.

Reply rules are available to non-English publications

In June, we launched reply rules to help you shape the conversation happening across your Substack community. This feature allows you to set your own community standards and auto-hide post comments, note replies, and subscriber chats that don’t meet them. The system learns every time you hide a reply and preemptively moderates replies it thinks you would take action on yourself.

Now reply rules are available to non-English publications and apply to non-English comments and replies, so everyone can set the terms for their corner of the internet, no matter where they live or what language they speak.

Reply rules added by Asami Saisho, Mãe de Zé, Crypto Coach, and Federica Salto.

Learn more about reply rules in our Help Center.

Subscriber-only comments

Different posts can elicit different kinds of conversation. You can now choose who gets to comment on each post, giving you more control over who participates. Set your comment section to include:

• Everyone (subscribers and non-subscribers)
• Free and paid subscribers
• Paid subscribers only
• No one

Carrie Jones, the publisher of Bar Harbor Story, a local media outlet serving the Mount Desert Island region of Maine and Acadia National Park, opens comments to free and paid subscribers.

Subscriber-only comments on Bar Harbor Story’s post ‘More Cars Is Never Going to Be the Answer’.

Carrie says, “Because we’re a community next to a national park, we have some hot-button issues. Having subscriber-only comments helps us cut down on bots and make community members feel safer when they comment. It becomes more like a playground with rules in the comment section, rather than a no-holds-barred WWF sort of showdown.”

Learn more about subscriber-only comments in our Help Center.

Podcast transcript advanced editing features

We’ve improved our transcript editing tools to make multi-speaker episodes easier to edit. You can now:

• Merge speakers when our transcript generator identifies more speakers than your podcast has
• Label unassigned speakers, reassign speakers, and correct labeling errors

Alex Kirshner, the co-host of Split Zone Duo, knows the pain of bad transcripts and how much time a tool like this can save a podcast creator who’s on a tight timeline covering college football: “Bad transcripts are gibberish, and a script that doesn’t understand proper nouns is useless. Every step toward a transcript that’s low-effort and high-trust is a step toward a less frustrating world. I’d much rather read my own words back to myself than endure the nails-on-chalkboard experience of listening back to specific sections or (heaven forbid) an entire show just to find something.”

Alex Kirshner can easily assign and merge speakers for episodes like Big 12 Preview 2026, including his co-host Richard Johnson.

Learn more about advanced podcast editing in our Help Center.

Typefully partnership

Substack is now integrated with Typefully, a platform used by creators to schedule and publish content across multiple platforms—like X, Threads, LinkedIn, and Bluesky—from one place. If you write a Note or post on X sharing your most recent work, you can increase discoverability where people already follow you. This also gives your audience a path back to your Substack.

If you have a story about how a specific feature or best practice helped you grow your Substack, let us know in a Note, in a post, or by restacking. Thanks for being here.

Original source

Earlier this week, we announced a feature that allows readers to scan text published to Substack to see how much of it is estimated to be written by hand or with AI assistance. We also launched tools for publishers, including the ability to run the program—Pangram—on drafts prior to publication, disable scanning on a post-by-post basis, and add a “How I make this” statement explaining their creative process to set expectations for their readers. These features do not use publisher content, either through Substack or Pangram, to train generative AI models and are now available on web, iOS, and Android.

Norms around AI use and its disclosure are unsettled. But we have made the assessment that while the use of AI isn’t necessarily a problem, a lack of transparency around it definitely is. Our aim is to help writers get credit for the work that’s theirs and help their audiences make more informed choices about what they spend their time on.

Substack has long been home to brilliant writers and thinkers exploring questions about AI disclosure, making a livelihood through writing, and whether technology can replace human effort in art.

Writers have methodically tested what AI can and can’t generate. Some have expressed concerns about AI-written prose and its impact on art and writing. Others have experimented with AI tools to understand their capabilities and limitations.

The common thread? We believe that human perspective is an essential ingredient of culture, and this will be true no matter how powerful AI becomes.

In the days since the AI scan feature was announced, we’ve seen many publishers putting the tools to use, and initial responses suggest that transparency is the right first step toward protecting writers and improving the experience for their readers.

We read all of your feedback, which we take seriously as we continue to evolve the product and host open conversation on this topic. Based on your comments, we made a change yesterday so that publishers can disable scanning on a post-by-post basis without having to scan the post first or interact with Pangram at all.

We also know that the use of AI tools is incredibly nuanced, with as many use cases as there are creators on the platform. You can create a strong “How I make this” statement, visible whenever someone scans a piece of your writing. Many publishers have already drafted their own statements, sharing their views on AI and explaining to their readers how, and whether, they use these tools:

“In my writing, the first draft is always mine. I use AI in editing, mostly for clarity. In preparing to write, I often test my ideas against AI and use it to gather background material, including some data analysis and charting that I direct. Any errors or omissions are mine.” — Claudia Sahm

“English is not my first language. I use AI as an editor to help me express my thinking in clear, professional English — the way a native-speaking writer would work with a copy editor. It shapes the prose, never the substance.” — Thierry from arvy

“No AI to see here darlings!” — Plum Sykes

“I use AI throughout my writing process: research, drafting, writing, editing. I typically start with 10-15 min of voice to transcript to capture my thoughts in their raw form, to ensure they are mine. Then I work with a model to draft and iterate until the writing accurately represents my thinking and intent. So, TL;DR if a scan flags this as AI-assisted, that’s accurate and expected.” — Nate

“I write gatekept using an open google doc, caffeinated beverages that no longer have any effect on me, and a prayer” — Morgan Vogel

“Welcome to The Female Edge. I want to be transparent about how this post was written: every idea here is mine, drawn from my own research, my clinical practice for 30 years, and my six published books. I use AI tools trained on my own writing to help me edit and publish more efficiently, the same way I’d use any other tool in my practice. The framework, models, critical thinking, clinical recommendations, and the care behind it are entirely my own. Thank you for being here.” — Sara Szal MD

“I use Claude like an editor uses a team of reporters, which is what I did for most of my career: send them out to gather stories, guide them in how to write those stories up, challenge them on their sources, thoroughly edit their drafts, write their headlines and standfirsts, hit the publish button, and then face the critics (and lawyers) the next day.” — Anthony Lawrance

“This involved a lot of hard, human work. Not AI.” — Jim Waterson

We’re invested in continuing the conversation. Our aim is to help build trust between you and your readers and create an environment that allows you to make the choices that are right for your creative work and your business. Starting next week, we’ll be kicking off a new series, Model Behavior, featuring top writers, creators, and thinkers addressing this conversation and exploring how they work in the age of AI.

And we’d like to continue to hear from all of you: restack, comment, share your “How I make this” statement, or tell us how you think Substack can best support writers and creators as they navigate the muddy waters of AI.

Original source

Whether you’re spending your Substack summer tinkering with your existing newsletter or podcast or launching your first one, we’re shipping features that make it easier to publish, customize, and distribute your work, and engage with your audience. We look forward to hearing what’s most useful and what you want more of. Here’s the latest.

Paid subscriber Perks

Subscriber Perks are a new feature that lets you give your paid audience something extra beyond traditional paywalled content, like discount codes, downloadable resources, or invites to live sessions. Perks you create will appear under the new “Perks” tab on your publication. It’s another way to thank the paid subscribers who support your work and encourage others to upgrade. This is available to publishers who have payments enabled.

Here are some perks publishers are already offering their paid subscribers:

• Anna Eleri Hart’s U.S. shopping guide
• I LIKE NETWORKING’s curated list of people to meet at SXSW London
• Caroline Chambers’s six-day meal plan

[From left] Perks available for paid subscribers of Anna Eleri Hart, I Like Networking, and Caroline Chambers

Learn more about subscriber perks in our Help Center.

Saved Notes

You can now save Notes on iOS and Android directly in the Substack app. Saved Notes live in your Substack profile. Just click on the ⋯ in the top right corner to access them.

This dedicated space for saved Notes within your profile is like your curated reading list, or as Ru Rao put it, the place to revisit a Note that’s an “absolute gem.”

Scheduled Chats

You can now schedule Chat threads just like you schedule Notes and posts. Scheduling chats is a great way to build community by connecting regularly with your audience between posts. Schedule a chat by going to the Chat tab, clicking the orange button to start a new Chat thread, and selecting “Schedule” in the thread settings

Shea Serrano, who writes Good Movie, scheduling a Chat thread

Polls

You can now post polls to Substack Notes. Polls are another way to continue the conversation with your audience by surfacing their opinions, preferences, and priorities. It’s just one click for them and can lead to a gold mine of ideas for you.

You can embed a poll in a Note or a post:

• In a Note, click on the Poll icon in the bottom of the Note screen.
• In a post, click “More” on the far right side of the text editor and select Poll from the dropdown menu.

Stephanie H. Murray, the writer of Family Stuff, recently restacked another publisher’s writing and polled her own audience to gauge their reaction to a parenting etiquette question. She received over 400 responses.

Text formatting

Superscript and subscript

Both superscript and subscript are now available in the post editor. If your writing regularly includes footnotes, scientific notation, exponents, ordinals (1ˢᵗ), or trademark symbols, select “Superscript” from the text editor dropdown. If you frequently use chemical formulas (H₂O) or mathematical notation (x₁), select “Subscript.” We hope this comes in handy for you deep writers, researchers, and thinkers.

Text colors and highlight text

You can now change colors and highlight text you want your readers to pay extra close attention to. You can find the text colors and highlight feature in the post text editor.

Podcasts

A redesigned podcast player

We made updates to our podcast and video player to increase engagement by giving your audience more controls. Subscribers can now adjust playback speed directly from the player, listen to episodes offline, and set a sleep timer to better control auto-advance behavior.

The redesigned podcast player puts the audience in the driver's seat with updated controls. Caleb Hearon’s subscribers can now download his extended interviews for offline viewing or add episodes to their playback queue.

Podcast distribution support

You can now distribute podcasts hosted anywhere to Substack with the same RSS feed and dynamically inserted ads. Get started here.

Distribute your podcast on Substack with the same RSS feed and ads

Tracking prefixes

You can also now add tracking prefixes directly to your show from your Substack dashboard. Tracking prefixes are third-party tools that give you accurate download data across all listening apps. This feature is a part of a growing toolkit to help you run and grow your podcast business on Substack.

You can toggle on tracking prefixes from your podcast settings

Filter subscriber questions in Chat

If you’re running a live video Q&A with your subscribers, you can now filter the chat to show questions only. It’s available on web, iOS, and Android.

Run a focused Q&A by filtering for questions only

Your video settings all in one place

We’ve unified all your video settings in the Substack editor, making editing and publishing more intuitive for creators. Here are some key changes:

• Podcast controls, free previews, clipping, and other options like transcripts and auto-publish to YouTube now live in one place.
• An improved clipping experience includes full-screen viewing, plus an immersive creation flow with control over captions and layout.

The updated video and clip editing experience, now with all settings in one place, as seen on Sarah Stewart Holland’s Good News Brief for Pantsuit Politics.

Learn more about podcasts in our Help Center.

MCP for stats and analytics

We’re introducing Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for bestsellers on Substack, offering new ways to understand your publication stats by integrating with tools like Claude and ChatGPT. You can get up-to-date analytics about your publication’s performance, subscribers, and engagement over time.

MCP for stats and analytics is available for bestsellers. Learn more about the Substack MCP in our Help Center.

There’s more to come soon. Let us know what’s working and what else you’d like to see, in a Note, in a post, or by restacking.

Original source

Today we’re introducing the next phase of Substack’s native sponsorships program, with an inaugural cohort of flagship partners who are collectively investing millions of dollars into creators on Substack. If you are a Substack bestseller who is interested in participating and shaping the program, you can publish your Creator Kit now.

The deal most of the internet offers creators goes something like this:

We’ll give you reach if you give us your audience. Perform for the algorithm. Hope for a minority share of a platform’s own revenue, or figure out the money part yourself. Build your following on our platform, under our rules, subject to our priorities—and if any of that changes, good luck.

Most creators accept this deal because they feel like they have no choice. The platforms are where the audiences are. And over time, the system shapes you. You learn to make things the algorithm rewards instead of things you believe in.

Substack is built on a different theory: Give publishers a direct connection to the people who believe in them. Let people pay for the work they value.

We know that model works. Now more than 100,000 publishers make money on Substack through the subscription model. The top 10 collectively make more than $100 million a year, while tens of millions of subscribers across the network give creators the opportunity to build both audience and business in one place.

At the same time, some of the most successful creators have been finding ways to expand their business and better serve their community by partnering with organizations that help them offer more perks, invest more deeply in their editorial, and introduce new features for subscribers.

Emily Sundberg’s sponsored letter with Hinge ranked as Feed Me’s fourth-most-engaged letter in 2024. She wrote about this herself that year: advertisements on Feed Me, done right, are not compromising her audience-first model.

Lenny Rachitsky built his own Product Pass — a collection of complementary product access and trials to companies like Granola, valued at more than $30,000 and offered as a perk to his Annual and Insider subscribers.

Dwarkesh Patel reimagined one of his most-read essays and brought it to life as a video.

Ochuko Akpovbovbo collaborated with a design partner to unveil a redesign for her publication, as seen on .

These creators, along with their independent agents and managers, handled this work themselves. They had to figure out the outreach, negotiate the terms, manage the relationships, and handle the logistics, on top of the work of showing up for their subscribers.

Making something great is hard enough. We want to help make the rest easy.

Substack’s native sponsorships program makes great partnerships simple. We’re excited to work with our flagship partners, including Yahoo Scout, Whatnot, Granola, Balenciaga, T-Mobile, Polymarket, and Uber. These forward-thinking brands recognize that some of the most interesting conversations happening on the internet are driven by writers and creators on Substack. They’ll be building with, and investing millions of dollars in, the creators who choose to participate

These are not arbitrarily inserted ads. They are direct partnerships between brands and publishers who have already built robust audience-first businesses.

Creators choose who they work with. They set the creative direction. They keep full editorial independence. Our job is to take care of what they shouldn’t have to—the matchmaking, the infrastructure, the logistics—so they can stay focused on the work.

To help these publishers control their experience with sponsorship-related revenue, we’ve built Creator Kits, a new tool for creating a media kit for potential brand partners, available today to bestsellers. By publishing your Creator Kit, you can let us know you’re interested in brand collaborations. It is also your entry point into what’s coming next: a partnership platform where you will be able to connect directly with brands investing in the Substack creator ecosystem.

Learn More: How do I set up a Creator Kit on Substack?

Subscriptions are the ultimate proof point of an audience-first media business. Sponsorships, when correctly aligned, can amplify the value of the direct relationship between publisher and audience, creating a stronger foundation for a growing business and community.

Other platforms have built a model that rewards performance. We’re building one that rewards trust.

The system should serve the people who use it, not the other way around. For creators, that means helping you make money doing the work you believe in.

Substack bestsellers, you can publish your Creator Kit today to signal your interest in brand collaborations and the forthcoming partnership platform launch. If you haven’t built your paid subscription base yet, here are some resources that can help you on your way.

As we build tools that make creator-brand partnerships easier and more effective, interested brands and agencies can learn more and connect with us here.

Original source

Since its founding, Substack has sought to create the best possible conditions for cultures of many varieties to flourish online. Doing so often involves difficult trade-offs, but on top of our core model—where we only earn when writers, artists, journalists, musicians, and so on earn—we’ve managed to chart a distinctive course relative to other platforms. We hope that people, their work, and the communities that form around it all can be more real here than has historically been possible elsewhere, where massive scales and advertising models seem to drain reality even from good-faith creators over time.

A few months ago, we shared this vision for what Substack can be: a place where you can build your own corner of the internet. That means your branding, your community, and your rules, without sacrificing the network that helps you grow. Today, we’re excited to announce the next feature in that effort, which we think will make it possible for even more people to be fully themselves and at home on Substack. We call it Reply Rules, and it combines a couple of elements:

1. Anyone can now set their own Reply Rules, which will appear to anyone replying to them: in comments on their posts, in replies to their Notes, or in Chat.
2. There is now a system that learns every time you hide a reply and preemptively hides replies it thinks you would hide yourself (you can always see these and un-hide them, which the system will also learn from).

Soon, this system will read your Reply Rules when you set them and use them as guidance for its actions, in addition to what it sees you do. Our hope is that it gives you more time to focus on what matters: creating the work that encourages people to stop by your corner of the internet in the first place.

Learn how to set up your Reply Rules here.

Your house, your rules

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Substack’s arc over the years that we try to think carefully about how moderation of various kinds can help or hurt writers, artists, journalists, musicians, and other creatives. To us, the following principles are of the utmost importance:

• Putting power in the hands of individuals and communities, rather than platform owners;
• Reducing administrative burdens—it shouldn’t require extensive learning, mastering interfaces, or fiddling with controls to have a good experience; and
• Facilitating clear zones of ownership. Substack may be lightly moderated, but in your house, your rules should apply.

Reply Rules reflect these values, and use contemporary technologies to make it easier than it’s ever been for Substacks to scalably set and maintain the kind of order that matters to them, using natural language and natural behaviors. Take a look at how some creators are already using Reply Rules to shape the conversations in their communities:

Write the rules you want. Hide the content you think shouldn’t be there. Let the system learn from you and, eventually, take much of the burden of this work off your plate.

Reply Rules are available today to all publications with their language set to English. To get started, go to your publication settings.

Original source

Who changed your life today? Who stretched your way of seeing the universe? Who challenged you to think deeper about the culture around you, or to question the state of the political world? Who introduced you to a new song, a brand-new way of cooking, or even a new rose to plant in your garden? If you’ve been on Substack for a while, my hope is you’ve found these people here.

Because that’s always been part of Substack’s mission: to make good on the internet’s promise as a place for the universal exchange of knowledge and ideas. We want to make it easier for you to stumble upon ideas that not only enrich your life but that challenge your thoughts and sharpen your thinking.

Today, we’re cracking open the world of ideas even further as we introduce new translation features, starting with the ability to translate Notes written in English into 15 languages, or into English from over 100 languages.

That means you can now read and engage with writers and creators anywhere from Trondheim to Tokyo. What’s more, in the coming weeks, we’ll also be adding translation to posts, meaning you can take a deeper dive into your favorite writers’ work, wherever they are across the globe.

For writers, this will open the world to your work. The post you publish in English will be able to find readers in Istanbul. The newsletter you write in Japanese can build an audience in Buenos Aires. A poet in Lisbon and a food writer in Marseille are no longer separated from each other—or from the readers who would love their work—by the language they happen to write their Notes in. The addressable readership for every writer will have grown meaningfully larger.

Because ideas should not be limited to geography or thwarted by language. Good, smart, interesting ideas should be allowed to flourish wherever there is a willing mind to engage.

I’ve had the chance to preview these features, and the writers I’ve discovered have already expanded my horizons. Just this weekend, I stumbled upon a discussion about the ethical responsibility of AI from an Italian writer I had hitherto not heard of. And I found intellectual kinship with a Dutch writer who somehow managed to articulate every thought and feeling I’ve had over the past few years about the blandification of culture. A young Japanese writer living in Barcelona taught me the word komorebi (it means “sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees,” and is apparently as much a philosophical dictum as it is a visual effect), whilst a chef in the south of France just made my life infinitely better by sharing an orange miso sauce that works like a dream with raw fish.

The point is, you don’t have to cross a border, get on a plane, or even speak another language now to connect with ideas that might change your life. Translations bring the world of ideas to your doorstep.

We’re still in the early days, and translation, especially at scale, is technically and culturally complex. And we have many more languages to go. But the translation of Notes is an exciting starting place, and your feedback can help us make it even better: when you see a translated Note, click the “translated” icon to tell us how we did.

The appetite for this kind of exchange is already clear in the numbers. Writers and creators everywhere are building real audiences and livelihoods on Substack. As of today, nearly 100,000 publishers are earning money on Substack globally, including almost 30,000 outside the U.S. In Europe, creators are now collectively earning more than $90 million annually.

And we’re continuing to invest in that community. We’re bringing on close to completion on nine new partnerships hires to support writers and creators in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordics, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Japan, joining a dedicated U.K. team. Alongside these new hires, we are also expanding Substack Defender, our legal support program for publishers who face legal uncertainty or pressure because of their work—a core pillar of our commitment to a free press.

All of this is in service of what the internet, at its best, can do: make the world wider and closer at the same time. If you’ve been thinking about starting your own Substack and sharing your ideas with a global audience, come to one of our upcoming international masterclasses. We’d love to meet you.

UPCOMING MASTERCLASS DATES

Europe

Head of Partnerships, Spain: Marcos García @Substack
Thursday, April 23 | 15:30 CEST [RSVP]

Head of Partnerships, France: Renée Kaplan
Wednesday, May 20 | 17:00 CEST [RSVP]

Head of Partnerships, Italy: Chiara Santoro
Wednesday, May 20 | 15:00 CEST [RSVP]

Head of Partnerships, Netherlands: Margot James
Thursday, May 28 | 17:00 CEST [RSVP]

North America

Head of Partnerships, Canada: Mark Swierszcz
Thursday, May 14 | 12:00 PM EDT [RSVP]

Asia-Pacific

Head of Partnerships, Australia and New Zealand: Annabelle Russell
Tuesday, May 5 | 8:00 PM AEST [RSVP]

Original source

This month, we’re shipping a range of updates that give you more control over your publishing workflow—from scheduling Notes in advance to new live video tools, post templates, and design details that make your publication feel unmistakably yours. Here’s what’s new.

Post templates

You can now create and save templates for longform posts, directly within the post editor. If your workflow includes recurring elements like calls to action, disclaimers, section structures, sponsorship placements, or code blocks, you can save them once and reuse them in new drafts instantly.

This removes repetitive setup work and helps you stay consistent without starting from scratch each time. Build your format once, and reuse it whenever you need it.

Drop caps

Enable a drop cap—the large, stylized first letter that opens a piece of writing—for your Substack publication. You can turn this on in the Website Editor in your publication settings. From there, click “Posts,” toggle on “Drop caps,” and click “Save.” Visible on web, drop caps are a small detail that can give your writing a more considered, editorial feel.

Live video: more control over how you stream and manage events

We’ve expanded Substack Live with new tools for publications running regular video programming:

• Choose where you stream: You can now decide which publication to go live from each time you stream, instead of being limited to your primary publication. This is available across iOS, Android, and web.
• From the new live video management dashboard page on desktop, you can now:
  • Schedule on behalf of a host. Contributors and admins can now schedule a livestream for another creator on your publication.
  • Edit scheduled streams. You can now update the title, timing, host, and notification settings for any scheduled stream after it’s been created. If a host needs to swap out or a time needs to shift, you can handle it directly from the dashboard without canceling and starting over.
  • Have quick access to stream keys. Contributors, admins, owners, and hosts can now view and copy stream keys directly.

Schedule Notes

You can now schedule Notes to publish at a specific time, on web, iOS, and Android. Write in advance, set a publishing time, and your Note will go out automatically. All scheduled Notes appear in your Notes Drafts tab, where you can continue editing right up until they publish.

• On web, click the 📅 icon in the composer
• On iOS and Android, tap “…” and select “Schedule”
• Choose a publishing time in your local time zone
• Find and edit your scheduled Notes anytime in the Drafts tab

Refine your feed with clearer controls

The “show less” control in your feed is now more visible and easier to use. When you see a Note you’re not interested in, tap the X to tell us why—whether it’s not relevant, feels like clickbait, or just isn’t what you’re looking for. Your feedback helps shape what you see going forward, so your feed stays focused on the work you care about.

Subscribe homepage block

The subscribe block—a customizable banner that prompts homepage visitors to subscribe—allows you to tailor your message to free, paid, and founding members. Now you can also customize its color and add a logo, giving you more ways to make it feel like yours.

Callout block

Add callout blocks to your posts: visually distinct, formatted containers that let a piece of text stand apart from the rest of your writing. Use them to highlight a key idea, surface a quote from another writer, flag a note to readers, or draw attention to something you want to make sure doesn’t get skipped. It’s a clean way to add visual rhythm or reference something you want your audience to see.

These updates are available now

We’re continuing to build tools that give you more control over how you publish and how you connect with your audience. As always, let us know what’s working and what you’d like to see next, in a Note, in a post, or by restacking.

Original source