Substack's Ideological Anti-Ad Choice
Justin Gage, founder of Technically, on how Substack earns its 10% take rate
Substack treated ads as a product choice about what kind of writing business it wanted to create, not just as a missing feature. The platform was built around reader payments, a 10% cut, and a premium writer brand, which made ads feel like a cultural mismatch even though writers were already selling sponsorships manually. That left an opening for Beehiiv and Kit to package ad demand, list growth, and software into a more practical creator toolkit.
-
The practical gap was real. Writers on Substack could sell sponsors, but they had to do the work themselves, inserting logos, copy, and links by hand instead of using a built in marketplace or trafficking tool. That supports the idea that the absence of ads was a choice in platform design, not a technical limitation.
-
Beehiiv was designed from the other direction. By 2024, about 30% of its revenue came from ads, and by June 2025 about a third of revenue came from its Ad Network and Boosts marketplace, where brands buy placements and newsletters pay for subscriber acquisition. Ads were part of the business model from the start.
-
The strategic consequence is that anti ads positioning became harder to maintain as the market matured. Research from 2023 through 2025 shows Substack moving from a brand led subscription model toward piloting and building ad products, mainly to keep larger writers from leaving for lower take rate platforms with better monetization rails.
The market is heading toward hybrid newsletter platforms where subscriptions, sponsorships, and paid distribution sit in one stack. That favors platforms that help creators make money in multiple ways without leaving the product. Substack’s future edge is likely to come from turning its prestige and audience graph into an ad product that feels native to paid publishing, not from staying purely anti ads.