MUMBAI: The social media landscape is shifting, and Substack is seizing the moment. With Tiktok’s future in the U.S. hanging in the balance, the San Francisco-based startup is doubling down on video, aiming to lure creators looking for new ways to monetise their content. On 20 February, Substack announced that creators can now post video content directly through its app and place videos behind a paywall.
“There’s going to be a world of people who are much more focused on videos,” said Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie. “That is a huge world that Substack is only starting to penetrate.”
One of those creators is Carla Lalli Music, a food content creator and cookbook author, who made a dramatic switch from Youtube to Substack. After posting nearly 200 videos, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers, and generating millions of views, Music quit Youtube. Why? The numbers didn’t add up. She earned almost $200,000 in revenue in just one year on Substack, a stark contrast to the losses she incurred producing videos for Youtube since 2021.
“If I published four videos a month on Youtube, I’d earn about $4,000, but each video cost $3,500 to make,” Music said. “I was losing $10,000 a month.” Even with brand deals, the earnings barely covered production costs. Now, with her content behind a paywall, she’s focusing on writing another book, posting exclusive recipes, and selectively producing videos for Substack subscribers.
Founded in 2017, Substack initially served as a newsletter platform where writers could charge readers a monthly subscription fee. The company raised $100 million, with its most recent valuation exceeding $650 million. Today, more than four million paid subscribers and over 50,000 creators generate income on the platform.
With the uncertain future of Tiktok, Substack is aggressively expanding its offerings. Following Tiktok’s brief removal from Apple and Google’s app stores in January, Substack launched a $20 million fund to attract creators looking for a stable platform.
“If Tiktok gets banned for political reasons, there’s nothing to do with the work you’ve done, but it really affects your life,” McKenzie said. “The only and surefire guard against that is if you don’t place your audience in the hands of some other volatile system who doesn’t care about what happens to your livelihood.”
Now, Substack is courting video-first creators from competing platforms, offering them a place to own their audience without algorithms deciding who sees their content. Already, 82 per cent of Substack’s top 250 revenue-generating creators have integrated audio or video into their content.
Unlike its previous video feature that only allowed clips in Notes-Substack’s front-facing feed—the new update lets creators monetise videos, track viewership, and measure revenue impact.
For creators burned by unreliable earnings on other platforms, Substack’s paywalled video model offers a sustainable alternative. The company is betting that in a world where direct-to-fan revenue drives more than half of the $290 billion creator economy, the ability to monetise video will make its platform even more attractive.
