The paid-newsletter economy, by the numbers

We pulled the full public archives of 14 well-known Substacks — 700 posts in all — straight from Substack's own public API. Here's what the data says about how the biggest independent newsletters actually publish, charge, and get read.

Engagement varies wildly — reactions per post

Average reactions per post span a 88× range across the sample — the median newsletter sees ~254, but a single breakout (Heather Cox Richardson's daily letter) clears 4,300. Engagement, not price, is where these publications truly diverge.

How much do they put behind the paywall?

Share of the last ~50 posts marked paid-subscriber-only. The median is 34% — most of these newsletters give the majority of their posts away free and monetize a minority.

1. Big Technology 92% paid
2. Bari Weiss 86% paid
3. Slow Boring 82% paid
4. The Pragmatic Engineer 62% paid
5. The Generalist 46% paid
6. The Honest Broker 46% paid
7. The Bulwark 40% paid
8. Noahpinion 28% paid
9. Experimental History 20% paid
10. Astral Codex Ten 18% paid
11. Marcus on AI 2% paid
12. One Useful Thing 0% paid
13. Platformer 0% paid
14. Letters from an American 0% paid

How often do they post?

Median posting cadence across the sample is 3.3 posts per week — but the mean (10.7) is dragged up by high-volume, multi-contributor outlets like The Bulwark and the Free Press family that publish many pieces a day. The classic single-author essay newsletter (One Useful Thing, Experimental History) posts closer to once every week or two.

Want the raw data?

Point our Newsletter Data tool at any public Substack and get its full post archive plus benchmark analytics — paid/free ratio, posting cadence, and reactions per post — as clean, structured records. No login, no scraping headaches.

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