The Colin and Samir Show · Colin and Samir

The Business of Email: How Substack Changed Everything

November 5, 2025·45 min·3 clips

Substack now has over 50,000 revenue-generating newsletters, with 50 making over a million dollars a year.

Email is the product here. The cold open treats inbox publishing like a real business, not a dusty side channel, with Substack out front right now. The model is simple. Readers subscribe to writers they trust, writers keep most of the revenue, and Substack takes ten percent for tools, discovery, and growth. That changes the customer relationship. The writer is paid directly by the audience, and that audience can leave whenever it wants. The scale is already visible. Substack is described as having more than 50,000 revenue generating newsletters, with more than 50 making over a million dollars a year through paid subscriptions. Then the conversation gets more grounded. Rachel explains that she sells ads independently, but paid subscribers are the bigger part of her business. That catches the hosts off guard. They read it as a stability signal, since direct reader revenue is less tied to ad swings and platform payout limits. The creator thesis gets sharper from there. Smaller creators with defined, committed audiences may be easier to sponsor than giant creators reaching broad, harder to read crowds. The hosts call that a move toward smaller tribes. Direct transactions matter more if the next chapter of the creator economy rewards tight groups over massive reach. Platform payouts look limited for smaller audiences by comparison. Advertising can move up and down, while a paying readership gives a creator a clearer base. Then the tone turns personal. A riff on em dashes becomes a shorthand for voice, personality, and the kind of conversational writing newsletters can hold onto. The close stays practical. Rachel likes concise newsletter length because long editions can become something readers save for later and never finish. Even metrics have blind spots. Completion rate matters, but newsletter writers cannot fully see when readers actually finish. The last beat is competitive and warm. The hosts send Rachel toward the leaderboards, where she jokes about checking rankings and stepping into the ring.

As heard by us

A grounded look at why Substack made email feel like real creator economy infrastructure.

The episode treats email as a serious creator economy business, with Substack as the main case study. Colin and Samir lay out the basic math: more than 50,000 revenue generating newsletters, more than 50 making over $1 million a year, and a 10 percent platform cut that leaves…

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Why you'd press play

You want the business math behind newsletters, not a platform victory lap.

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