Substack is seeing explosive subscriber growth this year, with the crazy political environment and a strategic push into audio and video helping it do so.
Substack co-founder Hamish Mckenzie tells The Hollywood Reporter that the platform has passed 5 million paid subscribers. That is up from 4 million just four months ago, and 3 million a year ago.
A year ago, Substack says that half of its top 250 creators used audio and video as part of their regular content. Now that number is 82 percent, underscoring just how much audio and video content have transformed the platform.
“There’s been a large, big start of the year because of the political volatility. So there’s a bunch of people looking to make sense of what’s going on. There’s a bunch of either anti-Trump sentiment or pro-Trump sentiment that is driving people to look for new voices, and a bit of a shake up from mainstream media institutions that are not doing as well as they once were,”…