I'm especially curious about which ones are earning "life-changing" money for their authors. I couldn't find an easy way to list Substack newsletters by subscriber count, though. (By revenue would be even better.)
Roughly three categories:
1. Newsletters that cost a lot of money and (claim to) deliver a lot of value, examples being any number of finance/investing newsletters.
2. Massive newsletters with broad appeal. I imagine Scott Alexander, Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, et al., are doing very well for themselves.
3. Anyone in an industry with extremely lucrative advertising opportunities. And any closely-followed reviewer of very expensive tech products (high sales price * affiliate cut) is probably doing well too.
Newsletters have been a very lucrative business for a very long time. The successful ones tend to be about business strategies and case studies. People will pay for actionable business information that they can copy, apply, and profit.
Most digital newsletters are merely collections of online content or writings from one person doing things that don’t have an earning potential for readers. That’s why they don’t tend to make any money.
