I’m analyzing over 50K Substack newsletters!

In Newsletter Circle, I’ve been interviewing newsletter creators and asking deep-dive questions about how they build successful newsletter businesses from scratch.

So far, I’ve interviewed over 50 newsletter creators and asked about:

• how they hit the road and started a newsletter

• growth and monetization strategies

• key metrics and tools they utilize

• how their newsletters changed their professional and personal lives

• key learnings and recommendations

But, on my way to building Newsletter Circle as a full-fledged media business for newsletter creators, these interviews are just a single part of the puzzle.

There is a need to see the big picture to have a better understanding of what’s going on in the newsletter landscape.

With this aim, I decided to create a huge newsletter database and analyze the insights.

After a quick exploration phase, I began building this database by first identifying Substack newsletters, which are easier to gather data from.

With this aim, I gathered over 50,000 newsletters from Substack and some key data related to them. 

Let’s have a look at a few initial findings:

• 90% of newsletters are in English.

  The second most common language is Portuguese, followed by Spanish, French, Italian and German.

• 27% of the newsletters disclose the number of subscribers they have on the landing page.

  50% of these 13,400 newsletters have subscribers between 1,000 and 2,500.

  20.7% has 2,500 - 5,000 subscribers, which is the second biggest group.

• 42% of newsletters offer a paid plan.

All of the above figures include both active and inactive newsletters. However,

• 41% of all newsletters didn’t send any issues in March, indicating a potential of over 20,000 inactive newsletters.

So, in the upcoming report, I’ll delve into the details of active and inactive newsletters separately and look for the following:

• Publishing frequencies

• Language preferences

• Age of the newsletters

• List sizes

• Topic Categories

• List sizes for paid & free subscriptions

• Pricing details for paid newsletters

• Preferred social media channels

• Usage of recommendations features

There is more to add, and the number of newsletters analyzed will probably double. I also plan to add Beehiiv and ConvertKit newsletters to the database in the future.

I will compile a detailed report from these findings that will provide numerous key insights about the newsletter space.

This report will be a gold mine for you to: 

• understand the space you’re part of

• explore other creators' behaviors and strategies

• identify opportunities in the market