Why Your Substack Subscriber Numbers Have Fallen Off a Cliff
Or slowed or stalled or...
Why your overall subscriber growth has plateaued, flatlined, or totally crashed
The truth about the Substack growth bubble
What to do next
Please read this entire post. It’s long because you need to understand the full picture. All the information shared is publicly available. I don’t work or speak for Substack. Opinions are my own.
Hello!
Before we get into this, let me just say that the subscriber drop-off happening isn’t doom and gloom or a sign that you shouldn’t be on Substack—quite the opposite:
The mid-2025 Substack slowdown will actually (I hope) quiet the Substack noise, the cacophony of people who post about how they gained 300 or 3000 or 30,000 new subscribers in a month and earned a gazillion dollars, and you can too.
It will make you (I hope) more skeptical of the people who arrived on Substack in the past year or year-and-a-half who are making money supposedly telling you how to grow because x or y worked for them or giving you AI-produced slop.
Why you don’t have to worry
Worry pretends to be necessary. I’ve got you.
I’ve been on Substack a long time. Through all the extreme changes and turbulence, I’ve helped my clients and subscribers grow. That will continue.
Each week, I work with a lot of clients and see what’s happening across all Substacks and will keep you up to date.
Substack has always been a work in progress.
So please don’t waste your precious time and creative energy worrying—or complaining—about what’s happening.
The elephant in the Substack room
For many Substack writers and creators, overall subscriber growth has plateaued, flatlined, or totally crashed.
What I mean by plateau, flatline, and crash:
Some (not all) Substack writers and creators are seeing an 80 to 90 percent decrease in the total number of new subscribers they’re getting each month.
That’s a lot.
What type of subscriber growth I mean:
All subscriber growth. I’ll be doing a deep dive into why your paid subscriber growth has stalled (or plummeted) next week.
When this started:
For some, the subscriber drop-off started in March; for others, in May or the past few weeks.
Who’s affected:
Obviously, I have no idea if everyone is experiencing this, but judging from my clients, what Substack bestsellers have shared, and what’s happening among my tens of thousands of subscribers, small, medium, and large Substacks—though it may look harrowingly dramatic for larger Substacks. (I’m one of these larger Substacks.)
This from last week’s Substack Bestsellers chat:
Why it’s happening:
We’ll get into that in a moment. First, we need to talk about the Substack growth bubble.
The Substack growth bubble
What might be called a Substack growth bubble started around November 2024. Notes started to pick up. It seemed like you could just start a Substack, and you could grow.
February 2025 brought the viral-Notes phenomenon where people were getting tens and hundreds and thousands of new subscribers from a single Note.
(With the good came some bad. Ease of growth created a lot of the annoying grow-fast-on-Substack noise.)
Pre-bubble, you could still grow on Substack—a lot
Before November 2024, for most people, growth was slow but good.
“Good” is probably an understatement. The opportunity Substack gives us, whether growth is slow or viral-fast, is unprecedented. Compare: In 2015, when I first learned that building an active email list was worth my time far more than chasing followers on some social media platform, I took Amy Porterfield’s email list-building course. The goal of the course? To get one hundred people on your email list. One hundred free subscribers. Paid subscriptions weren’t even on the table.
Substack changed all that.
Note: In case you’re wondering, it wasn’t easier to grow on Substack if you were an early adopter. We didn’t have Notes. (For those brand new to Substack, welcome! Notes is our internal social media network and drives people to your Substack but isn’t really part of your Substack.) For most, recommendations hadn’t yet become a serious growth engine. So don’t feel like you missed out on anything.
Why the recent slowdown is happening and what to do now
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