Which individual Substack newsletters had the largest paid subscriber bases in 2025?
Executive summary
Public reporting in 2025 points to a small group of individual Substack newsletters that dominated on raw paid-subscriber metrics, but there is no single, verifiable public ledger; Substack itself did not publish precise per-title paid counts, and most rankings are compiled from platform clues, creator disclosures and third‑party estimates [1] [2]. Press Gazette’s 2025 roll-up and several industry trackers identify recurring names — including Internet Princess, Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell, Michael Burry’s paid newsletter and high-profile politics titles — but the precise ordering and margins between them remain estimations [1] [3] [4].
1. The evidence the public has: opaque platform signals and piecemeal disclosures
Substack stopped publishing granular per‑title paid figures, so media outlets and researchers relied on creator disclosures, Substack’s broad “thousands/tens/hundreds of thousands” labels, platform leaderboards and data vendors like Reletter to assemble rankings [2] [5]; Press Gazette’s February 2025 survey produced a list of 52 publishers it judged to be earning at least £500,000 based on available clues, explicitly noting the limitations of public data [1]. Independent analyses and company summaries helped frame scale: Substack reported roughly 5 million paid subscriptions across the platform in 2025, a backdrop that implies a long tail of smaller paid lists and a handful of very large ones [3] [6].
2. Which individual titles were regularly cited among the largest
Coverage repeatedly flags a handful of individual newsletters as among the biggest in paid numbers: Rayne Fisher‑Quann’s Internet Princess was claimed to have “well over 100,000 subscribers” in a culture piece [4], Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell was reported at about 75,000 subscribers in business reporting [3], and Michael Burry’s paid newsletter was cited with roughly 76,500 subscribers by one industry roundup [3]. Press Gazette’s catalogue also lists prominent political Substacks — Slow Boring (Matthew Yglesias) and new high‑profile launches such as Jen Rubin’s The Contrarian — that were said to have “tens of thousands” of paying readers based on platform indicators and creator statements [1].
3. Outliers and surprising claims that need caution
Some numbers in the wild are striking and deserve skepticism: one analysis claimed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fitness newsletter had “over 1 million subscribers” on the platform, a scale far beyond most creator disclosures and not corroborated elsewhere in the reporting set [3]. Press Gazette warned that many high‑earners also monetize via sponsorships and corporate deals that aren’t captured by subscriber tallies, meaning revenue rankings and subscriber rankings can diverge sharply [1].
4. What “largest” meant in practice — subscribers vs revenue vs reach
Reporters and analysts used different yardsticks: Press Gazette prioritized minimum annual earnings inferred from pay tiers and disclosed subscriber ranges [1], FourWeekMBA and other trade pieces sometimes quoted headline subscriber counts for reach comparisons [3], while Reletter and Substack’s own “top” listings emphasize total email list size or chart position [5] [7]. This means a title could appear as a “largest” newsletter by raw list size but rank lower on paid‑subscriber or revenue lists if it under‑monetized its audience [8].
5. Bottom line and the reporting blind spot
The best-supported conclusion for 2025 is that a small set of individual Substacks — notably Internet Princess (Rayne Fisher‑Quann), Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell and several high‑profile finance and political newsletters such as Michael Burry’s and Slow Boring — were among the platform’s largest paid audiences according to public reporting and creator claims, but exact rankings and counts are estimates because Substack does not disclose per‑title paid numbers and third‑party datasets vary [4] [3] [1] [5] [2]. Readers should treat individual headcounts published outside Substack as indicative rather than definitive, and note that revenue lists (Press Gazette) and raw‑subscriber lists (Reletter, Substack charts) can point to different leaders [1] [5].