The State of Substack for PR

Original research · Find Substacks database

Data from Featured's Find Substacks database of 38,746 Substack publications. October 2026.

Based on 38,746 Substack publications, October 2026 · 12 min read

• 90.8% Have Substack DMs open (35,198 of 38,746 publications)
• 4,000 Median free subscribers (Across 35,654 publications with a recorded count)
• 481.9M Combined free subscriber count (Sum across all publications, not unique readers)

Reachability: nine in ten writers take direct messages

Substack direct messages are the primary route to a newsletter writer, and 35,198 publications (90.8%) have them open. Counting linked social accounts as a second channel, 37,314 publications (96.3%) can be reached by DM or at least one social account, leaving only 1,432 (3.7%) with neither. Reachability holds at the top of the market too: of the 9,481 publications with 10,000 or more subscribers, 89.4% have DMs open.

Figure 2. Publications by free subscriber tier (cumulative thresholds)

Free subscribers	Publications	Share of database
1,000 or more	35,654	92.0%
5,000 or more	16,156	41.7%
10,000 or more	9,481	24.5%
25,000 or more	3,904	10.1%
50,000 or more	1,784	4.6%
100,000 or more	733	1.9%
250,000 or more	195	0.5%
500,000 or more	50	0.1%
1,000,000 or more	10	0.0%