Substack is a Greenhouse

Since 2017, the blogging platform Substack has been running the playbook “borrow lots of money, and spend it to pay people to post on your site, causing it to grow and your site to seem big and important.” The web boom of the 2000s was funded by Google which needed to give people reasons to make Google searches, see Google ads, and be surveilled by Google Analytics. In 2021 Substack spent $3 in advances to bloggers for every $1 they earned from those blogs. In the past this has always ended in tears, and the people who run and fund the site have shady ideas and ugly politics. You can find many people talking about specific Substack bloggers, their ideas, and whether Substack should host them.¹ Not as many people talk about how the site as a whole is weird in a way which feels normal to wealthy and influential people in New York City and Southern California.

Who Writes Top Substack Blogs?

Substack has a leaderboard and 29 official categories. Afficionados tell each other that picking a category with less competition helps your blog grow. I had a look at the ten highest-earning Substack blogs in two different categories as of 9 October 2025.² Its difficult to quickly learn about who runs these accounts because Substack does not encourage bloggers to share an autobiography on the site (the “about” section is usually brief and about the blog). When they have websites, Substackers often do not list their nationality, education, or place or residence. However, I can usually get a general sense of an author’s background.

The History Category is as follows:

1. Darryl Cooper, a US Navy veteran and untrained historian interested in the 20th century. Cooper thinks that Holocaust denier David Irving was wronged by unnamed “pressure groups” (Victor Davis Hanson thinks Cooper “does not know the facts about World War Two” and I expect I would agree with Hanson on that one!)³
2. Adam Tooze, a professional historian who is leaning in the direction of a trade writer or pundit. He is English but works in the USA.
3. The Culturist: an anonymous group blog about writings and writers you would find in a Great Books curriculum from the 20th century like the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Tolkien. One author is an Evan Amato who wants the Internet to judge Christopher Columbus by the standards of his time (contemporaries had him hauled back to Spain in chains for crimes too many and vicious to list here, although not everyone today agrees he was guilty of every charge)
4. Curtis Yarvin: an untrained far-right blogger from California who shares very strange ideas in very many words
5. Christopher Schwarz, the American woodworker from Lost Art Press
6. Jemar Tisby, PhD: A Black American historian of race and religion in the United States
7. Niall Ferguson: a pundit with a PhD in history and a CV full of positions at wealthy institutions in the USA and UK
8. Khalil Greene, an impressive young Black man with a bachelor’s degree in History from Yale
9. Lucy Worsley, a trained historian and beloved TV presenter in the UK
10. Robertas Petruskas: a Lithuanian sports commentator with a bachelor’s degree in History who is writing a series about WW II in Europe

The top 20 include Kamil Kazani (a Tatar from Russia who tells American officials that Russia is about to break up and release nations like the Tatars from the Prison of Nations) and Dan Jones of the Hardcore History podcast. Three of the top ten have written about World War II. Worsley seems to be the only out woman in the top 20 although some of the team at The Culturist could be women.

The Culture Category has more of a balance between genders:

1. Selvaggia Lucarelli: an Italian journalist
2. Blocked and Reported, a podcast about corporate social media culture by Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, two professional sharers of opinions from the United States
3. Jessica Reed Kraus, “an American writer, Instagram influencer, and former mommyblogger” (Wikipedia)
4. Anne Helen Peterson, an American journalist formerly of BuzzFeed with a PhD in the history of the gossip industry
5. Matt Welch, “an American blogger, journalist, author, and Libertarian political pundit” (Wikipedia) who dropped out of college and now lives in Brooklyn
6. Niall Harbison, who touched the hearts of social media by feeding feral dogs while recovering from the effects of substance use
7. Sam Harris, an American writer on politics with a PhD in neuroscience
8. Jessica Valentini, a onetime feminist blogger who blogs about abortion rights in the USA and had to quit other social media after receiving graphic threats
9. Diaboloical Lies, a podcast by by American writers caro claire burke and Katie Gatti Tassin on topics like the “Disney-Industrial complex” and someone called Bari Weiss.
10. Triggernometry, a British podcast about topics in the news like “renewables aren’t as cheap as they say!” {{citationNeeded}} and the Rochdale grooming gangs

The next 10 include Old Media figures like feminist conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf and social media people like hereditarian Marxist Freddie deBoer. Looking at these high-earning bloggers is a very good way to get a feel for the site and the sort of things that it rewards, and stepping away from controversies about specific individuals or topics.

Substack is for Americans

I think its clear that the people who make lots of money on Substack are overwhelmingly Americans. Nine out of ten of the top-earning writers in both categories are either Americans or from rich English-speaking countries like the UK (and many of those have worked in the USA). It especially helps if those writers appeal to the chattering class in New York City and LA, or the West Coast surveillance and propaganda industry (people inside that industry sometimes call it tech). The Age of Invention blog by trained historian Anton Howes is great, but he is British writing about technological progress and economic growth in 16th-18th century Europe. Those make great conversation starters at a house party in Oakland whereas many aspects of history do not. The most exotic writer in English Wikipedia’s page on Substack is Salman Rushdie, born in pre-partition India, educated at Rugby and Cambridge, and migrated to New York City in 2000.

Most of these successful bloggers don’t bother to state their nationality, any more than a Roman in the fourth century CE thought of himself as having a nation (nations were for pagans and barbarians, being Christian and Roman was the right and proper state of mankind). Discouraging writers from sharing information about themselves discourages diversity, because if you need information to orient yourself, and that information is hard to find, you are likely to go somewhere else rather than work hard to understand what you are reading. We have all met people who like social media and respond to anything unfamiliar with a burst of sexual, ethnic, gender, and class stereotypes because that is easy and connecting with strangers as individuals is hard.⁴

The two high-earning Substack bloggers outside the Anglosphere do not even have English Wikipedia pages. That suggests to me that their audiences are in Lithuania and Italy not global, and that being famous on the Italian or Lithuanian Internet did not make English-speakers acknowledge their existence. As a historian and a craft worker and a fencer I was trained to take the best ideas from around the world, not the ideas that happen to be taught locally in my native language. Clearly, not everyone was trained the same way.

Brown people can make money on Substack. But it really helps if they have British or US citizenship and write about things that white Britons and Americans like to talk about such as race relations. I think that a Sikh talking about the Sikh diaspora and the Khalistani movement and the Indian government’s pressure on Sikhs would have a hard time making money on the site, because that is not something that professional sharers of opinion in New York City are used to sounding informed about.

Out of 29 categories, Substack has just three on politics: US, Health, and International. That would fly in a provincial newspaper like the Globe and Mail, but would look odd in The Economist. The world is so much bigger and more diverse than a handful of privileged people in three or four cities in the USA and UK!

Even the political controversies are controversies that a certain type of American likes to talk about in public. The Libertarian movement is very visible on American social media, even though it struggles to elect a dogcatcher, and the Green movement is less visible, even though it elects legislators and helps form governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Those legislators and governments are not in the USA, and the people who became fascinated by Libertarianism as young men are. Many Americans are fascinated with pseudoscience about race and IQ from a hundred years ago, so you can find people arguing about those ideas on Substack too.⁵ Even Substack’s proudly stated stance on free speech only makes sense within American thinking on that subject, and most of the critics accept that framing and respond with another perspective within the American tradition. That is not helpful if you want to find the best way of thinking about speech, but its helpful if you are Americans fighting over a microphone which some influential Americans listen to.

This Is Not Natural

There are all kinds of reasons why around 60% of donations in crowdfunding come from North America and almost all of the rest from Europe or East Asia.⁶ The United States still dominates the Internet, social media, and global finance. However, 60% American with many foreign influences is not 90% American with a few Brits and Canadians. One study of other social media noticed that Italian soccer commentator “Fabrizio Romano is mentioned by respondents in almost every country in our survey including South Africa, Kenya, Norway, and the United States.”⁷ How does a site become more American than Stack Overflow or Kickstarter?

I grew up in online communities which were gently tended like a garden. The founders usually had a plan, but something always died away, something always grew better than expected, and the birds or the raccoons always left a little gift with some strange seeds. Again and again, companies opened an online community and found that it refused to be a marketing arm for the owner and nothing but a marketing arm: people had arguments and new enthusiasms and someone had to keep the peace.⁸ My blogroll is very international, as is my Mastodon feed.⁹ The history of the open web is full of stories like “so Linguistics sent me to Asian Studies, and it turns out that our blogging platform is being used for opposition organizing in Thailand!” or “although we Japanese think of Mastodon as our site, it was actually invented by a German using a protocol designed by an American: who knew!” Armour scholars often find that someone on the Russian service VKontakt has shared a helpful photo. If a community is built around an interest or the affordances of a tool, it will spread across nations and cultures, because people around the world are interested in crochet or cat pictures or Bollywood films, and people around the world find Pandoc useful for converting files between formats. Even Wikipedia for all its faults is multinational and the different nations communicate with one another because often an English Wikipedia article is translated from the French or a Swiss Wikipedian can add some details about Erich von Däniken which have not yet appeared in English-language media.

Substack is more like a greenhouse where orderly racks of plants are tended with fertilizer and pesticide. It was founded by a handful of SoCal surveillance and propaganda workers, funded by SoCal people, and recruits specific types of writers. It has specific strategies like not seeking out sports writers because another site is preferred by sports writers in the USA.¹⁰ As yet the community does not seem to have broken free from the company and its Five-Year Plans. The plants in a greenhouse are there because the owner wanted them to be there and gave them everything they needed to thrive.

The trouble with greenhouses is that they need maintaining and plants can’t grow inside them forever. Its easy to look powerful if you are flooded with resources and don’t have to compete against anything you are not expecting. Substack recently borrowed even more money from a few very rich people, and if they had failed, I don’t think the site would have survived in its present form. (The non-profit platform Ghost, on the other hand, borrowed $300,000 on Kickstarter in 2013 and became self-sustaining a year later).¹¹ One reason why I ignored an offer from Substack is that I don’t trust the site and any rewards it can offer to last.

It is absolutely possible to ignore the controversies and the long-term future and write my sort of thing on Substack. Joumana Medlej’s Carwansaray blog is full of curiosity, practical knowledge, and aesthetic pleasure (she is Lebanese but lives in Oxford and has received resources from a variety of British and US institutions). But if you are trying to decide how to think about the site, try rolling around the idea that it reflects the range of ideas which fashionable people talk about in San Francisco or New York City. It has Nazis and hucksters and people with odd ideas about gender because a cocktail party in those cities has Nazis and hucksters and people with odd ideas about gender. Those ideas and people brought our civilization to the brink of destruction, and they are not going to help us build a better one from the ruins.

Isidore of Seville had his bishopric in Spain, but I just have a few fruit trees and a humble day job. If you can, please support this site.

(scheduled 10 October 2025; based on a Mastodon thread)

Edit 2025-11-02: linked Cultutist author Evan Amato

Edit 2025-11-03: formatted some links in footnotes, polished a phrase

1. Three examples of controversial Substack bloggers are Scott Alexander (RationalWiki), Joseph Mercola (RationalWiki), and a “National Socialist Weekly Newsletter” (Usermag). I don’t want to talk about them further because I think my gentle readers agree that their controversial ideas are self-serving nonsense (Alexander likes the idea that his race has superior genes for intelligence, Mercola wants you to buy his health supplements not take free vaccines, and Nazis tend to be losers looking for some reason to feel good about themselves). ↩︎
2. You can find definitions at What are Substack leaderboards? on the Substack Help Center ↩︎
3. The New York Times could not be bothered to say where that quote came from, but I expect it comes from a react video of VDH talking about Cooper’s appearance with someone called Tucker Carlson. Currently the alternative ways of viewing YouTube don’t work and I no longer watch YouTube videos on the YT site because I remember the last pre-war Dutch census. ↩︎
4. Someone once accused me of being a cis man and fair enough; I also have a university degree, which is another category which includes about half the population. ↩︎
5. One take on how the evidence turned against the idea that some races had smarter genes than other races is Graham Richards, “Reconceptualizing the History of Race Psychology: Thomas Russell Garth (1872-1939) and How He Changed His Mind,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter 1998) pp. 15-32. In the history of cranks and quacks, there is an eternal return to outmoded ideas. ↩︎
6. Compare Statista, Volume of funds raised through digital capital raising models worldwide in 2025, by region, October 2025 with crowdsourcing.org, Crowdfunding Industry Report: Market Trends, Composition and Crowdfunding Platforms, May 2012 (summary on Statista) ↩︎
7. Nic Newman, Amy Ross Arguedas, Mitali Mukherjee, Richard Fletcher, Mapping news creators and influencers in social and video networks, Reuters Institute, 28 October 2025 ↩︎
8. A good example is the James Randi Educational Foundation forum, hived off as the International Skeptics Forum in 2014 because it was as much work to manage as the Foundation’s other activities. Many writers find that comments on their sites become a whole community which needs management, and some even create a new post every week or so just to give followers a comments-section to chat in. ↩︎
9. In October 2025, I count 62 websites in my blogroll, of which 32 are based in the USA, six from Canada, one from Australia (A Fencer’s Ramblings), two from Aotearoa NZ (Abandoned Footnotes and Kiwi Helenist), eight from the UK (Age of Invention, Bad Science, Beachcombing’s Bizarre History, Caitlyn R. Green, Carwansaray, A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe, Papyrus Stories, Sphinx Blog), nine in continental Europe (Aardvarchaeology, Ancient World Magazine, Artistic License, Backreaction, elamit.net, Letteratura artistica, The Melammu Project, Renaissance Mathematicus, West’s Meditations), and four unknown (Bow vs. Musket, Executed Today, Great Ming Military, Moving 17th Century Soldiers). I treat Language Log as mostly-USA and Papyrus Stories as UK even though the founder started it while living in Germany. 40 out of 58 from the USA or UK is 69%. ↩︎
10. Ben Strauss, Out-of-work sportswriters are turning to newsletters, hoping the economics can work. The Washington Post, 1 June 2020. Archived ↩︎
11. Two useful pages on the economics of Ghost are https://ghost.org/about/ and ChartMogul. Some rambling musings about the economics and business practices of Substack can be found at From Filmers to Farmers. ↩︎