On Monday, Substack announced a framework for a native sponsorship program, along with “Creator Kits” to help Substack users build media kits for potential brand partners. (It’s also hired its first head of brand sponsorships, Axios reported.) These tools will make it easier for writers to increase their revenue while continuing to build their subscription bases, though that also means that independent journalists on the platform will have to grapple with the usual ethical questions around advertising that have been a part of journalism since its earliest days.
In his announcement post, Substack cofounder and CEO Chris Best writes that the native sponsorship program has launch partnerships with Yahoo Scout, Whatnot, Granola, Balenciaga, T-Mobile, Polymarket, and Uber. It won’t be the first time a Substack writer gets a sponsorship — Best points to an essay sponsored by Hinge that Emily Sundberg wrote for her Feed Me newsletter — but it vastly simplifies the process.
“Creators choose who they work with,” Best writes. “They set the creative direction. They keep full editorial independence. Our job is to take care of what they shouldn’t have to — the matchmaking, the infrastructure, the logistics — so they can stay focused on the work.”
To begin, the Creator Kits are only available to “bestsellers,” or Substacks that have at least 100 paid subscribers. One of those “bestsellers,” Simon Owens, who writes a media newsletter, shared his thoughts, and I’ll let him close us out:
Why do I think this is smart? Because it ensures that Substack’s north star continues to be subscriptions. It’s actually not easy to get 100 people to simultaneously pay for a subscription, and reaching that threshold ensures a basic level of quality. It also reduces the incentives that could attract get-rich-quick scammers looking to churn out AI slop…
There are still a lot of unanswered questions. How will sponsorship purchases actually work? Will a brand simply upload its creative and wait for me to approve it, or will I be expected to have a back-and-forth conversation? What cut will Substack take? How will pricing be determined? Will there be a cost-per-click option, or only flat-fee sponsorships? Will brands be able to make large buys across multiple Substacks, or will they need to negotiate a bunch of individual deals?
My guess is that Substack doesn’t yet know the answers to many of these questions. It first needs to get a large number of Bestsellers into the system so it can start testing different ad products and see how both creators and readers respond.
Either way, I can virtually guarantee it’ll deliver a better experience than what you’ll find on publisher websites monetized through programmatic ad tech — for both the users AND the advertisers.
