The Buzz: Still Waiting to Get on Substack?
December 2025
You can’t say you weren’t warned. Way back in October 2024, Casandra Campbell on Really Good Business Ideas! told us that 2025 “should be the year you start a Substack.” The best time to start a Substack “is right now.”
So, while you were still thinking about maybe — just maybe — starting a blog, the 1.3 million-member Teamsters launched its Substack newsletter, becoming the first major union to do so.
The launch was a response to what Teamsters President Sean O’Brien called “hit pieces” in the legacy media, specifically The Wall Street Journal. “They don’t tell the whole truth,” O’Brien told The Hill. “When you call them out on it and you want to do an [op-ed] on what they said, that’s completely edited, completely under their control.”
The Substack newsletter is a “direct-to-audience approach [that] lets them connect with supporters without relying on press coverage or social media algorithms,” Courtney Blackann writes on PR Daily. The move shows “a shift toward newer communication tools that allow longer form explanations and consistent updates.” It’s a way to bypass the gatekeepers and confront the bracing reality that legacy media — with a few exceptions — has seen its day.
The advantages seem pretty obvious. Substack “is essentially a hybrid of a blog, an email newsletter, and a subscription service — giving creators a direct line to their audience without social media algorithms getting in the way,” writes William Gasner, chief marketing officer at Stack Influence. It is “more than just a newsletter tool — it’s a full-fledged online publishing platform” that combines blogging, email distribution and, for those in it for the money, paid subscriptions.
Substack got off the ground more than eight years ago and, after a slow start, took off with the pandemic when people working at home were spending more time on their devices. It has seen remarkable growth ever since. In the four months ending in March 2025, the number of paid Substack subscriptions increased from 4 million to 5 million, with the top 10 publishers collectively making more than $40 million a year.
The Teamsters aren’t out to make money from their Substack, nor are most businesses that use the platform or plan to do so. Those figures are just a way to quantify Substack’s reach and power. Most organizations would consider such an investment to be a cost, not a means of generating revenue. The results could be significant nonetheless, in terms of branding and establishing a direct connection to members, partners and consumers.
And as Campbell writes, Substack makes it “extremely easy to create a professional-looking site to host your content,” which is a relief to ink-stained wretches and other micro-influencers who are not tech-savvy but of less importance to organizations with their own comms departments. Payment systems “are already built in,” though this too is not a big deal to businesses and professional groups that plan to distribute content free of charge.
Of course, embracing new technologies does not mean abandoning more traditional ones. “Look,” the Teamsters’ O’Brien says, “we’re still going to engage with mainstream media, and we have to.”
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In the four months ending in March 2025, the number of paid Substack subscriptions increased from 4 million to 5 million, with the top 10 publishers collectively making more than $40 million a year.
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