Part of a larger guide
This article belongs to our complete guide Substack Unfiltered: The Good, the Bad, and What Nobody Tells You, where we analyze the platform in depth for LATAM creators.
Every article promoting Substack mentions the $450 million flowing annually to creators. It’s a real number. And it’s a number that hides a distribution so unequal it makes the music industry look fair.
Before you open your account and connect Stripe, you need to see the numbers that nobody puts in the “how to monetize your newsletter” articles. Not because Substack is bad, but because making platform decisions without understanding the real math is like signing a contract without reading the fine print.
The Power Law: Where the Money Concentrates
The top 10 Substack newsletters collectively generate $40 million per year. More than 50 creators surpass one million dollars annually. Those numbers are impressive and absolutely real.
But there are 17,000+ writers earning some money on the platform. If you divide $450 million among them, the average comes out to about $26,000 per year. Sounds reasonable? The problem is that averages lie when the distribution is this skewed.
The median is closer to $4,000 annually. Nearly 50% of creators with paid subscriptions earned less than $500 in 2025. The top 10% captures 62% of all payments.
To put it in perspective: if the 50,000+ active Substack newsletters were a city, most of its inhabitants would be living on less than it costs to buy a daily latte.
The Fame Prerequisite
There’s a pattern that repeats when you look at who’s at the top. Heather Cox Richardson was a Boston College professor with established media presence. Bari Weiss was a New York Times editor. Matthew Yglesias co-founded Vox. Jim Acosta left CNN and accumulated 10,000+ paid subscribers within weeks.
They didn’t arrive at Substack with zero followers and build an audience from scratch. They arrived with audiences in the millions and converted a fraction into paid subscribers.
Substack itself paid advances of up to $400,000 to recruit high-profile journalists in 2020. It’s a smart investment for the platform. But it creates a dynamic where independent creators compete for attention in the same space as people with decades of public visibility.
Only 25% of paid conversions come from Substack’s internal discovery system. The other 75% requires external promotion: Twitter/X, LinkedIn, YouTube, podcast appearances. Even Lenny Rachitsky, who crossed 1 million subscribers, grew substantially by syndicating content to LinkedIn and X.
The uncomfortable conclusion? Substack is excellent for monetizing an existing audience. Building one from scratch is a different game entirely.
The Churn Treadmill
Say you achieve the improbable and reach 600 paid subscribers at $8/month. After commissions (10% Substack + ~3% Stripe), you’re left with about $50,000 per year. A respectable income.
But Sacra estimates that annual paid subscriber churn on Substack is approximately 50%. That means every month you lose around 4.2% of your base. With 600 subscribers, that’s ~25 people cancelling each month.
To keep your income stable, you need to replace those 25 every month. With a free-to-paid conversion rate of 7%, that requires ~357 new free subscribers monthly. And to attract them with a 2% opt-in rate, you need 17,850 visitors landing on your page each month.
Those numbers aren’t impossible. But they’re a treadmill. Stop running and your income drops month over month, without fail.
What This Means for Creators in LATAM
Lower costs of living in Mexico and Latin America make the income threshold more accessible. $30,000 USD per year is a solid income in many cities in the region, unlike New York or San Francisco.
But the Spanish-language ecosystem has its own challenges. The top Spanish-language creator has 35,000 subscribers (Jesus Terres, based in Spain). Samuel Gil, also in Spain, monetizes through sponsors at ~€900 per edition rather than paid subscriptions, which suggests Spanish-speaking audiences are more resistant to paying for newsletter content.
Mexican representation is minimal. Oso Trava (entrepreneurship) is probably the most visible Mexican creator on the platform. It’s not that the talent doesn’t exist. It’s that the market hasn’t formed yet.
If you’re going to try from LATAM, the competitive advantage is clear: there’s very little quality competition in Spanish. But the pool of potential subscribers willing to pay for a newsletter is smaller than its English equivalent. It’s a growing market, not a mature one.
The Numbers You Should Calculate Before Starting
Before choosing a platform, do this math:
- Annual income goal (in USD, after taxes)
- Monthly price you’d charge (most charge between $7-$15)
- Paid subscribers needed = Goal / (Price x 12 x 0.87)
- Monthly new paid subs to offset churn = Base x 0.042
- Monthly free subscribers needed = New paid / 0.07
- Monthly traffic needed = Free subscribers / 0.02
If those numbers feel achievable with your current distribution channels, Substack can be a good starting point. If not, maybe you need to build an audience first or consider a model where the newsletter is an authority and lead-generation tool, not your primary income source.
You can run these calculations with exact numbers in our interactive Substack subscriber calculator.
Should Your Newsletter Be a Business or a Business Tool?
The Strategy Behind the Numbers
Substack’s math works for some creators. For others, the newsletter is more valuable as an authority, lead-generation, and positioning tool than as a direct paid product. At Mazkara Studio we help creators and executives in LATAM define which model makes sense for their market and build the content system to support it.
Numbers don’t add up for a paid newsletter? Sometimes the best monetization isn’t charging subscriptions but using the newsletter as your best sales tool. Let’s talk about your strategy.