Scott Galloway had the audience. Here’s what he came for.
After two months on Substack, the Prof G Media founder talks subscription revenue, exit multiples, platform economics, and what he's still figuring out.
Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, a serial entrepreneur, and, for the past decade, a writer, podcaster and media founder. No Mercy / No Malice, the weekly newsletter he started as a testing ground for book chapters, now goes out to more than 400,000 subscribers, and his media business, Prof G Media, generates roughly $20 million a year in podcast revenue across his portfolio. His reach among the 25-to-54 demographic, he told us, beats the most-watched shows on CNBC.
No Mercy No Malice lived for most of its life passed around a series of email platforms that, as his team describes it, were built for enterprise marketing departments. For the year and a half before they came to Substack, another newsletter, Prof G Markets, was running on beehiiv. In March, the team made the decision to consolidate everything under one roof, bringing a full portfolio of newsletters, video, livestreams, and new subscriber-only content to Substack. In the two months since, they’ve launched three new newsletters and are preparing to debut The Week, a Friday roundup across the Prof G universe. Starting May 27, Jessica Tarlov of Raging Moderates will be co-hosting a weekly livestream with Aaron Parnas of The Parnas Perspective, their first Substack-exclusive show. “For the first time,” his team told us, “we’re supported by a platform purpose-built for content creators.”
We sat down with Galloway after his first two months on the platform to hear what this subscription revenue has unlocked for him and why he projects that Prof G Media will reach $1 million in ARR on Substack by the end of the year. He was characteristically direct about where media is going and about what it actually costs creators to build on platforms that hold the leverage—where your margin, as he puts it, is their opportunity. He is also honest about what’s hard, what he hasn’t figured out yet, and why he thinks the real test is still ahead.
You’ve been publishing the first of your weekly newsletters, No Mercy / No Malice, for what will be 10 years this summer. What were you first hoping to build when you started?
I just enjoy writing, and I used the newsletter as a kind of petri dish or incubator for chapters for a book. I would have a thought about something and just write. It was literally me at midnight on a Thursday writing something. Usually the top was business-related and the bottom was more personal. It was me punching out something Thursday night as a means of exploration, and it was just cathartic.
Did weaving in personal stories feel intuitive to you from the start?
I enjoy writing about family and my sons. I sometimes write about topics that upset people, or people find my content not in line with what they were expecting, or sometimes I just get it wrong. There have been a couple of seminal business moments [in the newsletter]. I wrote a piece saying WeWork was ridiculous. I got the S1 and wrote up an assessment saying it was a ridiculous idea that this company was going public and I think we’re credited with being one of the forces that stopped the IPO. So there have been some important business moments. But immediately it was obvious that the thing that resonates with people is the personal stories. The most-read post I’ve ever published was a post I wrote about putting my dog down. There’s a wide space for men of my age to talk about their emotions.
The WeWork story makes me think about risk-taking and being publicly outspoken. How do you evaluate what risks are worth taking?
I don’t do a risk assessment. I believe what Sam Harris said: if you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, you have an obligation to speak your mind. I think when I say something off-mark or wrong, that’s what people enjoy the most, because it gives them a chance to weigh in. I try to write as if the only people who are going to read it are my kids in 20 or 30 years. I want them to understand me better and the world a little bit better. But I try—I can’t always say I do it—I try mostly to ignore the comments. I talk about money, about a lot of my personal failings. I know it resonates with people. There’s a real danger in getting too caught up in thinking about what your audience is going to think of what you’re writing, as opposed to what you actually think is going on.
If not the audience, who serves as a check on you?
You need [checks and balances]. It’s important to reflect. Prof G Media is 27 people, and there are a lot of people in the company who tell me when I’m wrong or disagree with me. The newsletter has evolved dramatically. As my following grew, the number of people working on it grew, because now it involves a lot of data. I take the responsibility seriously that 400,000 people are reading it, not 400. You have a responsibility to do more fact-checking and review it more carefully. It used to be literally me at midnight on a Thursday giving myself 90 minutes to bang something out, and publishing it with the typos and a few charts. Now there are probably three or four people who touch it before it goes out. Graphics. It gets a host read-over. It’s its own podcast now. I have a lot of people who, quite frankly, save me from myself on a regular basis.
You built out your consulting firm, L2, specifically to maximize enterprise value, then sold at a significant multiple. Is that a model you’re trying to replicate with Prof G Media?
When I was 26 in business school, I started a strategy firm. After about eight or 10 years, I wanted out. We were doing $10 million in revenue. I sold for $33 million—3.3 times revenues—which is fine, but it was transactional revenue, not recurring revenue. When I started L2, I got a study from Deloitte that had looked at outcomes of private company transactions. They sussed out that companies whose exit multiple was in the top decile typically had four features: recurring revenue, they owned a niche, they had defensible IP, and they were international. So from day one, I set up L2 that way. Instead of charging Nike $800,000 for an engagement, I charged them half a million dollars a year for a quarterly membership.That company got bought for eight times revenues.
With Prof G Media, to be blunt, I’m economically secure. I want to do something I enjoy. But the business is doing really well, and I recognize that people working at Prof G want to have their own houses and cars and college funds. About two years ago, I started thinking there’s enterprise value here. Key to that business is subscription revenue.
I started thinking there’s enterprise value here. Key to that business is subscription revenue.
Our business does about $20 million top line in podcast revenues, but that business has a multiple of probably two to three times. We just started on Substack and wanted a subscription offering. My guess is we’ll be at an ARR of about a million dollars by the end of the year. That revenue has probably a four to six multiple. In addition, the entire company trades at a higher multiple when subscription revenue is growing faster than your core business. Substack’s role for us was to diversify the revenue mix and create a more valuable one. That’s the entire rationale and motivation for going on Substack.
How would you describe what you’re building on Substack?
We found on YouTube and other platforms, you have to be pretty vertically focused. What we wanted with Substack was a repository for everything we do, because we try to bring a voice of education and insight. We want people to learn and feel like they’re getting real insight, and also entertainment. We try to be funny, irreverent. We wanted a repository where someone could come for all things from Prof G Media.
The two biggest subscriber drivers so far have been our interview with James Talarico and Mia Silverio’s deep dive on storytelling—she puts together all my decks for my presentations. We’re still learning. I don’t know if I would have guessed those things would drive subscriptions. We’re adding about 150 paid subscribers a week, and a lot more unpaid. Have we cracked this nut? I don’t think so. We’re five or six weeks in. We look at people we admire, like The Bulwark or Heather Cox Richardson, and we try to understand what the secret sauce is. What about our content will drive subscriptions? We’re absolutely still in learning mode.
Is it right that this is the first time you’ve ever asked anyone to pay for anything Prof G–related?
I think that’s right, we’ve never asked anyone to pay for anything. It’s always been advertising-driven. When we started Prof G Media, all the podcasts and newsletters were nothing but a marketing funnel for my speaking business. The speaking business was three to four million dollars. The entire media and book business was a million dollars. Now the speaking business is two to three million—I just don’t want to travel as much—and the media business is a $20-million business. But when we first started, all the media was top-of-the-funnel marketing for speaking gigs.
How did you think about what the paid product should be?
We’re still trying to figure that out. You have to offer a ton of value. I think if you have an existing brand as we did, at least initially you’re going to come out of the gate strong because you’re monetizing goodwill, not necessarily the product offering itself. I think I could say to people, “Just help us out, everything’s for free, but subscribe”—and I think we’d get 5,000 subscribers because a lot of people like what we’re doing. But that’s not sustainable.
I’m constantly telling my team: these are the salad days. These are superfans. The real test will be after you have 10,000 subscribers and you’re trying to say to someone, “This is definitely worth $200.” When I look at what people who are successful on Substack in terms of paid subscriptions are offering, they’re just offering a lot of proprietary content. I think anyone who’s making more than a million dollars a year on Substack is exceptionally talented and exceptionally hardworking.
You’ve written a lot about platform dependency and the way intermediaries extract value from creators over time. How does all of that factor into why you’re building here?
I know several people who make their living off Instagram, and I know exactly what’s going to happen to them. These companies will let you grow to a certain amount, and then your margin is their opportunity. YouTube’s a little bit better—they have a revenue share model. But the reason I’ve leaned heavily into podcasting is that there’s so much competition in audio that no one platform—Amazon, Apple, Spotify—can extract the kind of rents that others do. If I put out a podcast, what do I get on Spotify? About 97%. If I had a show on MSNBC, they’d be taking 95% of the revenue for access to that distribution.
These companies will let you grow to a certain amount, and then your margin is their opportunity.
If we post something on YouTube, they decide what runs on the right rail. They decide what video comes up next. There’s not a lot of branding that can happen. They decide what you see next. Anyone who is totally dependent on a monopoly or oligopoly should just assume at some point they will turn the tables on you. I was on the board of the New York Times, and we had About.com, a content farm that would do something on, say, cooking, get a ton of traffic, have ads displayed, optimized for Google. One night we woke up and our revenues were down 60% because Google decided they didn’t want to send traffic to About.com. When you’re dealing with an oligopoly, just assume that at some point they will turn the tables on you. I’ve never wanted to build a business on YouTube, TikTok, or Meta. I see that as marketing to drive people to other channels where the split is more favorable towards the creator.
You have a reach that rivals most legacy media organizations. What do you make of that?
I can show you numbers that we’re reaching more people in the core demographic than any show on CNBC. The average age of a CNBC viewer is 63. The average age of a Prof G Markets listener is 34. On Prof G Markets, between video and audio, we’ll get about 300,000 views and listens. That’s 200,000 people in the core demographic, 25 to 54. The most popular CNBC show gets between 300,000 and 500,000, and 30% are in the core demo. We get $45 CPMs for advertisers. CNN gets around $13. The average age of a CNN viewer is 67. It’s 69 for Fox. Sixty-four for CNBC. These direct-to-consumer media companies that can hold onto the majority of the revenue, reinvest back into the content, and reach a younger audience—does anyone under 40 even turn on a TV anymore unless it’s to watch a streaming service?
Traditional media is still a very profitable business, but every minute of every day it’s leaking viewers, advertisers, and revenue to something more authentic that bubbles up organically. The death of traditional media has probably been exaggerated. It’ll die slower than people think. But there does appear to be a pretty big market for whatever you’d call alternative media.
Podcasts are essentially TV shows with a lower-cost means of production. Forty percent of our views on Prof G Markets are on TV, streamed through YouTube. Effectively, podcasts have become TV shows where you get 80% of a TV show for 10% of the price. A million-dollar podcast can be profitable. There’s no such thing as a million-dollar TV show in terms of production value that’s profitable.
A million-dollar podcast can be profitable. There’s no such thing as a million-dollar TV show in terms of production value that’s profitable.
Stephen Colbert is the best example. Colbert makes $60 million a year but costs $100 million. [When he leaves CBS] he’ll go to a podcast, take the six or dozen most talented people, make $20 million and clear $15 [million] in EBITDA. The arbitrage is dramatic. Podcasts are becoming TV shows that are almost as rewarding, almost as well-produced, and cost a lot less—so the creator holds onto a lot more of the revenue.
You said you have 27 people across all the Prof G Properties. How have you thought about who to hire and how to keep them?
I’ve always been an operator and the CEO of the companies I’ve started. The difference here is I no longer wanted to be the operator. I just wanted to be the talent. I wanted to hire people who could run the business so I could focus on writing, speaking, presenting, and podcasting. My core competence is storytelling. My superpower is finding and retaining really talented people. The woman who runs Prof G Media, Katherine, I’ve worked with for 15 years. Our chief growth officer I’ve worked with for a decade. My CTO and head of engineering I’ve worked with for 11 years. The team with the best players wins. I’m very proud of retention. We have a general cultural value that’s important to me, and that is we overcompensate. My aim is to pay 50% above market. We have a minimum wage of $100,000 a year for full-time employees and $50 an hour for part-time employees. Most people make substantially more than that. The median age is 26, and the average compensation is about $200,000. I spent my whole life trying to get rich, and I’m still trying to get richer, but a close second is trying to provide economic security for other people. Compensating well is a big cultural value for us, and quite frankly it’s a decent business strategy, because if you have the capital and the business to do it, it results in higher retention. In the eight or nine years Prof G Media has been around, I think one or two people have left voluntarily.
What do you think people are getting wrong right now in business, in tech, in society?
I think AI, from a valuation standpoint and a labor destruction standpoint, has been vastly overhyped. I think the catastrophizing about a labor apocalypse is a fundraising technique, to convince corporations they should continue to spend the millions or billions these companies need them to spend. AI has not come up with a lot of different moisturizers or cooler furniture. The only way they can justify these valuations is if they convince companies you can have the same revenue with 20% fewer employees in the next 24 months. I believe, over the medium and long term, AI will create more jobs than it destroys. I think the valuations are unsustainable. I think we’re going to see a similar drawdown as the dot-com implosion—the technology will survive, the companies that are really seminal will survive, but I’ve been to this movie before.
How are you thinking about AI internally, for content and for the business?
It’s not that disciplined or strategic. We have several younger associates who are very facile with AI, and we’re constantly challenging people to figure out how to be more productive around content production leveraging AI. What we’ve found is that it’s not good for creation. It’s more a supplemental tool for research. The biggest insult I can give anyone when I get a draft of a presentation or written material is: this feels or looks like it was produced by AI. Our view is that AI is all chip, no salsa. And what people want is salsa. But in terms of content strategy, AI is for research, refining, finding data. Pretty much all of our content starts between someone’s ears.
Do your sons have any interest in doing what you do?
They’re different. The only thing I would recommend to anyone who has kids is to have two, because the most fascinating thing is how different they are. One, if I take a picture, will say to me right away, “No social.” He doesn’t want to be on social media. The other wants to start a podcast with me so he can be famous. They’re just so different, and that’s the fascinating thing. Whenever I meet people who have one kid, I say: just have a second, because you’re going to be fascinated at how different they are.
The thing I find interesting and sort of weird about young people is they’d rather be famous than rich. When I was their age, I absolutely would have chosen money over fame. I do worry a little. I get a lot of negative feedback on some of my content. Some of it’s a function of me saying something stupid or being plain wrong. But a lot of it I also think is just that the bigger footprint you have, the more algorithms enjoy an incendiary comment about you. I worry sometimes about my kids reading that stuff and being upset or thinking less of me.
What does a good week look like for you across all of this?
I’m finally in a position in my life, rounding third, where I really enjoy what I do and the people I work with. Most people don’t get to do something they really enjoy and make good money at. It’s taken me a long time to get there. Consulting and analytics were rewarding, but that was real work. This is fun. I’m not an interesting person. I work, I work out, and I spend time with my boys. That’s about it. My best week is when I get to produce good work, I get to hang out with my boys, eat well and exercise so I don’t become depressed and angry at everybody.
A closer look at Prof G Media on Substack
Behind Prof G Media is a team of 27 people who have spent the past two months figuring out how to bring a sprawling media portfolio onto a new platform, launch new products, and build out a thoughtful subscription offering from scratch. We spoke with Claude Émilie de Jocas, chief growth officer, about what that transition has looked like in practice.
Tell us what the company was doing with newsletters before this year?
We launched our flagship newsletter, No Mercy / No Malice, in July 2016 (10-year anniversary this summer!). At the time, Scott was running L2, a subscription business intelligence firm. We were struggling to find ways to maintain an ongoing conversation with our clients outside of occasional meetings and deliverables. No Mercy / No Malice started as a way to spark a weekly dialogue.
The newsletter has been free since its inception, and was historically hosted on WordPress. Particularly in the early days, our biggest challenge was finding a distribution tool that made sense for us. Ten years ago, every email platform was designed to support huge enterprise customers using email as a marketing channel to drive their multi-million-dollar e-commerce businesses. For us, getting technical support on these platforms was almost impossible—no one had time for a subscale newsletter written by an NYU professor that wasn’t even trying to make money.
Since transitioning to Substack in March, we’ve noticed an immediate difference. For the first time, we’re supported by a platform purpose-built for content creators. We’ve benefited from a high level of service as we’ve established a presence on the platform. And from a production perspective, it’s by far the easiest tool we’ve ever used. We’ve launched three more newsletters in 2026 alone (with a fourth coming soon)—it’s really unlocked our team’s capabilities.
How did the team decide on Substack, and what was the strategic thinking behind bringing all the verticals over here?
In the 10 years since the launch of No Mercy / No Malice, we’ve evolved into a full-scale media company. We produce nearly 20 podcast episodes per week. Video is our fastest-growing medium. We’re constantly experimenting with new ways to meet our audience where they are, whether that’s through livestreaming, live events, or linear television.
We needed a partner that could support us comprehensively across all our formats. Substack was a great fit in that regard. And, crucially, the company shares our worldview that the media sector is evolving at a breakneck pace. The Substack team is relentless about pushing new features that enable us to constantly iterate on both our content and our business strategies. Essentially, the platform keeps pace with us.
Consolidating all our properties, including No Mercy / No Malice, The Prof G Pod, Prof G Markets, Raging Moderates, and China Decode, under the Prof G Media banner on Substack allows us to offer a strong value proposition to our audience, and to more explicitly connect the dots across our pods. It actually inspired us to start producing our newest show, The Week, a roundup of the most important insights across our universe every Friday through the lens of a unifying theme.
What have you found most valuable about being on the platform?
Our podcast business has historically been fully reliant on advertising revenue. Substack has allowed us to offer an ad-free option to our many listeners who were asking for a paid subscription alternative. The platform has also deepened our level of collaboration with our colleagues across the independent media landscape. Beyond just inviting guests onto our shows, we can now truly co-produce and cross-promote content with our many friends and peers in the space who have also found a home on Substack.
In just a couple of weeks, we’re actually launching a new project that completely exemplifies this approach. Starting May 27, Jessica Tarlov of Raging Moderates will be co-hosting a weekly livestream with Aaron Parnas, the talent behind The Parnas Perspective, in what will be our first-ever Substack-exclusive show. We couldn’t have pulled this off last year. And in an environment where mutual support among independent media outlets is more important than ever, it’s gratifying to find ways to contribute to the broader ecosystem.
What are your ambitions around growth for the Prof G community?
The Prof G Media brand has come to represent something uncommon in the space. Our hosts are motivated by empathy as much as by data. Across all our pods, strong opinions co-exist alongside rigorous, objective analysis. We constantly hear from our listeners that they don’t always agree with us—and that it’s their favorite part of our shows. We take the privilege of catalyzing constructive conversations very seriously. It’s immensely important to us that we can simultaneously provoke debate while maintaining our audience’s trust and respect.
Our ambition for Prof G Media is to scale this unique approach across new formats, channels, and topics, reaching new listeners in the process. Substack has been a great way to facilitate audience discovery as we’ve expanded our product portfolio over the past few months, and we’re excited for what’s ahead.