One year of Substack Notes—now with video and external embeds

A growth machine for writers and creators

The past two decades of social media have shown that conversation is the most powerful driver of online discovery. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in particular have proved that they can bring attention to stories, video, and audio at a scale never seen before.

A year ago, we introduced our own place for online conversation: Substack Notes. For the first time, people in Substack had a place where they could “snack” on content and discover, discuss, and share great works and writers from around the ecosystem. 

In the past 30 days, Notes has generated more than 3,000 paid subscriptions and 230,000 free subscriptions for writers and creators on Substack. 

Individual notes now have the power to send publishers thousands of dollars in paid subscriptions. One note on its own—an 11-word post announcing a new research report—resulted in $8,000 worth of subscriptions. Another—a one-paragraph TL;DR that introduced a news story about political espionage—drove more than 50 paid subscriptions. A note by

Parker Molloy

celebrating the recent launch of Zeteo sent

Mehdi Hasan

’s new venture close to $2,000 in subscriptions. 

There’s so much more to come. Today, we’re making two important additions to Notes. 

We want to help Substack writers’ work travel widely across the web, so we’re making it possible for anyone to embed notes on external web pages—for example, as part of a news story. To find a note’s embed code, you click on the three-dot menu in the top right corner and select “Embed note.” We hope that these external embeds will help writers’ notes get more reach and recognition outside of the Substack network. 

Learn more: How do I embed Substack posts or notes on a website?

Meanwhile, as more writers and creators use Substack’s video tools and start new shows on the platform, we’re making it easier for them to share their creative work on Notes, too. Beginning today, you can post videos directly to Notes in the Substack app and on the web. We’re excited to see more movement and sound in the Notes feed as people explore possibilities beyond images and text. To post a video to Notes, you can select a file from your phone’s camera roll or your desktop—or just open the camera to record a video directly. 

We are making these investments in Notes because we think that discovery powered by online conversation is critical for writers and creators but at risk of disappearing. 

Social media is increasingly at odds with the rest of the media ecosystem. Once upon a time, social media was symbiotic with traditional media. The two systems fed each other: social networks pushed traffic to the media, and the media provided content for social networks. Unfortunately for traditional media, the two systems relied on the same business model: advertising. In a zero-sum competition for ad dollars, traditional media didn’t stand a chance. Social media’s success has now been corroding the traditional media business for more than a decade. 

As ad-based social media platforms have grown, they have increasingly turned away from links to outside media sources, which makes them ever more insular. These companies want people to spend as much time as possible glued to their feeds so that more ads may be put in front of them. Or, as Elon Musk himself has put it: “The algorithm is trying to maximize what is most interesting to you, based on time spent on X.” That’s bad news for writers, creators, and publishers, because their links then get treated as irrelevant, or even harmful, to the social media companies’ bottom line. It’s also the reason that X is attempting to replicate the features that Substack offers, and it’s why Musk has suppressed Substack’s links on his platform. 

Substack serves as a home for both traditional and social media, encompassing the publishing and the conversation. Notes offers a new place on the internet where posts can go viral—as seen in the poet

Andrea Gibson

’s piece in praise of crying, for example, and

emily north

’s appeal to bring back dance-floor make-outs—and where readers are only a click away from subscribing. 

Notes is especially valuable for people who don’t have large pre-existing audiences, since it allows them to collaborate with other writers and connect with new communities. Writers such as

Laurie Stone

,

Tom Cox

, and

India Knight

have dramatically grown their mailing lists through their savvy use of Notes. 

Notes is a growth machine for writers and creators built right into the place where they also publish their work. What’s more, they get real ownership. They own their mailing lists and their content, and they can take it all with them at any time. And, in contrast to traditional social media, the vast majority of the revenue generated on the platform goes directly into their bank accounts. 

Notes blends the fun and immediacy of social media with the creator-friendliness of the Substack model. While other platforms tune their algorithms to maximize ad revenue, we tune the Notes algorithm to maximize value for audiences and money for creators. This machine becomes only more powerful when it operates alongside Substack’s other growth features, including Recommendations, Explore pages, and Boost, which handles subscriber conversion and retention without writers having to lift a finger. Today, the Substack network drives more than 50% of all subscriptions on the platform and 25% of paid subscriptions. 

We will continue to pour our efforts into making Notes an enjoyable and edifying place to hang out, packed with smart conversations and a different social dynamic than the ones offered by other platforms. It’s the way the internet should be.