Substack.com got more traffic than The Wall Street Journal and CBS News in June

For creators looking to reach their audience directly whenever they like, and maybe even make millions in the process, Substack has been one of the places to be since its launch in 2017. Now, it’s becoming a go-to for news- and content-hungry readers, too, as US site visits hit a record 73.9 million in June, per new monthly data from Similarweb.

Last month, Substack’s site visits outweighed The Wall Street Journal and CBS News — the first time the platform has drawn more American eyeballs than both news sites in the same month, as millions more people flocked to substack.com to explore free and paid publications across business, tech, and culture, or perhaps even to look into starting their own outlets. Interestingly, traffic-tracking site Similarweb actually crowned Substack as its “Digital Winner” in January, after it notched 88% growth across its website and app last year.

For context, Similarweb told Chartr that Substack authors with their own custom domains, such as Matthew Yglesias’ “slowboring.com” aren’t included in the 73.9 million figure — meaning that the dominance of Substack and its legion of writers, podcasters, and video makers is maybe even undersold by that headline stat.

Stacked up

Though it’s nowhere near the size of YouTube in the “creator economy,” Substack has carved out a solid spot in the modern media landscape, attracting top writing talent who have, in turn, managed to attracts tens and even hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. It’s a nice flywheel where the platform attracts writers, who bring their audience, which attracts more writers... and so on and so forth.