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subsumed

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

The popular newsletter platform clocked more US site visits than both major outlets last month.

7/11/25 4:53AM

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.

Substack site visits chart — Sherwood News

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.

$890B

Nia Warfield

8/25/25

Since the pandemic, picky high earners have been at the epicenter of a new cost headache for retailers: “buy now, return later.”

That’s the message from the Bank of America Institute, which reports that US retailers stared down a massive $890 billion tab from returns last year, according to the National Retail Federation. Return rates have more than doubled since 2019 among large retailers, with the associated costs rising even more:

Retailer returns data — Source: Bank of America Institute

More tidbits from BofA:

Department stores are taking the hardest hit, with a return rate in the high teens versus 4.5% for all US retailers.
Gen Z has the lowest return rate — unless it’s for electronics.
Higher-income shoppers are returning items at nearly twice the rate of lower-income households.

One explanation “may be that higher-income households are less cash-constrained and so are more likely to buy items speculatively when they are searching for a particular purchase, in the knowledge they can return it later if they decide it’s not right for them,” wrote Bank of America Institute economists led by David Michael Tinsley.

For shoppers, free returns have become the trade-off for hitting “buy,” but for retailers already squeezed by tariffs and soft demand, “buy now, return later” is proving to be an expensive habit to support.

The US military is deploying influencers to help drive recruitment

With the armed forces seeing its active-duty personnel slump to a record low last year, where better to attract young new recruits in 2025 than social media?

Millie Giles8/21/25

Max Knoblauch

8/20/25

As of tomorrow, all new PS5s will cost $50 more in the US

Sony on Wednesday announced that it will hike prices of the PlayStation 5 in the US this week.

Millie Giles

CURTAIN CALL

8/18/25

Netflix could lose big budget content creators over its theater-skipping policy

After almost a decade, the makers of “Stranger Things” could be leaving Netflix for Paramount — but the streamer’s core issue is a string of high-cost flops.

“Stranger Things: The First Shadow” world premiere – Arrivals

Rani Molla

8/14/25

ChatGPT head hopes “we can unequivocally endorse the product to a struggling family member”

Stories abound of human beings’ inappropriate and disastrous relationships with AI chatbots:

Here, a teen became romantically involved with a Character.AI chatbot before dying by suicide.

Here, a ChatGPT user went down conspiratorial rabbit holes that nearly killed him.

Here, an 76-year-old man died by accident on a trip to New York City to visit the Meta chatbot he became infatuated with.

The extent and frequency of such relationships led ChatGPT maker OpenAI to recently roll out overuse notifications, and it’s working to be able to “better detect signs of mental or emotional distress” among its users.

Amid all this, The Verge’s Alex Heath conducted an excellent interview with OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley. Read the whole thing, but this excerpt suggests that instead of shunning such relationships, OpenAI is leaning in, working to make its product capable of helping people in their most perilous personal moments.

“I trust our ability to do the right thing, but we still have to do the work and the work has begun and it won’t stop until we feel like we can unequivocally endorse the product to a struggling family member. That’s kind of the thought exercise we often give ourselves: if you knew someone who was struggling in life, maybe they’re going through something, maybe they just had a breakup, maybe they’re lost in life, would you actually recommend ChatGPT to them unequivocally and with confidence? For us, that’s the bar, and we’re going to keep working until we feel that way.”

ChatGPT chief Nick Turley doesn’t want you too attached to AI