This insights post is a summary of the blog post published by PBRK Communications. View the full insight at: Substack, Patreon and the others: new areas of PR work.
The media landscape is undergoing fundamental transformation as traditional platforms decline and independent content creators rise to prominence. Traffic to major news sites is experiencing double-digit drops in some markets while social media, video-sharing platforms, online aggregators, and creator platforms like Substack gain influence. The scale of this shift is striking. According to SEMrush, SubStack.com has seen a 55% global increase in SEO traffic over the last 6 months. For the United States, that measures out to 9.4 million in Organic Search traffic. For smaller markets like Hungary, SubStack has grown 34% in the last 6 months and drives over 20,000 in Organic Search traffic.
3 Forces Driving Media Fragmentation
Three parallel changes are reshaping the media ecosystem.
- Traditional media has entered crisis as print struggles with accelerated news cycles and television content production proves overly expensive and labor-intensive compared to lean creator operations. According to Forbes, Podcaster Joe Rogan achieves higher viewership than CNN news programs with minimal staff and technical infrastructure. Declining advertising revenue compounds these challenges.
- Social media advancement continues democratizing content production, enabling anyone to publish and creating direct connections between creators and audiences. This builds entirely new intellectual and financial ecosystems. Once dismissed as user-generated content, this phenomenon now dominates. Traditional media companies can only compete by driving traffic from social platforms to their own sites.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) has accelerated fragmentation dramatically. Content generation has become faster than ever, strengthening creator personal brands and multiplying the number of independent voices competing for attention.
The Substack Ecosystem’s Scale
Substack currently manages over 50 million subscribers, 10 percent of whom pay for content. More than 50,000 publications generate revenue on the platform, with the most popular newsletters reaching hundreds of thousands of subscribers and several exceeding one or two million. Dozens of publications earn over one million dollars annually. What launched as a niche tool for independent writers has become a powerhouse of digital publishing. Patreon and similar platforms show comparable growth, and currently has reached 9.4m for Organic Search.
What This Means for PR Practice
Media relations work is fundamentally changing. PR professionals must pay attention to independent content producers alongside traditional media companies and newsrooms. This includes editors who sign content platforms under their own names while maintaining strong connections to traditional media.
Professional attention resembles previous efforts to personalize messages for individual journalists, but the significant increase in creators requiring outreach demands new working methods. Comprehensive media lists now include industry specialists on Substack like The Pragmatic Engineer with over 1.1 million subscribers in IT, creators active on Patreon, and producers of popular LinkedIn newsletters.
Tips for PR Professionals to Leverage These Channels
Here are 5 useful tips on how to navigate this multidimensional new Substack media world.
- Map your industry’s independent voices: You need to pay attention not just to Forbes or Portfolio, but to that expert with 3,000 subscribers whom everyone in the sector reads.
- Build long-term relationships, don’t just pitch: For independent creators, regular, quality relationships are more valuable than one-time press releases.
- Think in micro-influencer partnerships: A well-placed Substack appearance can be worth more than a brief in a national daily newspaper.
- Create your own thought leadership platform: Consider whether to launch a Substack newsletter or LinkedIn series for your client.
- Be a source, notjust a newssource : Offer exclusive data, research, background information to these independent creators.
To get an additional 5 tips and further insights on the rise of SubStack, Patreon and other channels, view the full post at: Substack, Patreon and the others: new areas of PR work.
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