The newsletter boom that began with Substack marked a turning point in publishing. 

Individual creators could own their audience, control their distribution, and generate meaningful revenue outside traditional media structures. With over 35 million active subscriptions and 3 million paid, Substack proved that a single writer could build a brand as powerful as a publication.

But every revolution reaches its plateau. 

What made Substack remarkable in its early years, its simplicity, its ease of use, and its clean, closed ecosystem, has now become its ceiling. The same creators who once benefited from its streamlined design now find themselves limited by it.

In 2025, the next wave of operators is scaling beyond simplicity. They are building full-fledged media businesses that demand advanced analytics, flexible monetization, and deeper technical control. The new class of professional creators is not just publishing newsletters. They are building companies.

beehiiv has emerged as the infrastructure powering that evolution. With over 75,000 newsletters, 350 million monthly readers, and more than 30 million dollars in annualized revenue flowing through the platform, beehiiv has become the operating system for the creator economy’s next phase.

Substack has remained an excellent launchpad. It is easy to start, fast to publish, and offers built-in distribution. For writers testing an idea or finding their voice, its simplicity is unmatched. But when that idea scales, simplicity becomes a limitation.

For growing teams managing audience development, advertising, SEO, and data, the constraints become clear. Substack’s design serves creators at the beginning of their journey, not at the point where they start operating like a business.

beehiiv was built specifically for that next stage. It is not a reimagining of the newsletter. It is a redefinition of what a publishing platform can be when it prioritizes data, flexibility, and ownership.

In 2025 alone, beehiiv has powered more than 20 billion emails and generated over 25 million dollars in publisher revenue. It operates less as a newsletter platform and more as a scalable business foundation for creators who take growth seriously.

Substack’s focus on accessibility made it the perfect tool for launching a newsletter. But once a creator reaches a meaningful scale, that same simplicity becomes a barrier.

Analytics blind spots are among the biggest challenges. Substack limits insight into key data like retention, lifetime value, and subscriber cohorts. Without this visibility, optimization becomes guesswork. beehiiv solves this by offering full-funnel analytics built for growth teams, not hobbyists.

Revenue constraints are another pain point. Substack’s perpetual 10 percent fee compounds quickly- $100,000 in annual subscriptions means losing $10,000 every year to platform fees.  beehiiv’s zero-fee model ensures creators keep what they earn, preserving long-term profitability.

SEO isolation further limits scale. Substack’s content structure often prevents full indexing, which reduces discoverability and organic growth. beehiiv’s SEO-first architecture, including customizable domains and integrated sitemaps, ensures creators are visible to both Google and AI-driven discovery platforms.

Integration barriers compound these issues. Substack’s closed architecture restricts automation and external data connections. beehiiv’s open API, Zapier compatibility, and integrations with tools like Stripe, HubSpot, and Google Analytics enable complete workflow customization.

At its core, building an audience online has a simple motivation: ownership. Social media and algorithm-driven platforms can amplify reach, but they never grant control.

A newsletter changes that dynamic entirely. It creates a direct, unmediated relationship between a creator and their audience, an asset that compounds over time rather than vanishing in a feed.

Yet for many, the promise of ownership begins to fade once they outgrow the limits of Substack. What starts as an easy way to publish quickly becomes a closed environment that restricts visibility into the very people who make growth possible. 

Without deep analytics, cohort data, reader behavior insights, and lifetime value tracking, creators can’t truly understand who their audience is or how to serve them better. 

As a result, the platform that once empowered independence can ultimately constrain it.

The creator mindset has evolved. 

In 2020, the ambition was simply to launch a newsletter, to publish consistently and build a direct connection with readers. By 2025, that goal has expanded. Creators are no longer focused solely on audience ownership; they’re building full-scale communities and businesses around their work.

This shift isn’t an afterthought. It reflects a broader understanding that owning your audience is just the foundation. 

The real opportunity lies in turning that ownership into sustainable revenue. Platforms like beehiiv enable this next phase by providing built-in earning systems such as Boosts, the beehiiv Ad Network, and referral tools that let publishers not only keep more of what they earn but also actively grow new income streams.

Creators are no longer looking for a place to publish. They are looking for infrastructure that supports growth across content, data, and monetization.

beehiiv powers this transition through four core principles:

The difference between Substack and beehiiv is not philosophical- it is structural.

The migration trend is already visible across the industry. Across thousands of publications, the pattern is consistent: higher retention, broader revenue diversification, and more efficient operations. 

beehiiv enables creators to move beyond audience growth into audience sustainability, helping turn readers into customers and newsletters into businesses.

GRIT Capital moved 360,000 subscribers to beehiiv in 2025. Founder Christian Blackwell explained the decision simply: “beehiiv unlocked monetization and collaboration that wasn’t possible before.” 

The platform’s ad integrations and multi-user tools allowed GRIT’s team to scale revenue while maintaining a professional publishing workflow.

Pure Procurement, a niche publication for supply chain professionals, leveraged beehiiv’s automations and analytics to expand its reach. 

Founder Joël Collin-Demers said, “beehiiv’s product evolves in lockstep with how creators operate.” 

That adaptability is key. As creator businesses mature, beehiiv’s tools evolve alongside them.

Extra Points, founded by Matt Brown, offers another example of this shift. Focused on the business of college sports, Brown built a six-figure newsletter by serving a hyper-niche audience and earning through premium subscriptions and licensing partnerships with universities. 

After outgrowing Substack’s fees and limited analytics, he moved to beehiiv to gain visibility into retention and revenue data that helped refine his pricing and expand institutional deals. 

Today, Extra Points generates around $200,000 per year in revenue. On a platform that takes a 10% cut, that’s $20,000 gone before Matt even sees it. On beehiiv, he keeps that money and can reinvest it back into reporting, growth, and new products.

Brown’s success highlights a key principle:  creators thrive not by chasing scale, but by owning their niche and using infrastructure built to support it.

Migration is often the biggest hesitation for established creators- but beehiiv designed its onboarding process to make that concern obsolete. Most creators complete the transition within hours, not days.

Here’s how it works: 

Substack will always have a place in the creator ecosystem. It lowered the barrier to entry and made newsletters mainstream. 

But the next stage of the creator economy isn’t about who can start a newsletter- but who can scale one into a sustainable business. Ownership, flexibility, and data will be the differentiators that determine long-term success.

The results speak for themselves. Handmade Seller Magazine, a 10-year-old publication for artisan entrepreneurs, rebuilt its entire tech stack on beehiiv in six days, consolidating 25 tools into seven and increasing paid subscribers by 34%..

What began as a patchwork of systems became a streamlined business powered by a single platform. 

That transformation mirrors what thousands of creators and publishers are discovering: growth now depends not just on tools that simplify, but on systems that scale.

The industry’s trajectory is clear. Platforms, like beehiiv, that prioritize analytics, control, and earning will power the next decade of growth. 

Migrating to beehiiv is easy, and you can host your entire creative stack in one place.