73% of Top Newsletters Paywall Some Content
Paywall strategy across the top 1,000 newsletters by subscriber count — 2.2M posts analyzed.
Paywall Something
68%
873 newsletters analyzed
Completely Free
32%
zero paywalled posts
Heavy Paywall
31%
50%+ of posts paywalled
Median Rate
17%
across 298K posts
What should your paywall rate be?
Pick a category and size to see the median paywall rate for newsletters like yours.
32% of this cohort are completely free — the bimodal pattern shows up in every niche. Pick an all-in or all-out strategy; the middle ground is the smallest camp.
Newsletters go all-in or all-out
The middle ground (lightly paywalling 1–25%) is the least common strategy. Most top newsletters are either completely free or heavily paywalled.
Median paywall rate by category
Health and Food paywall the most; AI and Politics lean free. Click through to see the top newsletters in each niche.
Does size change strategy?
Mid-size newsletters (50K–100K) paywall the least — typically because they have enough reach to monetize through sponsors instead.
10K–49,999
23%
median · 39 newsletters
50K–99,999
14%
median · 390 newsletters
100K+
21%
median · 444 newsletters
Heaviest paywalls
Top newsletters with the highest share of paywalled posts.
Biggest fully-free newsletters
Completely free newsletters, ranked by post count — almost all monetize via sponsors.
Methodology
- Selection: top 873 newsletters by subscriber count with at least 10 published posts. Drawn from the top 1,000 overall.
- Coverage: 298K posts across Substack, Ghost, and beehiiv. LinkedIn excluded — it reports followers not subscribers and doesn't use post-level paywalls.
- Paywall detection: per-post at ingestion time. Paywall rate = share of a newsletter's posts marked paywalled.
- Refresh: matview rebuilt nightly at 3:30 AM UTC; this page caches for 24 hours.