LinkedIn drove 18 subscribers to our media careers newsletter. The Substack recommendation network drove 10x that.
Three months ago, we brought Mediabistro to Substack. We migrated 100,000+ subscribers, intentionally cut 30,000 of them, and ended up with 67,270 subscribers, a 62% open rate, and 326 publications recommending us. Here’s everything we learned.
Also on Mediabistro
Quick backstory: Mediabistro has been the career hub for media and creative professionals since 1999. Multiple ownership changes, a full rebrand, an identity crisis or two or three. We went independent again in January 2026 and bet on Substack as the home for our editorial voice.
We hit publish with a new editor and started learning. Seven posts later, here’s what the data actually says.
The Numbers
Current Subscribers: 67,270
- Imported: 6,345 (additional)
- Substack network: 426
- Direct: 44
- LinkedIn: 18
- Shares: 15
From recommendations: 189 subscribers via Substack recommendations.
Open rates: Started at ~48%. Climbed to 62% by end of February
Send volume per post: 104,220 in November. Down to 67,890 by February. We’ll explain why. It was on purpose.
The Recommendation Network Is the Whole Game
I was skeptical of recommendations. It felt like a feature that works for Substack’s biggest names and nobody else.
Wrong.
It’s the primary engine of Substack. 326 Substacks recommend us. Recommendations alone brought 189 subscribers. Onboarding flows (new Substack users seeing recommendations at signup) added another 162.
The top recommenders aren’t major corporate publications. Publications like Navigating the Drift, Sumac & Sunshine, From Here On Out, Simon Owens, and Charlotte on Sunday. General-interest newsletters with overlapping audiences we would never have targeted.
The network doesn’t connect you to obvious peers. It surfaces you to adjacent audiences who convert because they trust the person recommending you.
On our end, we recommend 30+ publications, such as: Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, George Saunders’ Story Club, The Entertainment Strategy Guy, FranchiseRe, and deep into niche media and career reads. We treat it as a way to curate a reading list for our audience. It feeds the flywheel in both directions.
Social Media Is a Rounding Error
LinkedIn: 18 subscribers
Google: 3
Eighteen subs from LinkedIn. For a media careers newsletter. From the platform where professionals go to advance their careers.
The Substack recommendation network drove 10x as many subscribers as LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook combined. If you’re spending hours on social posts to drive Substack growth, redirect that energy into the Substack ecosystem itself.
The Content That Grows Your List Isn’t What You Think
Our weekly drops pull big numbers. Industry roundups about Hollywood, the business behind media, publishing, media layoffs, and big company moves. Sent to 65,000-100,000 inboxes. 60%+ open rates. The goal is to serve the existing audience well.
But the post that drove the most new subscribers (subscribers, not traffic)? We never even emailed it.
“The ‘One Right Path’ Is a Myth: How to Break into Journalism,” an interview with Ryan Teague Beckwith, was published as a standalone blog. No email to all of our subscribers, no push notification. It drove 12 new subscribers purely through organic Substack discovery.
Our weekly editions, which reach tens of thousands of inboxes, drive between 2 and 10 new subs each.
Good advice attracts subscribers even when no one emails it out. Weekly news drops retain them. You need both, and you need to measure them differently.
Open Rates Are a Trailing Indicator
49% to 62% over seven posts.
The early openings were maybe a curiosity. A familiar brand in a new format. By January, the curious had filtered out, and the real audience remained. 62% open rates on a 67,000-person list is exceptional. Now we just have to keep it that way.
For Views, Email Is 99% of Everything of Course
Email opens: 742,037 views, 557,230 users
Direct: 2,879 views
Direct to app: 2,184 views
Everything else: noise
Your publication page, your archive, your “SEO”: none of it matters like what lands in the inbox. The email is the product, after all.
Prune Hard and Prune Early
Send volume dropped from 100,812 to 66,738 over seven posts. That was intentional.
A legacy list built over decades carries dead weight. Addresses from 2016 that haven’t opened since. Corporate inboxes that no longer exist. Sending to them tanks your deliverability. ISPs watch engagement ratios, and dead weight drags everything down. I’d guess Substack factors engagement into how they surface publications, but I have no data on that.
We cut over 30,000 subscribers. Open rates went from 49% to 60%+.
If you’re migrating a legacy list, plan to prune 30-40% in the first few months. It hurts to watch the number drop. Do it anyway, as we now know we have a solid audience worth building a relationship with.
What Flopped
The pattern across all seven posts is consistent with what other Substack publishers have found analyzing their own data at scale: content that makes people feel something outperforms content that simply informs.
Our best-performing weekly drops had sharp, opinionated headlines about real industry pain, like: (”Washington Post Cuts 100 Jobs as Publishing’s 40% Decline Continues”).
Our weakest post was one I wrote myself. It was process-oriented and inward-facing, and it read more like a company blog post than something written for readers. I thought transparency about how we were thinking about the relaunch would be interesting. It wasn’t. The lesson is simple: nobody cares about your process. They care about what your process means for them.
What We’d Do Differently
More standalone advice content. The Beckwith piece showed that advice posts can gain subscribers without email distribution. We should publish these once a month, or once a week, alongside the weekly drops.
Track subscriber source by content type from the start. We’re doing this now. Should have done it from post one.
Notes. Notes are likely your way to grow if you’re starting out fresh. We don’t have good data on this because we didn’t start doing it at first. But I had a personal one that drove 25+ subs, and I’ve seen others get hundreds. And you can see the direct effect transparently, which matters.
The Bigger Picture
Substack’s incentives are aligned with ours. The algorithm exists to surface good work to the right readers. Your growth is how they make money. The incentives are clean, and for a 25-year-old media brand rebuilding its voice, that’s the right platform.
Seven posts in. 67,270 subscribers. 60% open rates. 326 publications recommending us.
We’re just getting started. Thanks for reading with us.
Mediabistro is the career hub for media and creative professionals. If you’re in media or trying to break in, check out Mediabistro.
If you publish on Substack, here’s what our first seven posts taught us. The recommendation network is the growth engine. Invest there first and recommend generously, because it comes back. Publish standalone advice content and let Substack’s discovery surface it organically. Write headlines that make people feel something. Use Notes more than you think you should. And if you’re migrating a legacy list, prune hard and early. Everything else we tried was a rounding error.
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