Filip Titlbach, Miloš Čermák and the founder of Rohlík, Tomáš Čupr, all send their texts straight into their readers' inboxes. According to CzechCrunch, Substack is an escape for these authors from content governed by social media algorithms, and on it they can build a community of their own.
One technical difference lies behind this choice, and it is almost never mentioned in the debate about the creator economy. On Substack the author takes the subscriber list with them. On LinkedIn they only rent it.
The term creator economy now covers almost anything. Goldman Sachs estimated back in 2023 that the sector would double from $250 billion to $480 billion by 2027, and it put the number of people who describe themselves as creators at around 67 million in 2025, rising to 107 million by 2030. Other firms reach figures above $1 trillion by the early 2030s.
The spread arises from what is counted in the number. Some measure only creators' income, others the whole ecosystem of tools, platforms and brand spending. When a single word carries estimates that differ by hundreds of billions of dollars, it stops telling you anything about the market.
More useful than the size of the number is the question of what a specific creator actually owns. The audience, data about it, rights to the content, or just the attention that a foreign algorithm lends them. The difference between a company and a channel turns on this axis.
Owned list versus rented reach
The difference between Substack and LinkedIn is documented in both platforms' help pages. A newsletter author on LinkedIn sees about each subscriber “your name, profile photo, job title, and headline”. No email, no export. The relationship between creator and reader stays with the platform.
By contrast, on beehiiv a publisher can download the subscriber list as a CSV, “a list of subscribers by email, status, and tier”. That email is portable. Leaving the platform does not mean losing the audience.
This form of ownership is tangible. The newsletter platform beehiiv describes its distribution as “More predictable. More measurable. More owned” and the subscription as “an ongoing, permission-based relationship”. Behind that wording stands the ownership of data. In 2025 publishers on beehiiv sent over 28 billion emails, reached over 255 million unique readers and held an open rate above 41%. Paid subscriptions brought them $19 million in 2025, against $8 million the year before.
Capital bets on the direct relationship
Investors read the same signal. Substack raised $100 million in a Series C, a round from 17 July 2025 led by BOND and The Chernin Group, with Andreessen Horowitz also taking part. The platform sums up its thesis in the sentence that “hundreds of millions of dollars flow from audiences to creators there every year”, and it builds on tools that “foster deep and direct relationships”. That directness is the whole product. Money flows straight from reader to author, and the platform takes a commission on a completed transaction.
For a brand like Notino, this changes the calculation. Reach on a social network is a rental. When the platform changes its algorithm or rules, the paid audience shrinks without warning. A list of emails stays with the creator as an asset.
Rights are what hold the price
The most expensive form of ownership is the rights to a show. Jay Shetty and his podcast On Purpose have agreed a video distribution deal with Spotify and Netflix, starting on 13 July 2026, with Spotify acting as the show's global sales representative. According to Tubefilter, it is an exclusive multi-year deal “reportedly worth ~$100 million”, in which Netflix receives the video version and Spotify the audio.
A value of around $100 million rests on the show and on the audience that Shetty built. Only the holder of rights to the brand and catalogue can sell exclusivity. At the same time, the very same deal shows the limit. According to Tubefilter, Shetty is prevented from uploading new episodes to YouTube, so in exchange for money he gives up distribution independence on the platform where he grew up. Owning rights opens negotiations. What a creator keeps for themselves in those negotiations depends on the strength of their brand.
A European layer
In Europe, ownership of an audience makes even more sense. An opt-in email list is a first-party relationship built on consent, which is exactly what the GDPR pushes towards. Rented, ad-targeted reach sits at the opposite end. The French regulator CNIL last year fined Google €325 million, among other things for advertising inserted between emails in Gmail without consent. An owned list does not carry this type of risk, because the reader entered the relationship of their own accord.
The phrase creator economy is useful in every presentation and will stay in circulation. What is useful is what stands behind it for a specific creator. A creator who owns a list, data and rights runs a company with its own assets. A creator with just attention borrowed from an algorithm runs a channel whose value holds only until the next change in platform rules.
Comments