"Native Sponsorships" — Substack Introduces Advertisements

How a Platform Built on “No Ads” Is Quietly Reneging on Its Core Promise

When Substack announced a $100 million funding round in July 2025, investor Mike Kerns from The Chernin Group told The New York Times something that should have sent shockwaves through the platform’s creator community: “Creators have told [Substack corporate] that they want Substack to support advertising. We think it is a massive opportunity to launch a native form of advertising within the Substack ecosystem at some point.” A few writers on here did take notice, to be fair. And a persistent rumor of advertising being added to the platform, circulated for months thereafter.

This was only amplified by the many platform changes and subtle business pivots that Substack did throughout 2025. Many of which it failed to be fully open and honest about. For a platform that built its reputation on rejecting the “busted” (per co-CEO Hamish McKenzie) advertising model, these moves increasingly seemed odd, even like a sort of betrayal or reneging on a promise. And for years Substack had prided itself on being more transparent and less commercially driven—no pun intended—than other names in the online journalism and general content space.

But here’s what makes it worse: between that July announcement and this month, when native sponsorships finally launched, the company maintained radio silence with creators. Members of Substack’s tech support even denied that ads were coming to the platform in those intervening months. Yet when advertising finally did arrive on December 9, 2025, the company didn’t issue a public announcement, it…gave an exclusive interview to Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me newsletter?! One that’s hidden behind a paywall, no less.

Why Did I Have to Learn About Native Sponsorships Behind a Single Writer’s Paywall?

The question hanging over this entire announcement comes from George ~ FWN: “Why is Substack’s announcement that they’re launching a sponsorship program hidden behind a single creator’s paywall?” It’s a simple question that cuts to the heart of the problem(s) here. Issues of transparency, of fairness, of favoritism, and of corporate spin.

Sure, Emily Sundberg is by most accounts a good journalist. She’s also clearly one of Substack’s success stories, with the purple Bestseller badge (connoting thousands of paid subscribers) to prove it. Her Feed Me newsletter has built a substantial following covering culture, media, and business.

But all that does, in some ways, precisely cut aside the legitimacy of using her as the vessel for this announcement. A message that, by rights, should have been rendered free and fully publicly on Substack’s own blog, not handed to a single, favored daughter creator as an exclusive and locked behind a pay-gate.

When Substack gives breaking news about a significant platform feature to one of its most commercially successful creators—rather than making a clear announcement available to all creators simultaneously—it creates several issues. It signals that Substack has “insiders” (successful creators granted interview access) and “outsiders” (everyone else finding out through the grapevine). It shows a certain blitheness and callousness with regard to public relations. Perhaps worst of all, it implies that Substack did not, on some level, want to level with its users fully. It wanted to soft-pedal and to spin.

So What’s Actually Happening?

The interview, and notes about it from creators (including McKenzie himself) revealed a “pilot program” or beta test of “hand-selected brands + writers” had already been looped together behind the scenes. More will likely be added in the coming months. Interested creators or brands can apparently email sponsorships@substackinc.com to be “considered for future expansion,” per McKenzie and Sundberg.

Some of the info has been filtering out through notes, both from Sundberg and her peers. Notably, the “native sponsorships” will take the form of markups in the corner of posts and publications. Like the image above, they will be visible but not especially disruptive, or at least that’s the hope/assumption going in. They will be limited to posts for now, and only to the creators already in the program. Brands involved could be anyone from a retail food item to an e-commerce platform. There are plans to expand in 2026.

Substack will not take a cut of these brand deals, not during the pilot anyway, tho they have been instrumental in helping make them happen. Some creators expressed delight, arguing this was a long-time coming. McKenzie himself said that one reason for this program/feature is that Substack can negotiate on behalf of creators, freeing up time and money that writers might’ve othewise dedicated to hiring brand managers to do it instead.

The term native sponsorships is deliberately chosen. These are to be viewed, per Substack, like something akin to an athlete who wears a logo on their unique or their gear/vehicle during games. They are not advertisements in the same sense as what YouTube and Twitter run between people’s content. Still, the term is quite a mouthful, and people like controversial writer Freddie deBoer noted, that the deliberate choice not to use the words “ads” or “advertising” anywhere in the announcement feels “disingenuous.”

Problematic Pattern: Say One Thing, Build Another

Substack’s advertising pivot follows a now-familiar pattern for them, one that’s been well established in Silicon Valley: maintain an idealistic public stance while quietly building the infrastructure to do the opposite.

The Public Statements:

• July 2022: CEO Chris Best told Yahoo Finance, “Our decision to focus on subscriptions to the exclusion of advertising is one of the strategic strengths of the company.”

• April 2023: Best hedged slightly, telling The Rebooting that while reducing audiences to commodities “is in opposition to the reason Substack exists,” the question of whether there are “ways you can do advertising without that property” was “interesting.”

• March 2025: Co-founder Hamish McKenzie told Semafor that while Substack “is not hostile to advertising,” he worried that “if you do it in the wrong way, you can really screw things up.”

The Behind-the-Scenes Reality:

• February 2024: Axios reported Substack was running a pilot program helping podcast creators find advertisers and coordinate ad buys—done quietly, without public announcement.

• July 2025: Investors publicly announced advertising plans, apparently catching many creators off guard.

• Between July-December 2025: Despite the investor announcement, Substack employees reportedly continued to downplay or deny imminent advertising features when questioned by creators.

It is worth reiterating that the language choices are rather…euphemistic and massaged, including but not limited to the choice of “native sponsorships.” When a platform can’t even use the most straightforward phraseology for what it’s doing or rolling out, that may well be a tell.

The pattern of misleading statements extended beyond tech support to Substack's leadership itself. Mills Baker, Substack's Head of Design, stated in a Substack Note that there were "no plans for ads at all," according to economist Brad DeLong's November 19, 2025 analysis of the platform's direction. This denial came mere weeks before the December 9th launch of native sponsorships, and months after investor Mike Kerns had publicly announced advertising as part of Substack's roadmap.

Baker's statement is particularly notable given his senior position—as Head of Design, he would have been directly involved in building the infrastructure for any advertising product. The claim of "no plans" was either a deliberate misrepresentation to creators or evidence of a company where even senior leadership were kept in the dark about major business pivots, neither of which inspires confidence in Substack's transparency.

Understandably then, the reaction to this new development hasn’t been pretty. Consider longtime Substack loyalist Claire Swinarski, who writes at Claire the Catholic Feminist. She has been, per her words, “a steadfast defender of Substack for years + years” since mid-2020, yet she came in swift and critical. She responded with palpable disappointment:

“Introducing sponsorships is the absolute worst decision that Substack could make at this point in time. It’s going to increase slop, play right into the hands of the algorithmic attention economy, and drive down both the integrity and the quality of the pieces written here. If people want to independently work with a brand and go through that rigamarole to sponsor individual posts, they can do that [on their own]. They don’t need Substack’s gold stamp of approval... this is the first time I’ve actually winced in an ‘ah, shit’ way about Substack.”

She goes on to add that she makes “a full-time income on substack“ through her paid subscriptions alone, and that the platform’s original model works when creators “care about what [we] do, leading [us] to create consistent content.” Her critique matters precisely because she’s succeeded within Substack’s original promise. This isn’t a failed creator complaining; it’s a successful one watching the platform abandon what made it work, at least in her estimation.

Ongoing Opacity Issues

Beyond the announcement issues, there’s a deeper problem with how Substack operates: when creators encounter technical problems or have questions about new features, they are at the mercy of Substack’s own whims in terms of getting answers. Barring note messages from co-CEOs Best and McKenzie, or a stray interview gifted to a Notable journalist and placed behind a paywall, users must fend for themselves.

Tho Substack does at times try to mirror platforms like Twitter by letting a public-facing leadership, engineering team, and product teams actively engaging with creators on Notes, these are strictly capricious in terms of who says what where anbd when. There’s no overarching SubstackSupport team that reliably answers burning, and increasingly inconvenient or awkward, questions from the community. No visible product roadmap of new feature or upcoming like at other tech companies. There’s no engineering blog explaining how features work.

The official Substack corporate blog page has generic stuff about livestreaming and finance. They haven’t commented on verified badges, haven’t explained algorithm changes in anything but the most nebulous and careful of terms in a few stray notes from devs, haven’t been open and honest about a lot of things lately. Questions seem to go into a black box where there’s no public documentation of known issues. Solutions (if they arrive) aren’t shared for others to learn from.

This opacity serves Substack’s interests—it allows them to control information flow and avoid public accountability for technical issues or unpopular decisions. But it disserves creators who are building businesses on the platform and deserve to know how their tools work.

The Broader Pattern

The advertising pivot isn’t isolated. It fits a pattern where Substack:

1. Makes idealistic public statements about respecting creators, transparency, and subscription-first models

2. Builds features or makes changes that contradict those statements

3. Uses friendly intermediaries (successful creators, sympathetic journalists) to announce or explain changes

4. Maintains opacity about technical implementation and product roadmaps

5. Funnels dissent into private support channels where it can’t coalesce into public pressure

This is particularly galling because Substack built its brand on being different from platforms like Youtube, Twitter, and Medium. Not to mention traditional, legacy media organizations. The pitch was: We’re not like them. We’re transparent. We respect creators. We’re aligned with your interests, not advertisers.

Well, now Substack has welcomed advertising with open arms. But only for a select few creators. On the low, or sorta. And without the fanfare or scrutiny that might be initiated if they wrote about it themselves on their actual Products blog account. Nope. We just got a friendly interview we had to pay to read, if so able and inclined.

When you give exclusive platform news to favored creators behind paywalls, when you refuse to maintain public technical transparency, when your employees deny features are coming even as you’re building them…you’re not actually different or better than your competitors in the social media and content publication spaces. Ultimately, this strategy just turns out to be more of the usual from companies who want to seem more high minded than they really are.

What Creators Deserve

Substack must do better. It ought to provide:

1. Simultaneous Information: Major features should be announced publicly and officially, not simply rolled out on the low, talked about little if all, and even then only through favored intermediaries.

2. Technical Transparency: A visible, accessible engineering team that documents known issues, explains how features work, and maintains a public roadmap. Early, often, and with more accessible point personnel than the two co-CEOs.

3. Honest Communication: If something big is coming, say so clearly and early. If it’s already here, explain rather than letting us find out on our own. And definitely don’t have employees deny it while you’re building it.

4. Consistent Principles: If you’re going to abandon subscription-only models, own it. Don’t hide behind language about “new possibilities” or semantic distinctions that sound like weasel-words.

5. Public Accountability: When creators have concerns about features, those conversations should happen where others can see and participate, not buried in support tickets.

The Bottom Line

Substack can absolutely pivot to advertising. Markets change, business models evolve, and what seemed impossible in 2017 may be necessary in 2025. But the way you execute that pivot matters. There’s better and worse approaches to public relations.

You don’t build an anti-advertising brand for years, then quietly roll out ads through an interview with a favored daughter instead of an official announcement. You don’t maintain radio silence for five months after investors announce advertising plans, then drop the news through a paywalled newsletter interview. You don’t create a “hand-selected” pilot program without transparent criteria, forcing other creators to email sponsorships@substackinc.com and hope for the best.

That’s not respect. That’s not transparency. That’s information control. That’s spin doctoring. And if Substack wonders why some creators are increasingly skeptical of the platform’s promises—well, maybe they should ask themselves why we had to learn about so many new changes in ways that only compounded the angst and frustration.