Over the past couple of years, Substack has contended with a series of setbacks, antagonists, and straight-up flaming arrows fired in the direction of the six-year-old self-publishing service’s San Francisco headquarters. There was the brand-damaging, culture-wars-and-free-speech-fueled outrage over Substack’s platforming of both anti-vaxxers and enemies of the trans community, the latter of which contributed to at least a small exodus of users. There was last year’s not-insignificant company retrenchment—layoffs, the suspensions of marketing spend and writer advances, the decision not to seek an additional $75 million to $100 million in venture capital—as Substack reckoned with various market pressures coming to bear. (A revelation in The New York Times that Substack’s 2021 revenue was a mere $9 million, per sources who spoke to the paper, didn’t exactly instill bullishness about the company’s prospects.)

Meanwhile, mainstream publications like the Times and The Atlantic have taken aim with their own subscription-oriented newsletter offerings, hoping to bite off a piece of the Substack pie. More recently, after Substack introduced its Twitter-esque Notes feature in April, Elon Musk dropped a bomb on his Silicon Valley counterparts by preventing Substack writers from embedding tweets in their newsletters and stifling the circulation of Substack newsletter links on Twitter. (Those issues were only partially resolved, and Substack believes Twitter is still trying to screw with its accessibility by imposing a four-and-a-half-second delay on links to Substack posts.)

Is it just me or, despite the repeated threats to its prominence in the media ecosystem, does Substack seem more popular than ever? Anecdotally, at least, the long list of standout writers, journalists, and public intellectuals shacking up with the platform only appears to be growing. In addition to Substack’s existing bench of heavy hitters—the Matt Taibbis and Heather Cox Richardsons and Bari Weisses of the world—there’s been a flurry of notable additions in the past two months alone: Margaret Sullivan (whom Substack recruited to do a podcast as part of its push into audio), Jake Tapper, Elif Batuman, Richard Dawkins, Kevin Kruse, Alisha Ramos, and Hamilton Nolan, to name a few. Curbed cofounder Lockhart Steele is back with Found NY, filled with “recommendations and intel for people who earn and spend well in and around New York City.” After being laid off from NPR in March, breakout Ukraine correspondent Tim Mak returned to the front lines with The Counteroffensive, the first Substack dedicated exclusively to war correspondence. (This past weekend included a peak inside the Wagner military group that stoked rebellion in Russia.) And let’s not forget the new collaborative romance novel being serialized by Jen Taub, Mary Trump, and E. Jean Carroll, which debuted to a splashy New York Times story.

Another new Substack that caught my eye is The Media Mix, a newsletter and podcast from Claire Atkinson, who has been covering the industry for nearly three decades at big outlets like the New York Post, NBC News, and, most recently, Insider. She left a few weeks back to join the ranks of reporters who have fled established publications for Substack, which, by the way, makes its money by taking a 10% cut from each paid-subscription transaction. I asked Atkinson, who’s charging $8 a month or $80 a year for full Media Mix access, why she traded in a comfortable full-time gig with health insurance for the hustle and uncertainty of a Substack income.

“I was reading a lot of Substacks and I kind of felt like, you know, it’s a critical mass of thinkers in the same place,” she said on the phone, speaking from the French Riviera, where she was lingering after last week’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “Substack is quite easy to use, and I like the idea of cross-posting and reading other people’s Substacks and them reading mine. So much news these days is mediated by social and Google SEO, but you don’t even need a home page anymore. You just need people to know where to find you.”

Here’s the part where I should mention that I too have been using Substack, albeit more casually than the aforementioned folks, some of whom rely on Substack for their livelihood. When my book came out last September, I joined Substack as a way to generate an author email-list, put some bonus material into the world, and keep readers up to date on my work. (Just for kicks, I also recently started a column where I gab with fellow narrative-history practitioners about their research.) I’m not charging for any of this stuff (never say never?), nor do I have expectations of turning this into an income-generating side hustle. But I will say that, now that I’ve given Substack a spin, I can appreciate the platform’s value and ease firsthand. (Other authors apparently can too.)

That said, when I profiled Substack (before I was using it, for what it’s worth) in the June 2022 issue of Vanity Fair, I suggested that, “maybe, in another five years, we’ll all look back on Substack and remember when it was the hot new thing, only to have fizzled,” joining the ranks of Tumblr or TinyLetter or whatever other community-oriented, content-driven start-up had once been all the rage. I still wonder about this, and we won’t know how things ultimately shake out for some time. (Falls from grace can be years in the making.) But to date, we have yet to see a formidable usurper.

In terms of rivals, Ghost seems to be the one you hear about most often, and it does have its share of Substack refugees. (Then again, how often do you hear about Ghost?) Ten-year-old Patreon doesn’t make for as much of an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s a shark in the water nonetheless, and it recently expanded upon the ways in which users can interact with and make money from their fans.

This month brought news of two direct challenges to Substack’s dominance. The nearly two-year-old New York–based newsletter start-up Beehiiv announced it had raised another $12.5 million to “expand its product, bring on more writers, and build out its revenues,” according to TechCrunch. Also in TechCrunch: “WordPress.com challenges Substack with launch of paid newsletters.” As Substack user and media writer Simon Owens observed, “Probably the biggest weakness of Substack is that, once a newsletter reaches a certain size, it’s incentivized to move off the platform to avoid the 10% fee. With WordPress, users will simply be able to upgrade and then eliminate the fee—thus WordPress doesn’t lose them as a customer.”

I called Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie to get a sense of how he views the emerging competition. “With Ghost and Beehiiv and WordPress, the critical thing is, can you help people grow?” he said. “For Substack, that is so nonnegotiable, because the entire business model is built on it. We have to justify our 10% take by helping writers grow so they can get more money. We have amazing publishing tools, but we also have the Substack network.”

On that note, how is the Substack network doing these days overall? “We’re just coming out of defensive mode,” said McKenzie. “The numbers are still growing. It’s not the same as the rocket ship growth we saw during the pandemic, but I feel proud of the way we’re growing steadily despite the chaos of the current times and Elon trying to kill us and all the rest. Hopefully now the market will turn around and things will catch fire again.”