Substack Notes Is Quietly Overtaking Threads for the Newsletter Class

Substack reported 22 million monthly active users on Notes in its April 2026 platform update, growing 73 percent year over year and pulling within striking distance of Threads at 141 million on a per minute engagement basis. Notes users averaged 38 minutes per day on the surface in March 2026, compared with 16 minutes per day on Threads per Sensor Tower's cross platform report. The story is not raw user count, where Threads still wins by an order of magnitude. The story is who is using it and what they are doing with it.

The Notes audience skews older, more educated, more financially capable, and dramatically more likely to convert into a paying subscription. Substack's internal data shared on the company's April update shows 41 percent of Notes monthly active users have at least one paid Substack subscription, and the average paid subscriber has 3.4 active subscriptions running. Threads, by contrast, has no paid conversion mechanism for the publishers who post there. Mark Zuckerberg's framing of Threads as "iMessage with a feed" describes the experience accurately and also describes why Threads has not produced meaningful publisher revenue.

The publisher migration started in late 2024 and accelerated through 2025 after Substack rolled out the recommendation engine that surfaces Notes from publications a user already subscribes to. Lenny Rachitsky, Casey Newton, Anne Helen Petersen, Ryan Holiday, and Heather Cox Richardson all moved their primary social posting from X and Threads to Notes over the last 18 months. Each reported sustained subscriber growth that they attributed publicly to Notes engagement. Lenny's Newsletter added 47,000 paid subscribers in 2025, with 38 percent of new paid signups citing Notes as the discovery channel.

The mid tier creator story is where Notes is reshaping the economics of newsletters. Substack publishers between 2,000 and 25,000 subscribers reported 28 to 41 percent paid conversion lift over a 12 week period after committing to a daily Notes posting cadence per a Beehiiv competitive analysis published in March. The average top quartile newsletter operator spent 22 minutes per day on Notes in Q1 2026, posting 4 to 6 times daily and reposting work from authors they admire. The behavior pattern looks more like LinkedIn than X, with longer captions, more deliberate engagement, and direct conversation with paying readers in the comments.

Threads remains the larger consumption surface and Meta has invested aggressively in keeping it that way. The platform crossed 145 million weekly active users in March, with 22 percent of Instagram users now using Threads at least weekly. Meta has rolled out longer post limits, video, polls, custom feeds, and most recently a creator monetization fund worth $42 million for the back half of 2026. The fund pays creators per million impressions on a sliding scale that maxes out at $4,500 monthly for the highest tier participants. The economics still do not match what newsletter creators can earn through paid subscriptions on Substack.

Bluesky's growth tells a third story. The platform crossed 41 million users in early April after a sustained migration from X that started in November 2024 around the U.S. election. Bluesky's developer focused community, AT Protocol portability, and chronological feed have made it the preferred home for technologists, journalists, academics, and a growing slice of independent media. Daily active users hit 9.8 million in March, with average session time of 14 minutes. Bluesky has no monetization layer for creators yet, which has kept the major newsletter operators from making it their primary surface despite intellectual alignment with the protocol.

The fragmentation has changed how creators allocate time. The new playbook for a working independent creator with paying subscribers looks roughly like this: 60 to 70 percent of social effort goes to Substack Notes for paid conversion, 15 to 20 percent goes to LinkedIn for B2B reach and credibility, 10 to 15 percent goes to one of Threads or Bluesky for top of funnel discovery, and what remains goes to legacy posting on X or Instagram for the audience that has not migrated. The shift away from "post the same thing on every platform" toward "platform native posting on three platforms" has been the dominant operational change for working creators in 2026.

The signal for brands and marketers is now well understood. Engagement on Substack Notes converts to paid spend at a rate that no other social surface matches. The average Notes recommendation drives 2,800 newsletter signups for the recommended publication, with paid conversion of 8 to 14 percent over 90 days. The same recommendation on Threads drives roughly 600 signups with paid conversion under 2 percent. For working writers, podcasters, and independent journalists, the math is increasingly hard to argue with, even if the audience size on Substack will never match the legacy platforms in raw user terms.