Substack Chases Brands as beehiiv Scales Its Ad Network

Substack, a platform built on rejecting advertising, is now courting social-native sponsors like Poppi and Rothy's — and its own executives are framing the pivot as something bigger than old-school display deals. Business Insider reports that consumer brands including Hinge, Tory Burch and Rare Beauty have also launched their own Substack publications, turning the platform into both a sponsorship marketplace and a brand-publishing channel.

Substack's Head of Brand Partnerships Dan Robbins documented the company's sponsorship feature expansion in a recent post, writing that Substack is "not just trying to recreate existing advertising models." The remark is a notable deflection for a company that once eschewed advertising entirely.

Why is beehiiv moving in the same direction?

The competition between the two biggest independent newsletter platforms is sharpening because their business models diverge at the revenue line. Substack takes a 10% cut of subscription revenue. Beehiiv takes 0% — which means it must recover that margin elsewhere: advertising, tech and marketing services. In July, beehiiv announced the launch of its programmatic ad network extension, and just this month it raised prices on paid services.

For writers and newsletter operators, the trade-off is concrete. Substack's model costs 10% of subscription income but bundles a growing sponsorship pipeline aimed at brand dollars. Beehiiv's model preserves full subscription revenue but pushes monetization toward its ad network and paid tooling — at rising service prices.

What does AI mean for messy campaign files?

Elsewhere in the industry, a mundane discipline is getting a hard reset: creative file naming and metadata. The era of files named "sunny_blue.v2_final_ab_edit15sec" with loosely added tags is over, because an AI algorithm — not a person — now sits behind the controls of most campaigns.

Practitioners call the practice "steering": feeding the platform structured, complete information so the AI targets the right outcomes. Simply uploading creative assets and product catalog feeds into an AI interface no longer qualifies, Ad Age reports. Marketers now add contextual details, such as the moments when a product is most popular and the preferences of its target customers.

"You might not have thought about that for every single beverage brand in the past, but you need to fill out every field and do all the fundamentals to get it right, or you're going to be missed and you will not show up," Josh Gurley, Coca-Cola's VP of transformation and strategic growth, said during an Advertising Week New York panel last week. "The fundamentals can't be missed," Gurley added.

The implication for ad teams: incomplete metadata now carries a direct performance cost, because AI-driven campaign systems skip over creative they cannot interpret.

Can Skydance compete with Big Tech on data?

The newly combined Skydance, with a new name and leadership team, faces a structural problem in streaming, according to media analyst Mike Shields. Amazon and Google hold a massive deterministic identity spine spanning billions of IDs, while individual streamers rely on what Shields calls "flimsy IP addresses" and other unreliable data for audience extension.

His proposed fix: Skydance should consider allying with Disney, Netflix and Fox to pool first-party data into a collective — with privacy precautions in place — to improve content recommendations and targeted ads. The Joint Industry Committee is already pursuing comparable work on standardized ad measurement, though with a neutral middleman so streamers aren't handing data straight to rivals.

In brief

• Brands that received US government refunds after Trump's import tariffs were ruled illegal are passing the money back to consumers through more ads (WSJ).
• Meta has banned TikTok's former controlling owner ByteDance from advertising on its platforms (Bloomberg).
• Anthropic will treat users who are abusive toward its AI models as violators of its usage policy (Business Insider).
• Ad spots during NFL games perform best when they're funny, Adweek reports.

The newsletter giants' next move — whether Substack's sponsorship push or beehiiv's ad network wins more publisher revenue — will hinge on which model writers trust enough to build a business on.