The highest-converting finance Substacks
Audience size isn't the story.
The Terminal now tracks free subscriber counts for >200 authors, including the 100 Bestsellers, growing with every daily update.
The data already tells a fascinating story. James Bulltard has an astonishing 360k fewer free subs than Doomberg (14k vs 374k) yet sits only one bestseller rank behind (#4 vs #3); Bulltard is followed by either Michael Howell or Charlie Garcia (we can’t know exactly without their precise data). That’s a seriously impressive conversion rate and value signal.
The top 3 bestsellers all write to six-figure audiences (245k–374k), but Compounding Quality has the single largest raw reach in the Terminal at 523k — yet sits behind Citrini, Burry, and Doomberg, because paid conversion rate drives the bestseller rank. The contrast with Bulltard is starker still: his 14k audience outranks their 523k in terms of paid subs, roughly 37x its size.
Bao说杂谈 (314k) and Alfonso Peccatiello (152k) are the two authors with 100k+ subs not in Bestsellers at all (Alf took his paid audience in house, I believe). App Economy Insights has 321k subs, converting to BS #44.
The power law is steep — most finance Substacks are specialist communities operating at micro-audience scale. Of the 204 authors with mapped free sub data, only 9 clear 100k, 108 (53%) have fewer than 10k free subscribers — though treat this distribution as indicative, given the sample has a degree of randomness.
Subscriber counts are also in Author pages.
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