How the flame of Beehiiv is attracting and why? The Substack crisis looks like a failure of courage. Look closer and it's a failure of architecture.
Apr 15, 2026
When a platform protects harmful content, our first instinct is to call it a values failure. Sometimes it is. But often the more dangerous culprit is structural: a business model that creates a direct financial cost for doing the right thing. Substack and Beehiiv are a live case study in exactly this — and what it tells us about platform governance applies to every brand that has ever confused its revenue logic with its principles
Everyone has been asking the wrong question about Substack. The question being asked is: does Substack care enough about harmful content? Does its leadership have the right values? Is it brave enough to act? These are the right questions to ask of a person. They are the wrong questions to ask of a platform. The more forensically accurate question — and the more useful one for every brand watching this unfold — is this: what does Substack’s business model make it rational to do?
Because once you look at it through that lens, the behaviour stops being mysterious. It becomes almost predictable. And it becomes a warning that extends far beyond the newsletter economy.
The Architecture of the Problem
Substack’s model is elegantly simple: it takes 10% of every paid subscription generated on the platform. No flat fee. No ceiling. A straight percentage, forever, of whatever a writer earns from their readers. The more a writer earns, the more Substack earns. This creates an alignment between writer success and platform revenue that feels virtuous — and largely is, for the vast majority of its 63,000 newsletter creators. Until a writer who is generating significant subscription revenue also happens to be producing content that is harmful, hateful, or corrosive to the platform’s reputation.
At that point, the alignment breaks. Because removing that writer now has a real, calculable financial cost to Substack’s bottom line. Not a theoretical cost. Not a moral trade-off. An actual line on a spreadsheet that goes from positive to zero the moment the account is closed.
"The most dangerous kind of institutional failure isn't bad values. It's a business model that turns good values into expensive ones.
A newsletter with 10,000 paying subscribers at $10 a month generates $100,000 in monthly subscription revenue. Substack’s 10% take is $10,000 a month — $120,000 a year — from a single account. Removing that account doesn’t just cost Substack a subscriber. It costs Substack $120,000 in annual revenue. That is a boardroom-level decision. It requires a meeting. It requires sign-off. It requires someone to write a memo justifying the loss. And in that delay — in the bureaucracy that financial consequence creates — harmful content continues to exist, continues to reach readers, and continues to be associated with the platform.
Multiply that across dozens of high-earning accounts whose content sits in ambiguous territory, and you begin to understand why Substack’s response to the Nazi content scandal was not immediate removal but philosophical deflection. The company invoked free speech. It called itself a platform for ideas, not an arbiter of them. It removed five publications in January 2024 — five, against a backdrop of scores — and presented this as meaningful action. The language of principle was being used to justify what was, at its core, a financial calculation.
Now Look at Beehiiv
Beehiiv’s CEO Tyler Denk said something in February 2026 that deserves to be read slowly. Asked about how Beehiiv handles harmful content, he said: “It’s easy, because they’re paying us $79 a month and it’s not a big part of our business, and we aren’t incentivised to keep them on. So if we think that they are net worse for the ecosystem and our brand, it’s very easy to remove them. I think where you see Substack having trouble is that could be hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue that they’re kicking off the platform.”
This is one of the most honest pieces of corporate self-awareness to emerge from the platform wars. Denk is not claiming that Beehiiv has better values than Substack. He is not positioning his company as the morally superior alternative. He is saying something far more structurally important: our business model doesn’t make it expensive to do the right thing. That is a different claim entirely. And it is a more durable one.
Substack — 10% revenue model
A harmful newsletter has 10,000 paying subscribers at $10/month
£120K
Annual cost to Substack of removing a single high-earning bad actor. A boardroom decision requiring sign-off, justification, and a memo.
Removal is expensive
Beehiiv — flat SaaS model
The same creator pays Beehiiv’s platform fee regardless of subscriber count
£948
Annual cost to Beehiiv of removing the same actor. A product decision. No boardroom required. No memo. No meeting.
Removal is straightforward
The structural conclusion
Beehiiv’s governance advantage is not moral — it is architectural. A flat SaaS fee removes the financial conflict of interest that a percentage-of-revenue model creates. The model determines the incentive. The incentive determines the behaviour. The behaviour becomes the brand.
Now notice what Denk does not say. He does not say Beehiiv has no hateful content. He does not claim ideological purity. He acknowledges there is likely “wide left and wide right” on the platform. Beehiiv does not proactively scan for misogyny. It does not audit newsletters for manosphere content. Its Acceptable Use Policy prohibits incitement to violence and illegal activity — not ideology, not viewpoint, not offensive opinion. In that respect, it is no more a values-led governance model than Substack claims to be.
The difference is that when something clear enough to act on surfaces, the act of removing it costs Beehiiv almost nothing. So they act. Promptly. Without a meeting. The architecture permits good behaviour in a way that Substack’s architecture actively obstructs it.
The Platform vs. Infrastructure Distinction — And Why It Matters
There is a second architectural difference at work, and it compounds the first. Substack is a network. It has Notes, Recommendations, a social feed, a mobile app. It surfaces content from writers you’ve never subscribed to. It algorithmically promotes newsletters it believes you’ll enjoy. It is, in every meaningful sense, a media platform — and media platforms are editorially responsible for the content they actively promote.
Beehiiv is — by deliberate design and consistent positioning — infrastructure. It sends emails from a writer to their existing subscribers. It does not discover content for strangers. It does not recommend newsletters to people who didn’t ask for them through its own algorithmic layer. Your newsletter reaches the people who opted in to receive it, and no one else via Beehiiv’s machinery.
This is not a trivial distinction. The moment you build a discovery layer, you become responsible for what you surface. You are no longer a pipe — you are a curator. And curators bear editorial liability in a way that pipes do not. Substack chose, over years and multiple product decisions, to become a curator. Beehiiv has, so far, chosen to remain a pipe. That choice has governance consequences that neither company may have fully intended.
When Substack’s algorithm recommends a newsletter to a reader who never sought it out, Substack has made an editorial decision. It has said: this content is worth your attention. If that content is harmful, Substack has not merely hosted harm — it has endorsed and distributed it. That is a categorically different level of responsibility. And it is a responsibility that Substack’s leadership appears to have underestimated as the platform evolved.
IV
So Is It a Values Problem at All?
Here is where the argument becomes genuinely uncomfortable — because the honest answer is: yes, and no, and the order matters.
Substack’s founders made choices. They chose to build a social discovery layer. They chose a revenue model that ties platform income directly to creator earnings. They chose to respond to the Nazi content scandal with philosophical deflection rather than swift removal. Each of those was a values-inflected decision. The values were there — expressed in architecture, in product roadmap, in public statements. What they lacked was not values but foresight — the understanding that the architecture they were building would, at scale, make their stated values increasingly unaffordable to act on.
This is the point that matters most for anyone building a brand or a business model: your values don’t operate in a vacuum. They operate inside an incentive structure. And if your incentive structure systematically makes your values expensive to honour, your values will lose. Every time. Not because you are corrupt — but because the architecture is.
“You don’t get to separate your business model from your values. Your business model is where your values go to be tested.” The governance question every brand must answer.
Governance Dimension
Revenue model
Flat SaaS fee per publisher
Financial cost of removing a high-earning bad actor
Minimal — £79/month flat fee
Platform type
Infrastructure — email delivery tool
Amplification of content
None — sends to opted-in subscribers only
Editorial liability
Lower — pipe responsibility, not curator
Proactive content auditing
Minimal — reactive when flagged
Speed of enforcement when issue identified
Fast — no financial consequence creates action
Public governance narrative
“We’re a tool, not a publisher” — architecture framing
What This Means for Every Brand Building a Business Model
The newsletter platform wars are a contained, legible version of a conflict that plays out at every scale of business. Replace “Substack” with any brand that has ever faced the moment where doing the right thing would cost too much — and you will find the same structure underneath. A revenue model that creates financial alignment between the brand and a particular behaviour. A moment when that behaviour becomes publicly unacceptable. A delay that looks like cowardice but is actually the incentive structure doing its job.
The question is not whether your brand has good values. Most brands do, at the level of intention. The question is whether your business model architecture supports those values being acted on — or whether it quietly, systematically, makes them too expensive to honour at the moments that matter most.
The Brand Architecture Test
Four Questions Every Brand Should Be Able to Answer
Before the moment of conflict arrives — not after
01
Where does your revenue come from — and what behaviour does it reward?
Map your revenue model. Identify which customer behaviours, content types, or user actions most directly increase your income. Then ask: are those the same behaviours you publicly say you stand for? If the answer is partially no, you have a structural misalignment — and it will surface in a crisis.
02
What does it cost you to remove a bad actor from your ecosystem?
Calculate it literally. Not in reputational terms — in financial terms. If the cost is high and the decision requires executive sign-off, your values will always be slower than the crisis. If the cost is low and the decision can be made at product level, your values have a fighting chance of arriving on time.
03
Are you a pipe or a curator — and does your governance reflect which one you are?
If you amplify, recommend, surface, or actively distribute content beyond the people who sought it out, you are a curator. Curators bear editorial responsibility. Your governance framework needs to match that. If you are a pipe, govern like a pipe — but do not build a discovery layer and then claim pipe immunity.
04
Is your stated positioning actually embedded in your commercial structure?
This is the hardest question. Anyone can write values on a website. The test is whether those values are load-bearing — whether they are so embedded in how the business makes money that violating them would require changing the model itself. If they’re not, they’re decoration. And decoration doesn’t survive a crisis.
Beehiiv is not a paragon of virtuous governance. It has hateful content on its platform. It does not proactively police ideology. Its CEO is candid about staying “as far away from content moderation as possible.” What it has is an architecture that removes the main structural barrier to acting when something clearly crosses a line — and a revenue model that does not hold a gun to its own head every time it has to make a difficult call.
That is not a values advantage. It is a model advantage. And in the long run, model advantages are more reliable than values advantages — because values depend on the humans in the room, and humans change, get promoted, sell their equity, and move on. But the model stays. The architecture persists. The incentive structure outlasts the founders who built it and the press releases that described what it stood for.
The real lesson of Substack versus Beehiiv is not about newsletters. It is about this: if you want your brand to behave in accordance with its values under pressure, you need to build a model where doing so is cheap. Because when the moment comes — and it will come — the architecture is what shows up first. The values arrive later. And later is often too late.
The Flame - Brand & Business Intelligence
The brands that endure are not the ones with the most articulate values statements. They are the ones whose commercial architecture makes it structurally natural — not heroic — to do the right thing.
Know your model. Own your incentives. Because your business model is not separate from your brand. It is your brand, made operational.
