Substack takes a 10% cut of subscription revenue while beehiiv takes 0% – and that single gap now explains why both platforms are racing deeper into advertising, according to industry reports.

Substack has pushed further into social-style sponsorship deals, Business Insider reports. Social-native brands such as Poppi and Rothy's now treat the newsletter platform as a channel to strike deals with food and beverage voices. Other social-native brands – including Hinge, Tory Burch and Rare Beauty – have gone further and launched their own Substack publications.

How is Substack's ad stance changing?

Substack's Head of Brand Partnerships Dan Robbins documented the company's sponsorship feature expansion in a post. He wrote that Substack is "not just trying to recreate existing advertising models" – a notable deflection for a platform that once eschewed all advertising.

Rival beehiiv announced the extension of its programmatic ad network in July. Because it takes no cut of subscriptions, beehiiv must recover that margin through advertising and by charging for tech or marketing services – prices it raised this month.

Why are messy creative file names 'kaput'?

Campaign creative files named "sunny_blue.v2_final_ab_edit15sec" with loosely added tags are gone from acceptable practice, because an AI algorithm – not a person – now sits behind the controls of the campaign.

Marketers call the practice of supplying structured information to guide those algorithms "steering." Simply uploading creative and product catalog feeds into an AI interface no longer works; marketers now add details about when a product is most popular and the preferences of its target customer, Ad Age reported from Advertising Week New York.

"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," said Josh Gurley, Coca-Cola's VP of transformation and strategic growth, during an Advertising Week New York panel last week.

"The fundamentals can't be missed," Gurley said.

Can Skydance compete with Big Tech streaming?

Skydance, with a new name and leadership team, faces a structural problem in the streaming wars, Mike Shields wrote on Substack. Grandfathering in the same business playbook for the combined company will not be enough.

Amazon and Google hold a massive deterministic identity spine with billions of IDs, Shields wrote. Individual streaming platforms cannot compete, partly because audience extension relies on "flimsy IP addresses" and other unreliable data.

Shields suggests Skydance ally with other major players – Disney, Netflix and Fox – to form a data collective. Pooling first-party data, with the right privacy precautions, would sharpen content recommendations and targeted ads for all parties. The Joint Industry Committee already pursues similar work on standardized ad measurement, though with a neutral middleman so streamers do not feed data directly to competitors.

In brief

• Brands that received US government refunds after President Trump's tariffs on global imports were found illegal are passing the money back to consumers through more ads, the WSJ reports.
• Meta banned TikTok's former controlling owner ByteDance from advertising on its platforms, Bloomberg reports.
• Anthropic will treat users who are overly abusive toward its AI models as violators of its usage policy, Business Insider reports.
• Ad spots during NFL games perform best when they're funny, Adweek reports.
• Digiday examined how Hollywood handles IP in deals with online creators.

The newsletter ad race and AI-driven campaign hygiene point the same direction: platforms and marketers that structure their data and partnerships now will hold the advantage as algorithmic buying deepens.