and to make specific posts publicly available to non-subscribers. , the minimum fee for a subscription was $5/month or $30/year, and Substack usually takes a 10% fee from subscription payments. Advertising to users plays no role in revenue generation. In February 2019, the platform began allowing creators to monetize podcasts. Substack reported 11,000 paid subscribers as of 2018, rising to 50,000 in 2019. Substack raised an initial seed round in 2018 from investors including The Chernin Group, Zhen Fund, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron. Andreessen Horowitz provided $15.3 million in Series A funding in 2019, some of which went to bringing high-profile writers into Substack's network. Substack has provided some content creators with advances to start working on their platform. In 2019, the site provided a fellowship to some writers, which included a $3,000 stipend and a one-day workshop in San Francisco. The decline of sports-oriented publications such as Sports Illustrated, Deadspin, and SB Nation, coupled with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, led to a surge in sports journalists moving to write on Substack in 2019 and 2020. However, Substack competes with subscription site The Athletic in this submarket, so McKenzie says the company does not recruit as strongly in that market. In 2020, following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Substack extended grants of $1,000–$3,000 to over 40 writers to begin working on the platform. Substack expanded into comics content in 2021 and signed creators including Saladin Ahmed, Jonathan Hickman, Molly Ostertag, Scott Snyder, and James Tynion IV, paying them while keeping their subscription revenue. After their first year, Substack will take 10 percent of subscription revenue. The Substack founders reached out to a small pool of writers in 2017 to acquire their first creators. Bill Bishop was among the first to put his newsletter, Sinocism, on Substack, providing his newsletter for $11 a month or $118 a year with daily content. As of 2019, Bishop's Sinocism was the top paid newsletter on the service. By late 2020, the conservative newsletter The Dispatch claimed the title of top Substack user, with more than 100,000 subscribers and over $2 million in first-year revenue, according to founder Steve Hayes. In May 2021, Substack acquired Brooklyn-based startup People & Company. In August 2020, Substack reported that over 100,000 users were paying for at least one newsletter. As of August 2021, Substack had more than 250,000 paying subscribers