and its top ten publishers were making $7 million in annualized revenue. In April 2022, the New York Times reported Substack may be valued at $650 million. Substack dropped an effort to raise money in May 2022. The company had aimed to raise between $75 million and $100 million. Privacy incident On July 28, 2020, Substack sent out email notifications to all its users about changing privacy policies and notification about CCPA compliance. In this notification email, email addresses of all recipients were inadvertently included in the email 'cc' field rather than in the 'bcc' field. This exposed the email addresses of many Substack users. The company acknowledged the issue on Twitter and said that it was remedied after the initial batch of emails but did not disclose the number of users affected. Substack Pro In March 2021, Substack revealed that it had been experimenting with a revenue sharing program in which it paid advances for writers to create publications on its platform; this became a program known as Substack Pro. Substack has been criticized for not disclosing which writers were part of Substack Pro. Substack Defender Substack provides legal advice to its writers through its program Substack Defender. Lawyers provide a legal review of stories before they are published, and provide advice surrounding cease-and-desist letters related to writers' work. Criticism In 2020, popular platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube began restricting or removing accounts that they claim spread COVID-19 misinformation, which violates those platforms' content policies. Some prominent authors known for spreading misinformation have moved from those platforms to Substack. The Washington Post mentioned Joseph Mercola, whose content, according to Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, is "so bad no one else will host it"; Joe Rogan, who spreads "conspiracy theories about vaccines"; and Stephen K. Bannon, who spreads "violent rhetoric and false claims about the election in the weeks leading up to the Capitol siege on Jan. 6". In January 2022, the Center for Countering Digital Hate criticized the company for allowing content which could be dangerous to public health, estimating it earned $2.5 million per year from the top five anti-vax authors alone, who have tens of thousands of subscribers. Presumably in response to press inquiries, the three founders in a blog post affirmed their commitment to minimal censorship. References External links Online companies of the United States Blog hosting services Internet