The shift: Across a full year and ~300 tracked newsletters, B2B tech dominates paid Substack sponsorship — Brex (160 placements), Turing (97), Vanta (89), Deel (70). Finance is a strong second, led by ETF issuers and fintech running disclosed sponsored content. The consumer categories tell the real story: beauty, food, and fashion show big mention volume but mostly through affiliate links and gifting, not paid placement. When you filter to genuine paid sponsorships, the field narrows sharply — and skews B2B.
Brands with the most verified paid placements over 12 months
Substack sponsorships are no longer experimental. Around 141 brands placed verified paid sponsorships over the past year. If you sell to operators, builders, or knowledge workers, the channel is becoming table stakes — Brex's 138 placements prove the leaders aren't testing, they're scaling.
This is real, recurring money. Brands are budgeting for Substack the way they budget for podcasts or conferences. If you have a focused audience in tech or finance, a sponsorship pitch is now backed by a year of comparable deals you can point to.
Substack is maturing into a standard placement channel. The 12-month view shows brands cycling in, sticking around, and expanding across multiple newsletters — the pattern of a real channel, not a trend.
Coverage. Drawn from a tracked set of ~300 established newsletters — not a scrape of all of Substack, but a defined, watchable universe weighted toward mid-to-large publications. The 148 brands below are every verified paid sponsor found across that set over the trailing 12 months.
Paid only. Every brand here has a verified paid placement — a sponsored section, a "brought to you by," or a disclosed partnership. Affiliate links, gifting, and organic mentions are excluded. Each card links to real example posts so you can check the placement yourself.
Placement counts reflect verified sponsorship activity over the trailing 12 months. Event sponsorships and other off-platform "thank you to our sponsors" mentions are excluded — a brand only appears here if it paid for placement within a newsletter. A few brands still surface via shared "partner content" blocks (one post listing several partners at once); these are genuine paid placements but concentrated in a single newsletter, so read single-example brands accordingly.
Affiliate is excluded, and it matters most here. In beauty, food, and fashion, many brands show high overall mention counts but almost no genuine paid placements — the activity is affiliate links, gifting, and retailer roundups. Those are filtered out, which is why those categories look smaller than their raw mention volume suggests. That gap is itself the finding.
Consolidation. Sub-brands and card variants are merged into their parent (e.g. Pique Life into Pique, individual Chase card products into one Chase entry) to avoid double-counting a single advertiser.