10 Data Patterns That Shape a Healthy Substack Publication
What I’ve seen across data audits of 500,000+ subscribers — and why it might change how you look at your dashboard, your cadence and your audience
📊 Ever wonder what I’m really looking for inside a Substack data audit?
This piece unpacks 10 patterns I’ve seen across data audits of 500,000+ subscribers — and what those signals reveal about rhythm, trust and creative sustainability.
It’s a quiet, strategic guide for considering your own metrics more intuitively — and seeing the stories your audience might already be telling you.
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This is not a data course. It’s not a tutorial on where to click or how to obsess over open rates.
This is a pattern map — pulled from real data audits I’ve done with Substack authors, creative entrepreneurs and thoughtful publishers who care deeply about how their work lands.
Inside these 10 patterns, you’ll find something quieter:
Clues. Confirmations. And maybe, a shift in how you think about audience “success.”
Whether you’re facing audience drift, newsletter fatigue or a moment of pivot, this post is designed to help you see signal through the noise. It’s an invitation to look beneath surface metrics and start reading your dashboard like a living story.
You don’t need to memorize anything.
Just read with your instincts turned on. This is what a good publisher does: they listen for the story, while holding all the information — and they synthesize what it means for their publication next.
Some of these patterns may affirm what you already sensed about data trends on Substack.
Some will challenge how you’ve been interpreting your numbers.
Either way — it’s your clarity I want to support.
1. Inbox Opens Tell You Something — But Not Everything
If you’re seeing solid open rates, that’s a good sign: your headlines are compelling and your tech is working.
But opens alone don’t give you relational cues. Post views do. If you’re getting high opens but low views (or low likes, comments, restacks, the markers of audience trust on Substack), your readers may be getting everything they want in the inbox — and never visiting your publication.
In a data audit, we look at whether that’s a design issue, a platform comfort issue or simply a rhythm misalignment — so your posts can start working harder for you, not just land in inboxes and disappear.
2. It’s Not Just the Volume of Leads — It’s the Quality
More subscribers isn’t always the win. In an audit, we want to look at how leads from each referral source behave.