Substack Notes vs. Threads: Which Actually Grows Your List

Published: September 2026

Threads and Notes solve different problems, and conflating them leads to disappointment either way - expecting Threads to convert like Notes does, or expecting Notes to reach like Threads does. Here's the actual gap between them and where each one earns its place.

The core structural difference

Substack Notes lives entirely inside the subscription ecosystem - every person browsing the Notes feed already has a Substack account, and subscribing to a new publication they discover there is a single tap, no new account or app required. Threads is Meta's standalone social platform: much larger in raw reach, but every person seeing your Thread has never heard of Substack unless they click through, leave the app, and go create an account somewhere else entirely. That extra friction is the whole story here.

The number that matters most

For many early-stage publications, Notes has reportedly become the dominant growth channel, accounting for over 90% of new subscribers in some cases. That's not "Notes is one channel among several" - for a lot of new writers, it's functionally the only channel that matters yet. Threads, by contrast, functions more as outbound distribution: it can put your name in front of a much bigger and more general audience, but that audience isn't standing one tap away from subscribing the way Notes' audience is.

How Threads compares to a similar platform, concretely

There isn't a widely reported like-for-like traffic study directly between Notes and Threads specifically, but a useful proxy exists: publishers reportedly saw roughly 3x more referral traffic from Bluesky than from Threads in a comparable period. Since Bluesky itself converts to Substack subscriptions at a real but secondary rate compared to Notes, and Threads underperforms Bluesky by that margin, the practical implication is that Threads sits even further down the list as a subscriber-acquisition channel - useful for visibility, not the tool to lean on for growing your list specifically.

Why the friction difference matters more than reach

It's tempting to assume a platform with a much bigger user base will out-produce a smaller, niche one on raw numbers. But subscriber growth isn't a pure function of impressions - it's impressions multiplied by conversion rate, and conversion rate is where the platforms diverge sharply. A Note seen by 500 people, all of whom already have Substack accounts and are one tap from subscribing, can realistically outconvert a Thread seen by 5,000 people who'd need to leave the app, remember to come back, and create a new account before they can subscribe to anything. This is the same dynamic covered in the Notes vs. Bluesky comparison - proximity to the actual subscribe action matters more than raw audience size.

Where Threads still earns a place

None of this means Threads is worthless for a newsletter writer. It's genuinely useful for:

• Visibility with people who'll never open Substack - reaching a mainstream, general audience who might eventually hear about your work through other means, even if they don't convert directly from a Thread
• Repurposing content you've already written - since a Thread and a Note are similar enough in format that the same repurposing approach used for other platforms applies here too, at low additional cost
• Community and brand presence outside the Substack ecosystem, which matters for credibility even if it's not the growth engine

The mistake is treating Threads like a second Notes feed and expecting Notes-level conversion from it. It's a different tool, further from the actual subscribe button, doing a different job.

A practical way to split effort

Given the 90%-of-subscribers pattern above, the sensible default for most new-to-mid-stage writers is to treat Notes as the primary channel and Threads as a lightweight secondary one - post your best Notes to Threads as repurposed content when convenient, but don't spend equal creative effort on both, since the return on that effort is structurally lower on Threads for the specific goal of growing subscribers.

The bottom line

Notes wins decisively for actual subscriber growth because of proximity - its entire audience is already one tap from subscribing to you. Threads wins on raw reach and can be a reasonable secondary channel for visibility and repurposed content, but treating it as an equal growth engine to Notes is likely to be a disappointing comparison, not because Threads is bad, but because it's solving a different problem.

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