📬 Substack Newsletter Directory & Sponsor Discovery

Discover high-growth Substack newsletters, analyze audience engagement, and instantly identify existing sponsors and creator contact details.

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🚀 The Opportunity: Newsletter Sponsorship Intelligence

Newsletter advertising is one of the highest-converting marketing channels in the world today. Modern decision-makers, software engineers, founders, and investors read curated newsletters like The Pragmatic Engineer, Lenny's Newsletter, Not Boring, and Platformer rather than scrolling social feeds.

However, Substack has no public sponsor marketplace or advertiser directory. Brands, B2B SaaS growth teams, and PR agencies typically spend hundreds of hours manually opening newsletters, skimming posts, checking links, and trying to find author contacts.

Substack Newsletter Directory & Sponsor Discovery automates this entire pipeline:

1. Discovers Top Newsletters across 35+ Substack categories (Technology, Business, Finance, Crypto, Health, AI, etc.) or custom leaderboards.
2. Audits Audience Scale & Tier: Extracts subscriber badges ("Tens of thousands of paid subscribers", "Over 100,000 subscribers").
3. Calculates Real Engagement: Analyzes recent posts for average likes, comments, and publishing cadence.
4. Detects Active Sponsors & Brands: Scans post bodies and outbound links for UTM sponsor tracking, affiliate links, and brand mentions (e.g. Sentry, Google Cloud, Notion, HubSpot).
5. Extracts Author & Contact Details: Captures writer names, handles, Twitter/X profiles, and direct publication URLs.
6. Computes Sponsorship Feasibility Score: Automatically rates each publication as High, Medium, or Niche/Emerging based on engagement velocity and sponsorship history.

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✨ Key Features

Feature	Description
🏷️ 35+ Curated Categories	Target Tech, Business, Finance, AI, Marketing, Health, Crypto, Food, Politics, and more.
👥 Audience & Paid Tier Badges	Filter by subscriber tiers (e.g., minimum 1,000+ or 10,000+ paid subscribers).
📈 Live Engagement Benchmarks	Computes exact average likes and comments per post across recent issues.
🔍 Automated Sponsor Detection	Identifies companies already sponsoring the newsletter with brand domains, promo UTMs, and anchor text.
🎯 Sponsorship Readiness Scoring	AI-informed heuristic scoring based on sponsor frequency and community activity.
🐦 Social & Author Contacts	Extracts author names, handles, Twitter/X profiles, and custom domain endpoints.
💸 Cost-Effective Pay-Per-Event (PPE)	You only pay for what you extract—$0.002 to initiate + $0.004 per enriched publication lead.

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📥 Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
category	string	"technology"	Category to explore (e.g., technology, business, finance, crypto, health-and-wellness, all).
rankingType	string	"all"	Leaderboard ranking filter: "all" (All publications), "paid" (Top Grossing Paid), or "free" (Top Free).
maxPublications	integer	25	Maximum number of publications to analyze and extract.
samplePostsCount	integer	5	Number of recent posts to inspect for engagement calculations and sponsor link discovery (1–20).
detectSponsors	boolean	true	Deep-crawl recent posts to detect outbound sponsor links, UTM campaigns, and brand partnerships.
minSubscribersTier	string	"all"	Minimum subscriber tier filter: "all", "hundreds", "thousands", or "tens_of_thousands".
proxyConfiguration	object	{ "useApifyProxy": true }	Proxy settings. Default Apify datacenter proxies ensure 100% reliable uptime.

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📤 Sample Output

Each output dataset item contains comprehensive publication intelligence, author metadata, engagement metrics, and identified sponsors:

{
  "publicationId": 25779,
  "subdomain": "blog.pragmaticengineer.com",
  "name": "The Pragmatic Engineer",
  "url": "https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com",
  "customDomain": "blog.pragmaticengineer.com",
  "logoUrl": "https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F09199342-d619-487c-86e5-2ae34969fa4a_1024x1024.png",
  "heroText": "Big tech and startups: from the inside.",
  "about": "The #1 technology newsletter on Substack. Pragmatic, actionable advice for software engineers, engineering managers and tech leads. Highly rated advice on career growth, engineering culture, and tech trends.",
  "primaryCategory": "technology",
  "subscriberCountBadge": "Over 700,000 subscribers",
  "rankingPosition": 1,
  "rankingType": "all",
  "author": {
    "name": "Gergely Orosz",
    "handle": "gergelyorosz",
    "twitter": "GergelyOrosz",
    "profileUrl": "https://substack.com/@gergelyorosz"
  },
  "metrics": {
    "samplePostsAnalyzed": 5,
    "avgLikesPerPost": 342.6,
    "avgCommentsPerPost": 58.2,
    "avgEngagementScore": 400.8,
    "latestPostDate": "2026-09-08T14:15:00.000Z"
  },
  "sponsorshipFeasibility": {
    "score": "High",
    "reason": "Active sponsor detected across multiple issues with high engagement (>300 interactions/post)",
    "hasActiveSponsors": true,
    "detectedSponsorsCount": 3
  },
  "detectedSponsors": [
    {
      "brand": "sentry",
      "sampleUrl": "https://sentry.io/welcome/?utm_source=pragmaticengineer&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q3",
      "anchorText": "Sentry: Error Tracking and Performance Monitoring",
      "postTitle": "Engineering Hiring Trends for 2026"
    },
    {
      "brand": "antithesis",
      "sampleUrl": "https://antithesis.com/?ref=pragmaticengineer",
      "anchorText": "Antithesis: Autonomous Software Testing",
      "postTitle": "How Big Tech Tests Distributed Systems"
    }
  ],
  "recentPosts": [
    {
      "title": "Engineering Hiring Trends for 2026",
      "url": "https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-hiring-trends-2026",
      "publishedAt": "2026-09-08T14:15:00.000Z",
      "likes": 412,
      "comments": 74
    }
  ],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-09T23:30:00.000Z"
}

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💼 High-ROI Use Cases

1. B2B SaaS Growth & Performance Marketing

Stop guessing which newsletters your target buyers read. Search your industry category (e.g. technology or finance), extract who is currently sponsoring them, and reach out to the authors with relevant proposals.

2. PR & Influencer Marketing Agencies

Build proprietary sponsor databases for your clients. Pitch your clients' products to verified newsletter creators with audience tier proof and historical engagement numbers.

3. Competitor Intelligence

Want to know where your competitors are placing their ad spend? Run this scraper to discover which newsletters feature competitor UTM referral links.

4. Creator Partnerships & Podcast Guests

Identify top voices in any niche with verified Twitter and Substack profiles for podcast invitations, co-marketing webinars, or syndicated guest posts.

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💰 Pay-Per-Event (PPE) Pricing

This Actor utilizes transparent, pay-per-event pricing. You never pay for idle container run time or empty queries:

• Actor Start Event: $0.002 per run execution.
• Verified Publication Dataset Item: $0.004 per fully enriched publication lead (including sponsor detection and metrics).

Example: Extracting 50 verified publications with sponsor intelligence costs only ~$0.20!

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🛡️ Best Practices & Proxy Configuration

• Substack employs standard rate limiting. For best performance, keep the default Apify Proxy enabled.
• Setting samplePostsCount between 3 and 5 provides optimal speed and high sponsor discovery accuracy.