Substack Author Scraper

Find newsletter creators to pitch. Takes Substack URLs, returns one CRM-ready lead row per author — name, email, social profiles, subscriber count, publication metadata.

Focused for B2B outreach, sponsorship sales, partnership prospecting, and competitive lead research. No posts, no comments, no article scraping — just the contact data you actually need.

🚀 Key Features

• 📧 Email Discovery: Author contact emails extracted from About pages, footers, and mailto: links with confidence-based ranking. Blacklists 100+ noise domains (analytics, CDNs, social platforms) and generic prefixes (info@, support@, no-reply@).
• 🔗 Social Profiles: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and personal website URLs.
• 📊 Publication Metadata: Title, description, custom domain, logo, created date, paid status, founding-plan name, subscriber count (when publicly visible).
• 🌐 Custom Domain Support: Handles *.substack.com and custom domains (e.g. platformer.news).
• 👥 Multi-Publication Authors: Correctly attributes the requested publication (not the author's primary one) for writers who run multiple newsletters.
• ⚡ Batch Processing: Process hundreds of URLs in a single run.
• 💰 Pay-per-Lead: One charge per URL processed (success or fail).

📋 Input

Required

• newsletterUrls (array): List of Substack newsletter URLs to enrich
  • Example: [{"url": "https://platformer.substack.com"}, {"url": "https://lennysnewsletter.com"}]
  • Supports both *.substack.com URLs and custom domains

Optional

• delayBetweenRequests (number, default: 3000, range: 500-10000): Delay in milliseconds between HTTP requests to avoid rate limiting
• maxRetries (number, default: 2, range: 0-5): Retry count per URL on failure

💡 Example Input

{
  "newsletterUrls": [
    { "url": "https://platformer.substack.com" },
    { "url": "https://lennysnewsletter.com" },
    { "url": "https://andrewsullivan.substack.com" }
  ],
  "delayBetweenRequests": 3000,
  "maxRetries": 2
}

📊 Example Output

One row per submitted URL:

{
  "author_id": 241262,
  "author_name": "Casey Newton",
  "author_handle": "platformer",
  "author_bio": "Casey Newton is the founder and editor of Platformer...",
  "author_photo_url": "https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/...",
  "author_previous_name": null,
  "author_subscriber_count": 176000,
  "author_subscriber_count_string": "176K+ subscribers",
  "author_follower_count": 209469,
  "author_twitter_url": "https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton",
  "author_linkedin_url": null,
  "author_facebook_url": "https://www.facebook.com/...",
  "author_instagram_url": "https://instagram.com/crumbler",
  "author_is_active": true,
  "author_profile_set_up_at": "2021-04-22T18:51:48.648Z",
  "author_profile_disabled": false,
  "email": "casey@platformer.news",
  "website_url": "https://www.platformer.news",
  "publication_id": 7976,
  "publication_name": "Platformer",
  "publication_subdomain": "platformer",
  "publication_url": "https://www.platformer.news",
  "publication_description": "News at the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy...",
  "publication_logo_url": "https://bucketeer-...",
  "publication_custom_domain": "www.platformer.news",
  "publication_created_at": "2019-03-29T13:28:21.009Z",
  "publication_subscriber_count": 176000,
  "publication_subscriber_count_visible": true,
  "publication_is_paid": false,
  "publication_founding_plan_name": "Mystery Tier",
  "publication_has_posts": true,
  "publication_count": 1,
  "leaderboard_category": "Technology",
  "leaderboard_rank": 4,
  "leaderboard_ranking_type": "paid",
  "all_publications": [...],
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-23T19:19:13.110957+00:00"
}

📋 Output Fields

Grouped by prefix. All fields except those marked required may be null.

Author identity & profile

• author_id (int, required), author_name (string, required), author_handle (string, required)
• author_bio, author_photo_url, author_previous_name
• author_subscriber_count (int), author_subscriber_count_string (string), author_follower_count (int)
• author_twitter_url, author_linkedin_url, author_facebook_url, author_instagram_url
• author_is_active (bool), author_profile_set_up_at (ISO 8601), author_profile_disabled (bool)

Contact

• email — best-effort, may be a personal address, team alias, or null
• website_url — personal/business site from the author's profile

Publication

• publication_id (int, required), publication_name (string, required), publication_url (string, required)
• publication_subdomain, publication_description, publication_logo_url, publication_custom_domain, publication_created_at (ISO 8601)
• publication_subscriber_count (int), publication_subscriber_count_visible (bool), publication_is_paid (bool), publication_founding_plan_name
• publication_has_posts (bool), publication_count (int) — how many publications this author runs

Leaderboard (present only when ranked)

• leaderboard_category, leaderboard_rank (int), leaderboard_ranking_type

Other

• all_publications (array of objects) — full list with id/name/subdomain/url/is_primary/role/payments_state per entry
• scraped_at (ISO 8601, required)

🔧 Use Cases

• Newsletter sponsorship outreach: Build target lists with the actual emails you need to pitch
• Creator partnership prospecting: Find collaborators in specific niches with subscriber-count context
• B2B lead generation: Convert a Substack URL list into a CRM-ready contact file
• Competitive intelligence: Map who's writing what and at what scale
• Market research: Audience size + monetization status across a topic area

⚠️ Limitations

• Email is best-effort, not guaranteed. When an author doesn't expose a contact address publicly, email is null.
• Subscriber count visibility is opt-in. Authors can hide it; publication_subscriber_count_visible: false means it isn't exposed.
• Broken/dead URLs are still billed. One lead-scrape charge fires per URL regardless of whether enrichment succeeds — compute is consumed either way. Validate your URL list before submitting.
• Some custom-domain newsletters can't be resolved. When the requested URL doesn't expose the data we need, that URL produces a typed failure record in the run's key-value store under failed_urls.

💰 Pricing

Pay-per-event:

• One lead-scrape charge per URL processed, whether enrichment succeeds or fails
• Failed URLs (broken sites, missing data, parsing errors) are billed the same — compute is consumed regardless
• Validate URLs before submitting to avoid charges on dead newsletters

🛟 Support

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab in Apify Console. We respond within a few business days.

🏷️ Tags

Substack, lead generation, B2B outreach, newsletter, email discovery, contact enrichment, creator economy, sponsorship sales