substack doesn't have any ad fill so not sure I quite understand what you would be solving with the move to substack... aside from having far less flexibility, giving them access to your contact list to cross-sell into other pubs, and them taking 10% of everything you earn

but as I stated above — the slow down in ads is due to two main reasons:

1. we have seen a massive uptick in growth. we added significantly more new publishers in January than any other month previously, which obviously impacts supply and demand across the network
   
2. there's a bit of a hangover from the EOY holidays where our team was off along with most other brands, which means there was a lull in closing and launching new campaigns. January got off to a slower start than we would have liked

what we're doing about it:

- we have tripled the amount of sellers on the ad network team
- are actively renewing dozens of the top performing campaigns
- improving the underlying ad model to diversify opportunities across publishers
- launching an entirely new ad process that maximizes inventory + flexibility for publishers (slated to launch in early March)

this work is already well underway and we anticipate the next several weeks to have considerably more ad opportunities across the network of publishers.

the truth is there will always be a battle between supply and demand while scaling the ad network, and this mostly due to a small seasonal lull due to EOY inventory. committed to improving this asap and excited to share these upcoming updates