4 days ago
Joy Reid's substack following climbs after MSNBC firing
On Monday, the former Reid Out host announced that she was a 'Substack Bestseller with thousands of paid subscribers.' While it's unclear how many of her 168,000-plus followers shell out the $8 monthly subscription fee, even a small percentage of paying customers would potentially net Reid six figures per month.
'At the start of the year, I had a grand total of nine thousand subscribers, who mostly came to this page (then called "And another thing with Joy") to read my occasional posts, and to live chat with me as I sat on set at 30 Rock during MSNBC special coverage,' Reid wrote on Monday. 'That modest growth ended abruptly in January, when my then boss, the MSNBC president, told me I wasn't allowed to have a Substack.
Other paid plans for her Substack musings include an annual subscription for $80 and a yearly 'Founding Member' subscription for $240. Substack takes a 10 percent commission from each of its authors - as well as a four percent surcharge per payment - leaving Reid with plenty left over to pay the bills.
Even if just 5,000 of her subscribers opted for the yearly plan, she would still be raking in a cool $360,000 a year. That doesn't account for any revenue earned from her YouTube series, The Joy Reid Show, which launched on June 9 and counts more than 243,000 subscribers.
Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta, for example, has amassed just over 300,000 subscribers on Substack after his resignation from the network in early January. Reid, who rankled MSNBC brass with her extreme online rants, was fired in late February by the network's new boss.
An insider at MSNBC told Politico that her controversial social media posts - including shamed Latino Republican's for voting for Trump and claiming the media's preoccupation with Russia's invasion of Ukraine was motivated by the victims being 'white and largely Christian' - 'gave the Standards Department heartburn.' In January, Reid compared President Donald Trump to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
