Own Your Audience: How The Ankler Escaped Substack and Took Back Control

People say that publishers are fleeing WordPress for Substack. Don’t believe the hype. The Ankler intentionally left Substack, which is a case worth studying.

With 15 newsletters, over 130,000 email subscribers, and 10,000 paying members, The Ankler is one of Hollywood’s most respected insider publications. When platform constraints started limiting their editorial and business ambitions, they made a deliberate choice: migrate to a fully owned WordPress environment rather than deepen their dependency on a third-party platform.

This talk covers what that decision looked like in practice. We’ll walk through the real technical challenges of migrating away from Substack (a platform that wasn’t designed to let you leave), including reconstructing editorial tools, and preserving paywall features across thousands of posts. You’ll also see how Passport replaced Substack’s native paywall and newsletter infrastructure entirely, giving editors direct control over content gating, subscription tiers, and newsletter distribution from within WordPress.

The result is a publication that now owns its content, its subscriber data, its revenue logic, and its reader experience. This talk makes the case that for media companies serious about independence, WordPress isn’t the platform people are leaving. It’s the one they should be building on.