Which LinkedIn newsletters are growing fastest now?

Which LinkedIn newsletters are actually growing fastest now?

The fastest-growing LinkedIn newsletters we can substantiate today are In the Loop, Gates Notes and Microsoft’s The Monthly Tech-In, while Google’s Monthly AI Recap stands out more for its enormous launch than for its growth since then.

There is no official LinkedIn growth leaderboard, so we reconstructed the trajectories from dated subscriber counts rather than ranking newsletters by their current size.

The biggest measurable jumps are striking. A widely circulated early-2024 dataset put LinkedIn’s In the Loop at roughly 7.4 million subscribers and Gates Notes at about 2.3 million. When LinkedIn consultant Melanie Goodman manually checked 58 major newsletters against their live pages in late summer 2026, In the Loop showed 11,534,190 subscribers and Gates Notes 6,523,720.

That works out to roughly 4.1 million additional subscribers for In the Loop and 4.2 million for Gates Notes. Gates Notes is especially impressive because it added almost twice its original audience.

Microsoft’s The Monthly Tech-In followed a different curve. It passed 1 million subscribers within its first 24 hours, according to a Microsoft employee involved with the project, topped 7 million around its first anniversary, and displayed 10.87 million by the end of 2025.

Google’s Monthly AI Recap started with about 8.29 million subscribers on its first public edition. By late summer 2026 it was around 8.59 million. That launch was extraordinary, but the subsequent increase was only about 300,000.

Newsletter	Earlier public count	More recent count	Approx. gain
Gates Notes	~2.3M	6.52M	+4.22M
In the Loop	~7.4M	11.53M	+4.13M
The Monthly Tech-In	7M+ around first anniversary	10.87M by end-2025	+3.87M+
Monthly AI Recap	8.29M at launch	~8.59M	+0.30M
Ask Richard	~5.4M	~5.7M	+0.30M

Why is it so hard to rank the fastest-growing LinkedIn newsletters?

Ranking LinkedIn newsletter growth accurately is difficult because LinkedIn shows everyone the current subscriber total but keeps the real subscriber-growth chart inside the publisher’s analytics.

LinkedIn’s current help documentation confirms that newsletter authors can see new subscribers over periods ranging from seven days to 365 days. Outsiders cannot access that history.

Most public rankings therefore answer a different question: which newsletters are biggest?

That causes some surprisingly large errors. Goodman’s 2026 audit found that figures still circulating online were sometimes years out of date. Gates Notes was still commonly quoted at 2.3 million subscribers even though its live page showed more than 6.5 million. In the Loop was often listed around 7.4 million while the live count had passed 11.5 million.

Current directories such as Reletter are useful for discovering large LinkedIn newsletters, but a snapshot cannot tell us whether a newsletter added 2 million readers recently or has barely moved.

So for this article, we care much more about dated subscriber counts than a single large number.

Is LinkedIn’s In the Loop still growing quickly today?

Yes. In the Loop is still one of the strongest LinkedIn newsletter growth stories we can verify, having added roughly 4.1 million subscribers from the commonly cited early-2024 count to its latest independently checked total.

The older dataset put In the Loop at approximately 7.4 million subscribers. Goodman’s direct check of its LinkedIn page in 2026 found 11.53 million.

An increase of more than 4 million matters because In the Loop was already huge before that growth happened. It did not need a tiny starting base to produce an impressive percentage.

Its distribution advantage is also unusual. The newsletter belongs to LinkedIn itself, whose company page reaches tens of millions of followers. LinkedIn’s current rules still say that when someone follows a person or Page with a newsletter, the platform automatically sends that follower an invitation to subscribe.

That gives In the Loop a continuous stream of potential subscribers even between editions.

Is Gates Notes growing faster than Richard Branson’s Ask Richard?

Yes. Gates Notes has completely outpaced Ask Richard in recent subscriber growth even though the two newsletters now have audiences of a similar size.

The comparison is unusually clean. The older dataset put Gates Notes at roughly 2.3 million subscribers and Ask Richard at about 5.4 million.

Goodman’s recent manual check found Gates Notes at 6.52 million. Ask Richard is now around the mid-5-million range.

Gates Notes therefore added roughly 4.2 million subscribers while Ask Richard appears to have added only a few hundred thousand. Gates Notes grew by around 180%; Ask Richard moved by only a few percent.

That makes Ask Richard a good example of why a huge current subscriber count can hide fairly slow growth. Gates Notes reached roughly the same league through a much steeper recent climb.

Newsletter	Earlier count	Current level	Approx. gain	Approx. growth
Gates Notes	~2.3M	6.52M	+4.22M	~184%
Ask Richard	~5.4M	~5.7M	~+0.3M	~6%

Is Microsoft’s The Monthly Tech-In still growing unusually fast?

Yes. Microsoft’s The Monthly Tech-In remains one of the biggest LinkedIn newsletter growth stories, although its most extreme acceleration came during its first year.

The launch was exceptional. A Microsoft employee who worked on the newsletter reported that it passed 1 million subscribers in less than 24 hours. Around its first anniversary, another Microsoft employee reported more than 7 million.

By the end of 2025, a published edition displayed 10,874,391 subscribers. LinkedIn’s own marketing material subsequently described the newsletter as reaching more than 10 million readers.

Adding nearly 4 million subscribers after already crossing 7 million is still huge.

The pace, however, clearly changed as the audience became larger. Going from zero to 7 million in roughly a year was far more explosive than the next few million.

The Monthly Tech-In is therefore still growing at massive absolute scale, but its early launch phase remains the exceptional part of the story.

Did Google’s Monthly AI Recap really gain eight million subscribers almost overnight?

Google’s Monthly AI Recap effectively launched with an audience above 8 million, but most of that number came from immediate conversion of Google’s existing LinkedIn reach rather than months of newsletter growth.

The first public Monthly AI Recap edition already displayed approximately 8.29 million subscribers. A few months later the number was about 8.31 million. By late summer 2026 it had reached roughly 8.59 million.

So after the initial launch, the newsletter gained about 300,000 additional subscribers, or less than 4%.

Three hundred thousand subscribers would be enormous for almost any independent publication. Against an 8.29-million starting point, though, it looks very different.

Google’s case shows how aggressive LinkedIn’s built-in distribution can be for a giant company. LinkedIn automatically invites followers to subscribe when they follow a Page that publishes a newsletter. A company starting with millions of followers can therefore create a multi-million-subscriber newsletter almost immediately.

Google’s launch deserves attention. Its continuing growth rate is much less unusual.

Are company LinkedIn newsletters growing faster than creator newsletters?

At the very top, company newsletters have a huge advantage because they can turn millions of existing LinkedIn followers into newsletter subscribers almost immediately.

Goodman’s recent review found that company and media publishers dominate the largest LinkedIn newsletters. Eleven of the top 15 belonged to organizations rather than individual creators.

The mechanism is built directly into LinkedIn. Its current help documentation says that someone who begins following a person or Page with a newsletter automatically receives an invitation to subscribe. When someone subscribes to a newsletter, LinkedIn also starts following the author for that member.

That creates a strong loop between Page growth and newsletter growth.

Microsoft showed the extreme version with 1 million newsletter subscribers in its first day. Google began its Monthly AI Recap above 8 million. IBM’s AI in Action reportedly passed 5 million around a year after launch.

Creators can still move quickly, just on another scale. Tom Boston said he converted roughly 5,000 newsletter subscribers during his first week from an existing audience of about 19,000 followers. By early 2026, he reported around 35,000 subscribers.

The pattern is pretty clear today: company newsletters dominate absolute subscriber gains because their starting distribution is enormous, while smaller creators can post much stronger conversion rates relative to the audience they already have.

Is AI the fastest-growing LinkedIn newsletter topic right now?

AI is currently the most obvious topic cluster among LinkedIn’s biggest newer newsletters, although the evidence is stronger for corporate AI newsletters than for AI newsletters generally.

Google’s Monthly AI Recap launched above 8 million subscribers. IBM’s AI in Action reached several million. Andriy Burkov’s long-running Artificial Intelligence newsletter has built an audience in the hundreds of thousands.

That concentration is hard to dismiss.

But topic alone does not explain the size gap. Burkov is one of the best-known independent AI educators on LinkedIn, yet his newsletter remains far smaller than Google’s or IBM’s.

The difference is distribution. Google and IBM started with enormous corporate followings and could push a newsletter invitation directly into that existing audience.

AI is clearly pulling readers these days. The spectacular multi-million launches happen when that demand is combined with a company Page that already has millions of followers.

Which smaller LinkedIn newsletters are genuinely growing now?

Digital Waffle, Hacking HR and several individual creators show that meaningful LinkedIn newsletter growth is happening well below the giant corporate accounts, and these examples are often more useful if we want to understand what a normal publisher can replicate.

Digital Waffle gives us a clean two-year trajectory. Its own company history says Waffle Bites reached 50,000 newsletter subscribers in 2024 and passed 100,000 in 2026. Its LinkedIn following grew from 150,000 to around 350,000 over roughly the same period.

So the newsletter doubled while the surrounding Page audience more than doubled.

Hacking HR is much larger. Bitly recently described the community as having around 900,000 LinkedIn newsletter subscribers alongside more than 1 million LinkedIn followers. Hacking HR itself entered 2026 with just over 1 million LinkedIn followers.

Energy Jobline gives us another mid-sized example. Its Page currently has about 296,000 followers and continues publishing a weekly energy-news-and-jobs newsletter. Earlier 2026 material put the newsletter around 175,000 subscribers, equivalent to well over half the size of the Page audience.

Creator trajectories can be smaller but still impressive. Tom Boston moved from about 5,000 subscribers in his first week to roughly 35,000. Kait LeDonne has reported a newsletter audience above 50,000. Hammad Siddiqui has described growing from around 20,000 subscribers in 2022 to more than 50,000.

These cases tell us more about repeatable LinkedIn newsletter growth than an eight-million-subscriber launch from Google.

Publisher	Useful growth marker	Recent scale
Digital Waffle	50K subscribers in 2024 → 100K+ in 2026	100K+
Hacking HR	Large newsletter built alongside 1M+ LinkedIn following	~900K
Energy Jobline	Newsletter audience equal to a large share of its Page following	~175K
Tom Boston	~5K first week → ~35K	~35K

Does a LinkedIn newsletter launch still create a big first-week spike?

Yes. A LinkedIn newsletter can still get an unusually strong launch because the platform actively pushes subscription invitations to an author’s existing audience.

Tom Boston is a useful recent creator example. He said roughly 5,000 people subscribed during his first week after launching to an audience of about 19,000 followers. That is equivalent to more than one subscriber for every four existing followers.

Tina Paterson reported reaching 1,000 LinkedIn newsletter subscribers within 72 hours of launch and specifically pointed to LinkedIn’s built-in invitation mechanism as a major reason.

At corporate scale, Microsoft’s 1 million subscribers during the first 24 hours and Google’s multi-million starting audience show the same mechanism taken to an extreme.

This is why launch growth needs to be separated from later growth. A publisher can have an extraordinary first week and then settle into a much slower pace once the existing follower pool has been converted.

Does a LinkedIn newsletter subscriber count work like an email list?

No. A LinkedIn newsletter with 1 million subscribers does not give its publisher an owned email list of 1 million people.

LinkedIn keeps the relationship inside its platform. Subscribers can receive an edition in their feed, through an in-app notification, through push notifications and, depending on their settings, by email.

LinkedIn has recently improved newsletter analytics by exposing email sends and estimated email open rates to publishers. That distinction itself tells us something important: total subscribers and people actually receiving an email for a particular edition are different numbers.

Independent publisher data confirms the gap. Melanie Goodman has reported around 13,000 subscribers to her LinkedIn newsletter while recent editions were emailed to closer to 7,700. She also documented another case in which only around 35% of subscribers received the newsletter by email.

So when Microsoft says The Monthly Tech-In has more than 10 million subscribers, that is best understood as a 10-million-plus LinkedIn audience. We should not translate it into a conventional 10-million-address mailing list.

Do LinkedIn newsletters grow faster if they publish more often?

Publishing more frequently does not appear to be the main reason the biggest LinkedIn newsletters grow so quickly.

Goodman’s review of 58 large newsletters found monthly publishing to be the most common cadence, with 26 newsletters. Another 21 published weekly, six were biweekly and only four described themselves as daily.

Several giants fit that pattern. The Monthly Tech-In publishes monthly. Google’s Monthly AI Recap is monthly. Ask Richard is monthly. Gates Notes publishes roughly every two weeks. Andriy Burkov’s Artificial Intelligence is weekly.

Daily output clearly is not required to reach millions of subscribers.

LinkedIn itself tells newsletter publishers to keep a consistent cadence. The large-newsletter data points in the same direction: regular publication seems useful, while audience size, topic and distribution explain far more of the extreme growth differences.

Are the biggest LinkedIn newsletters still accelerating today?

Some are, but several of LinkedIn’s largest newsletters now look much more mature than their headline subscriber totals suggest.

Gates Notes is the strongest example of continued expansion among the established giants. Its rise from roughly 2.3 million to 6.52 million represents an enormous recent increase.

In the Loop also added more than 4 million subscribers from an already huge starting point.

Ask Richard has moved much less, rising only modestly from the roughly 5.4 million figure recorded in the older dataset.

Google’s Monthly AI Recap makes the contrast even clearer. The newsletter started around 8.29 million and then added only about 300,000 over the following months.

Microsoft’s The Monthly Tech-In sits between these cases. Its first year was explosive, taking the newsletter above 7 million, and it later crossed 10 million. The newsletter kept adding millions, but the percentage pace naturally slowed as the base became enormous.

As we saw above, raw subscriber totals can therefore hide completely different growth curves.

What do the fastest-growing LinkedIn newsletters have in common?

The fastest-growing LinkedIn newsletters today usually combine a large existing LinkedIn audience, a broad professional topic and a publishing cadence that readers can easily understand.

The distribution advantage appears again and again. In the Loop comes from LinkedIn. The Monthly Tech-In comes from Microsoft. Monthly AI Recap comes from Google. AI in Action comes from IBM. Every one of those publishers already had access to an enormous follower base before launching the newsletter.

Their topics are also broad: technology, AI, careers, business, leadership and work. These subjects can address millions of professionals without narrowing the audience too early.

The branding tends to stay simple as well. Goodman’s study of 58 major LinkedIn newsletters found an average title length of 2.93 words, with roughly three-quarters using one to three words.

There is no secret publishing formula hiding here. The strongest combination is much more basic: millions of reachable followers, a topic with wide professional demand, a clear newsletter proposition and LinkedIn’s built-in subscription prompts.

So which LinkedIn newsletters are growing fastest now?

Right now, In the Loop and Gates Notes are the clearest large newsletters for sustained subscriber additions, while Microsoft’s The Monthly Tech-In produced the strongest multi-year corporate launch trajectory we found.

In the Loop rose from roughly 7.4 million subscribers to 11.53 million, adding about 4.1 million.

Gates Notes moved from approximately 2.3 million to 6.52 million. Its gain of roughly 4.2 million is even more impressive because the newsletter nearly tripled from its earlier base.

Microsoft’s The Monthly Tech-In went from 1 million subscribers in its first 24 hours to more than 7 million around its first anniversary and 10.87 million by the end of 2025. Few LinkedIn newsletters have matched that combination of launch speed and continued multi-million-subscriber growth.

Google’s Monthly AI Recap belongs in a different bucket. Launching above 8.29 million was extraordinary, but the rise to roughly 8.59 million afterward suggests that most of the spectacular growth happened immediately.

Ask Richard shows the opposite side of the market: a massive newsletter that now appears to be growing quite slowly.

Below the giants, Digital Waffle, Hacking HR, Energy Jobline and creator newsletters such as Tom Boston’s are worth watching because their growth depends less on instantly converting a corporate audience of tens of millions.

So the best-supported answer today is fairly sharp. In the Loop and Gates Notes lead the measurable sustained-growth group, The Monthly Tech-In remains the standout corporate growth story, and Google owns one of LinkedIn’s biggest newsletter launches without currently showing the same continuing acceleration. The broader pattern is also becoming hard to miss: the newsletters growing fastest in absolute numbers usually start with a huge LinkedIn audience before the first edition is even published.