Fun With Numbers: A Five Month Review of the Missing Middle Initiative

A peak behind the curtain

Highlights

• Five months ago, four dreamers founded a new think tank devoted to addressing the challenges faced by Canada’s middle class, with a particular focus on housing.

• From the beginning, we decided we wanted to be different than a traditional think tank, and employ a “small, fast, and frequent” strategy of a steady stream of content.

• We are pleasantly surprised by the results, having already achieved over 250,000 views of our Substack content and 2,200 subscribers, numbers we had hoped to reach by the end of 2025.

• Our podcast, which predates MMI, continues to experience growth. Our YouTube channel now boasts over 4,500 subscribers and has garnered more than 500,000 views on YouTube, as well as 200,000 clip views on TikTok. The audio version has over 150,000 downloads on streaming platforms, with new releases exceeding 2,500 downloads per episode.

• We appreciate your support!!!

A dream and a desire to be different

Just five months ago, on January 20, 2025, the Missing Middle Initiative was introduced to the world. A spin-off from the University of Ottawa’s Smart Prosperity Institute, Mike Moffatt, Meredith Martin, Cara Stern, and Jesse Helmer started a think-tank devoted to creating “a Canada where every middle-class individual or family, in every city, has a high-quality of life and access to both market-rate rental and market-rate ownership housing options that are affordable, adequate, suitable, resilient, and climate-friendly.” Sabrina Maddeaux joined us on this adventure to co-host the podcast while Cara was on parental leave, and Alex Beheshti has joined us as a Senior Researcher.

From the outset, we were going to operate differently than traditional think-tanks, which tend to release a small number of large reports each year, with knowledge mobilization tactics centred around each release, a “few and big” strategy. MMI employs the opposite strategy, focusing on “small, fast, and frequent” releases. We decided to publish content multiple times a week across our various platforms, including Substack, our Missing Middle podcast, opinion pieces in third-party outlets, and a handful of larger pieces throughout the year.

We chose this knowledge mobilization strategy for three reasons.

1. It enables us to disseminate the knowledge generated by our research and make it accessible to policymakers, the media, industry, academics, and the public as soon as possible, thereby aiding in real-time decision-making.

2. The “small, fast, and frequent” strategy provides a form of continual peer review, as those pieces generate responses that aid our knowledge generation and improve our policy recommendations.

3. It’s cheaper. The MMI team is relatively small, comprising only five full-time staffers with a total annual budget of under $1 million. MMI has no endowment and must pay for salaries as well as services used both inside and outside of the University. MMI currently receives roughly half of its funding through charitable organizations and not-for-profit entities, with the remainder coming from government and private sector partners.

Our goal is to change the world, not become social media influencers, and we know we will always have a niche audience. That said, our audience numbers have grown far beyond our expectations, and it means a lot to us to learn that the niche isn’t as small as we thought it was and that so many of you value our work.

Here’s a behind-the-curtain peek at our numbers.

Substack

In our first 5 months, we’ve published 90 pieces of content on Susbtack, receiving just over 254,000 views. Our views per post have been steadily increasing over time, with each new post receiving over 2,000 views, and our Impossible Trinity post achieving over 10,000 views.

We were hoping to have 2,000 subscribers by the end of the year. We managed to reach our goal in under five months and currently have just over 2,200 subscribers, who receive our content via email. The majority of our subscribers use personal email addresses; however, among those who use work addresses, we observe that our subscriber base includes a high number of individuals employed in housing, as well as over 100 subscribers using either federal, provincial, or municipal government email addresses.

Podcast - Audio

The Missing Middle podcast predates the Missing Middle Initiative and continues to be a thriving presence. We have published over 100 episodes, which are available in both audio and video formats.

The audio version, available on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts, has garnered over 150,000 downloads and continues to gain popularity.

Our recent episodes have been receiving over 2,500 downloads after their first month of publication, with our episode with Ron Butler talking about Toronto’s condo market being a fan favourite.

The podcast consistently ranks in the Top 30 of Apple Canada’s News Commentary charts, and has hit a peak position of #3 in the charts.

Podcast - Video

A video version of our podcast is also posted on our YouTube channel, and clips from the podcast are posted as YouTube shorts. We’ve received over 500,000 lifetime views on the channel and have over 4,500 dedicated subscribers.

Similar to our audio version, our typical recent episodes receive around 2,500 views. We have had a few breakout hits, including guest episodes with Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes, Ron Butler, and Ed Elson, as well as a recent episode featuring Mike and Sabrina discussing a Bank of Canada study on the impact of immigration changes on wages.

We also make clips of the show available on TikTok, with our clips receiving over 200,000 lifetime views. Over 78,000 of those come from a single clip of Sabrina talking about a multiplex controversy in Etobicoke.

A big thanks from all of us

We truly appreciate all the support, interest, and feedback we receive, both positive and critical. We’re particularly delighted that the population of people who care about topics like reforming elevator regulations and temporary foreign worker policy is larger than we thought. Thanks for joining us on this journey!