The Business of Content with Simon Owens

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   The war in Ukraine has given rise to an entirely new generation of independent media organizations, but few have a backstory as unusual as The Counteroffensive. Founded by veteran journalist Tim Mak after more than a decade covering politics, national security, and investigations for outlets including NPR, Politico, and The Daily Beast, the publica...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For more than a decade, Erin Millar has been trying to answer a question that has plagued the journalism industry: What should replace the local newspaper model after it collapses? Her first attempt came with The Discourse, a Canadian media company that experimented with new approaches to community-driven reporting before eventually evolving into a...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Mike Rogge purchased Mountain Gazette in early 2020, he wasn't acquiring a thriving media business. For $5,000 and the cost of a couple beers, he bought a dormant outdoor magazine brand whose main assets consisted of a URL, a trademark, decades of archives, and boxes of old issues sitting in storage. But Rogge believed the magazine's legacy —...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For years, HubSpot was known as a pioneer of content marketing, building a huge library of articles that helped attract potential customers to its software products. But more recently, the company has expanded far beyond blog posts. It now owns newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, and creator-led media brands that reach millions of people every...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Aaron Wilbur launched The Coaches Site in 2010, he simply wanted to solve a problem he kept seeing in hockey: the best coaches were constantly sharing ideas with each other, but that knowledge rarely made its way to coaches at lower levels of the sport. What started as a small coaching conference eventually turned into a subscription platform...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Will Richards first started compiling news about startups, he wasn't trying to launch a media company. He was working at a family office and needed a better way to track what was happening across the Australian startup ecosystem. After realizing there wasn't a single place that aggregated all this information, he began sending out a weekly ema...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ When Sipho Kings and his co-founder Simon Allison launched The Continent in 2020, they wanted to rethink how journalism is distributed online. Instead of chasing search traffic and social algorithms, they created a weekly PDF newspaper designed specifically for smartphones and distributed it through platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and emai...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For years, Hollywood writer Aaron Tracy built his career inside the traditional television system, writing for shows like Law & Order and navigating the endless cycle of pilots, canceled series, and development purgatory that defines much of the TV business. But over the last several years, Tracy has quietly carved out a very different kind of ente...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ After spending several years helping launch food and travel magazines in London, Krista Faist returned to Toronto with a simple idea: replicate the free magazine model that was thriving across the UK transit system. In 2015, she launched Twenty Two Media Group and started building two media outlets into lifestyle brands focused on food, travel, and c...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ James Capo has spent much of the last decade helping publishers solve one of the industry's biggest challenges: how to better understand and monetize their audiences. As CEO of Omeda, he oversees a platform that powers subscription management, email marketing, audience data, and paywall tools for many of the world's largest media companies. In a rece...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ Straight Arrow News was founded around a simple idea: a lot of Americans feel like they're living in completely different realities depending on where they get their news. The company grew out of conversations between founder Joe Ricketts and media executive Jonathan Harding, who come from different political viewpoints but realized they were often c...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   There's a certain irony that one of the most influential publications covering Australia's telecommunications industry still arrives each morning as a daily PDF. But that format has become central to the success of Communications Day, the niche B2B outlet founded by Grahame Lynch in 1994. What began as a fax-delivered newsletter covering the early...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   The TV advertising business has changed dramatically over the past two decades. What used to be a relationship-driven industry built around upfront presentations and manual negotiations has turned into a fast-moving, highly automated digital marketplace. As ad dollars have shifted to streaming, the system has become more complex, introducing new ch...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ Before launching his own media company, Andrew Palermo spent years working in marketing, where he saw firsthand how affiliate deals between brands and publishers actually worked. That experience sparked the realization that many of the sites earning commissions weren't producing especially helpful or original content. In 2018, he decided to test whet...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Digital advertising has long been shaped by a David-versus-Goliath dynamic, with publishers struggling to compete against tech platforms that control better data, more powerful ad tools, and vastly larger pools of advertiser demand. That raises a few big questions: Why have publishers struggled to close that gap despite the promise of programmatic...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Jessica Dante didn't set out to build a multi-platform travel media company—she set out to escape one. After an early career managing social media for corporate travel brands, she quickly grew frustrated with the slow-moving, top-down decision-making that defined the industry. So she struck out on her own, initially experimenting with blogging befo...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For most brands, TV advertising has long operated as an opaque, high-stakes gamble—an expensive channel dominated by middlemen, limited measurement, and a reliance on blunt audience estimates. That's the system Philip Inghelbrecht set out to disrupt when he co-founded Tatari. Tatari is attempting to rebuild the TV ad stack from the ground up—bringi...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   The rise of "sleep podcasts" has quietly reshaped a corner of the audio industry, turning bedtime into a high-engagement listening moment. Few creators have benefited more from that shift than Kathryn Nicolai, whose Nothing Much Happens podcast has grown from a scrappy 2018 experiment into what she describes as the largest sleep podcast in the worl...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ Axios Local began as an experiment in translating a national media brand's playbook into the fragmented world of city-level journalism. After acquiring the Charlotte Agenda, Axios used it as a template to launch a network of local newsletters built around a simple idea: hire well-connected reporters, deliver concise, high-signal updates directly to r...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Robbie Daymond is best known as a prolific voice actor, the kind of performer whose work spans anime, video games, and animation without ever putting his face front and center. After slowly breaking into the industry in the late 2000s and early 2010s, he built a rare, multi-disciplinary voiceover career—one that includes everything from audiobooks...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For most of his career, Scott Brown has operated at the crossroads of Hollywood and the creator economy. After first breaking into digital media during the early days of web series, Scott went on to work across a wide swath of the modern media ecosystem. His résumé includes producing hundreds of hours of Larry King programming for streaming platfor...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Pat Walls didn't originally set out to build a media company. In 2017, he was simply interviewing founders as a side project while working a full-time job, hoping the conversations might spark his next startup idea. But those interviews—published as detailed case studies on a blog called Starter Story—slowly evolved into something much bigger. Over...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Founded during the pandemic, the The News Movement set out with a simple but radical premise: what if journalism were designed entirely for the platforms where younger audiences already consume information? Rather than trying to pull readers back to a website, the company built a newsroom that publishes directly to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Sh...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   In 2004, Eric Hochberger co-founded Mediavine, which would eventually become one of the most influential ad management companies on the open web. The company didn't start as an ad tech firm — it began as a scrappy collection of SEO-fueled fan sites, built by three founders chasing traffic in the early blogosphere. While selling $50 sidebar ads and...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Michael Fritzell doesn't fit the typical profile of a newsletter writer. Before launching Asian Century Stocks, he spent 15 years inside the machinery of global finance — working in investment banking and eventually managing money for a wealthy family in Singapore. A Swedish native who studied Chinese at Peking University, Michael built a career an...