The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Back in January, I wrote an article for New York magazine asking whether it's time for the U.S. government to enact stricter regulation on social media influencers. I pointed to investigations from news outlets like The New York Times that uncovered companies that have sold hundreds of millions of fake followers to willing buyers, most of whom wanted to inflate their online influence. In many case...

John Yedinak didn't have a traditional journalism background when he started his media company. He was working in the mortgage industry when he read an interview with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. The interview inspired him to launch his own blog on the reverse mortgage industry, and as the blog's audience grew, he began to realize that there was a massive market out there for niche, B2B p...

Peruse through the vast video archive at The New York Times, and you'll come across plenty of your standard short documentary films, the kinds with voiceover, b-roll footage, and original interviews. But you'll also encounter some experimental fare. There's the fake infomercial advertising a phone hotline for racists. There's an entire animated series geared toward parents. And then there's the on...

Advance Publications is one of the world's largest media companies. It owns Conde Nast, home to magazines like The New Yorker and Vogue, as well as dozens of newspapers across the U.S. It even has a majority stake in Reddit. A few years ago, it launched Alpha Group, an incubator meant to launch brand new tech products and grow them into fully functional companies. Rather than acting like a traditi...

Founded in 1998, MoveOn.org started as a progressive email group and pioneered political online advocacy. Over the past two decades it's leveraged its massive email list to raise millions of dollars for left-wing candidates and push for a number of progressive legislative issues. As the internet evolved, so did MoveOn, and today its reach spans millions of followers across the web's biggest social...

It started in 2009 in San Francisco. A couple of journalists got the idea of putting together a magazine, but instead of setting it to print, they would perform it live. Pop-Up Magazine, as the event was called, was a huge hit, and the founders had to seek out larger and larger theaters in order to meet demand. In 2015, they decided to take the show on the road, touring Pop-Up Magazine across seve...

The Atlantic may be a 160-year-old institution, but it isn't shy about experimenting with new things. It was one of the first traditional publications to go all-in on digital media in the late-aughts and managed to achieve profitability from the move pretty quickly. It experimented with brand new verticals like The Atlantic Wire and Quartz. Recently, it was acquired by Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerso...

When Ben Collins launched his blog about Google Sheets, which is basically Google's version of Excel, he didn't intend for it to become a full-time business. He was just documenting his learning process and hoped the blog would serve as an online portfolio for when he went out to seek full-time employment. But he was surprised to learn that there was an actual audience for his blog posts, and with...

In 2017, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed titled "How Antitrust Undermines Press Freedom." It was written by David Chavern, the head of the News Media Alliance, a trade group that represents over 2,000 publishers. In it, he argues that Facebook and Google have effectively cornered the digital ad market, eating up all its growth, and that this has come at the expense of the very content c...

Name just about any media beat, and you'll find plenty of people trying to predict the future. Political pundits argue over who will win the next election. Finance journalists report on economic forecasts and claims from analysts over where a stock will be six months from now. Even entertainment bloggers will try to hash out which film, song, or TV show will win at the next awards ceremony. But in...

Subscriptions are all the rage in the media industry right now. Facing diminishing ad rates, publishers have turned to the paid subscription model as a way to draw revenue directly from the users that consume their content. Publishers ranging from The New York Times to The Washington Post to The Financial Times have announced they've reached north of a million subscribers. It seems like every day...

You can't write a history of Web 2.0 without including the contributions of Brian Alvey. After getting his start doing design work for traditional publications like TV Guide and BusinessWeek, Alvey teamed up with his childhood friend Jason Calacanis to launch a series of online publications. Eventually, the two created Weblogs, Inc, a blog network that went on to be sold to AOL. The content manage...

In 2014, Ben Thompson, a blogger who writes about the business of technology, announced he was quitting his job so he could write full time. His business model? He would send out four newsletters a week. One of those newsletters would be free, and if you wanted access to the other three, then you had to pay $10 per month. Within a year, Thompson had 2,000 subscribers, which, if you do the math, me...

Monica Reinagel had no background in broadcasting or radio when she launched a podcast called Nutrition Diva in 2008, but she was a trained nutritionist, had published several books, and was writing a regular column at a popular health website, and this was just the sort of background that Quick and Dirty Tips, a podcast network run by the book publisher Macmillan, was looking for when she reached...

Just about everyone's experienced a scenario like this: you read a highly-nuanced article on a topic you find interesting. You then decide to share it on Facebook. Within minutes, a Facebook friend leaves a comment arguing with the premise of the article, and it's immediately obvious that this person hasn't actually read the piece in question. In fact, the vast majority of social media users will...

Sam Parr never set out to launch a media company. A few years ago, he was fresh from selling a company he had founded and was looking for something else to do. He decided to recruit about a dozen entrepreneurs as speakers and hosted an event he called Hustlecon. The event was a success, and Parr expanded it into a media website that published daily content. But while the site generated some viral...

While it seems like every publisher, from The New York Times to Vox, is making significant investments in podcasting, one could argue that Slate was the earliest to invest in the medium. It launched the Slate Political Gabfest -- a panel show with three regular hosts -- all the way back in 2005. Since then, Slate has debuted dozens of new podcasts, which collectively generate millions of downloads...

Chris Grady didn't know much about the webcomic world when he launched Lunarbaboon , a semi-autobiographical comic about family and parenthood. But shortly after launching the comic, he started sharing it to Reddit, and suddenly Lunarbaboon was being seen and shared by tens of thousands of people. Flash forward a few years, and Lunarbaboon has over a million followers on Facebook. Grady generates...

Would you read a 1,300-word newsletter about garden sheds? What about a 1,400-word piece on lettuce? A little over a year ago, the business-focused publication Quartz made a bet that you would, launching a daily newsletter called Quartz Obsession. The aim of the product? Take the most mundane topics imaginable and -- through narration, numbers, and quotes -- prove to the reader that these topics a...

Recently, an industry website called The Drum reported that The Financial Times, the London-based business publication, is projected to hit 1 million paying digital subscribers by next year. This is impressive, not just because only a handful of publications have hit this milestone, but also because The Financial Times has done so while maintaining a hard paywall. Unlike companies that use metered...

Long before Facebook started generating billions of dollars on self-service native ads, Henry Copeland had invented a self-service native advertising platform for blogs. And he was building early content management systems for newspapers well before products like Wordpress would go on to power much of the internet. These days, Copeland is focused on augmented reality, and he think that today's AR...

If you follow the digital media sector, you've likely noticed that advertising as a business model is on the wane. With the Facebook and Google duopoly sucking up just about all the advertising money flowing online, publishers have been forced to find alternate revenue sources to fund their content. One such source: subscriptions. More and more publishers are rolling out subscription and membershi...

In 2010, a college dropout named Kyle Taylor launched a blogspot account. He was taking on odd side jobs in an attempt to crawl his way out of debt, and the blog was a way to write about lessons he learned on making and saving money. Traffic was scarce, at first, but over a period of years the blog slowly gained an audience. Eventually, brands started approaching Taylor about publishing sponsored...

When Christopher Wink graduated college in 2008, he had no intention of launching a media company. He just wanted an entry level journalism job that would allow him to work his way up within the industry. But back then, when newspapers were hemorrhaging revenue and announcing mass layoffs, there weren't a lot of journalism jobs to pass around. So, out of desperation, he and a couple other college...

Back in January, Facebook made an announcement that shocked the publishing world: It was tweaking its Newsfeed algorithm so there would be less emphasis on Facebook pages and more focus on what your friends were sharing. Reach for Facebook pages was expected to plummet, and publishers that had grown addicted to Facebook's free referral traffic girded themselves for an all-out decimation of their b...