The Business of Content with Simon Owens

It's impossible to know which company launched the first branded podcast, but one of the earliest well known examples was GE's The Message. Produced in collaboration with Panoply, The Message was a science fiction documentary that generated millions of downloads and a rabid fanbase. Ever since GE's runaway success with the medium, other major brands have waded into the podcast waters, with large c...

Will Sommer grew up in a conservative household and garnered an early interest in Rush Limbaugh and other right wing media figures. When he went to college, his politics changed, but his obsession with conservative media never went away. In late 2016, that obsession paid off. Sommer was one of the first reporters to write about Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that a DC pizza parlor was the home o...

Back in 2013, the Obama Administration rolled out a new version of Healthcare.gov, with disastrous results. It was the public unveiling of the Obamacare exchanges that would allow anyone to buy health insurance on the open market, and yet the website was almost impossible to navigate without encountering errors that would prevent you from signing up for insurance. At the time, Charles Gaba was run...

Every year we get new articles questioning whether " email is dead ." With the proliferation of social media and messaging apps, it seems only natural to ask what will replace a decades-old electronic messaging system that really hasn't changed much in all the years we've used it.   But email has remained resilient, and it's even experienced a renaissance of sorts lately. In the wake of Facebook's...

There's no question that newsletters are on the rise. Legacy publishers are constantly launching new newsletter products. Quartz's Obsession newsletter, for instance, picks seemingly random topics and goes deeps on them. Vox's Voxcare newsletter, a favorite of mine, covers new developments in healthcare policy. But we're also seeing a number of media startups that are producing newsletters without...

With over 150 million users, Spotify has the ability to launch the careers of previously-unknown music artists. It does this by featuring these artists on its playlists, which are maintained by a mixture of users, Spotify staff, and algorithms. Playlists count for half of all listening on Spotify, and getting your song listed on a few of the most influential lists, some of which boast millions of...

The influencer marketing industry is estimated to generate $2 billion a year, with $1.6 billion coming from Instagram influencers alone. That number is only set to increase, with 39 percent of marketers saying they plan to increase their influencer marketing budget this year. It's now pretty much impossible to open up Instagram or YouTube without seeing #sponsored posts popping up from your favori...

Think Progress was founded in 2005 as an offshoot of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. What started as a bloggy website has grown into a fully staffed news organization that employs beat writers and conducts investigative reporting. The site has generated real impact, most recently when it published a list of companies that had established corporate partnerships with the...

Technorati rankings. Full RSS feeds vs partial RSS feeds. Blogrolls. The Techmeme leaderboards. Blogspot vs Wordpress vs Typepad. If you were a blogger over the mid-aughts, these were just a few of the things you might have obsessed over as you catapulted blog post after blog post into the ether, hoping someone would notice and provide you precious links and send even more precious readers. Back t...

Welcome to Night Vale. The Message. Steal the Stars. Homecoming. The Bright Sessions. All are fiction podcasts that have seen downloads in the millions. Some have been optioned for television or film adaptation. All were launched in just the last few years. For much of the early to mid 20th century, millions of listeners tuned in each week to listen to radio dramas and fiction broadcasts in genres...

Podcasting as a medium has been around for about 13 years now, and for most of that time you'd find that most podcasts were platform agnostic. When a new episode was released, it would appear pretty much simultaneously across all podcast apps. Sure, podcasters placed most of their promotional efforts on iTunes, but that's because it accounted for most of all podcast listening. But over the last fe...

In 2014, former Major League Baseball player Derek Jeter launched a media company with a novel premise. Called The Players' Tribune, it's a sports site that's produced and written by pro athletes themselves. Many wondered if this would result in what are essentially bland, rewritten press releases that would be typed up by publicists, but in its few years of existence, The Players' Tribune has pro...

If you want to subscribe and listen to podcasts, there are dozens of apps to choose from, including podcast-specific apps like Stitcher and even music streaming apps like Spotify. But anyone who works in the industry knows that Apple is the king of podcasts; its podcast app, which it spun off from iTunes a few years ago, accounts for more than 50 percent of all podcast use. This is why Apple's pod...

This week I interviewed a guy named Ernie Smith. Why do I think Smith is so fascinating? Because over the past decade he's created two successful media properties, each with the absolute opposite goal of the other. The first was a Tumblr account called ShortFormBlog. It amassed over 140,000 followers and was one of the hyperreactive news aggregators that thrived in the aughts. Every single day Smi...

If you run a hit podcast, you might have a couple avenues open to your for monetization. You could host live events and charge admissions, like what we've seen with Slate's Political Gabfest and Pod Save America. You could, like Gimlet Media, launch a membership program and charge $60 a year for free tshirts, exclusive bonus content, and access to a private slack channel. Or you might turn to runn...

For the past several years, Twitter's been a punching bag, both for tech writers and Wall Street analysts. It remained unprofitable, was a magnet for trolls, and, worst of all, its user growth came to a halt. But in just the past few months we've seen some meaningful signs of life at the embattled social network. For one, it had its first profitable quarter in, well, forever. But it also saw growt...

The last decade hasn't been kind to local news. While the entire news industry has experienced hardship, local newspapers have been hit particularly hard. A recent article in the American Prospect detailed how newspaper chains have been bought up by private equity firms and then were systematically cut to the bone, the private equity firms wringing out every last cent of profit before closing the...

According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the sixth most visited website in the U.S. and the fifth most visited in the world. When you Google famous people, places, or companies, their Wikipedia pages usually come up as the first or second result. If you're a company that already has a Wikipedia page, then monitoring what's written on it is vital to your reputation management strategy. If you don't have yo...

Branded podcasts are on the rise. With one out of every four Americans saying they listen to at least one podcast a month, companies are increasingly incorporating the medium into their content marketing strategies, and in some cases these branded podcasts are really taking off with listeners. The first major success of a branded podcast was The Message, a joint venture between the Panoply Network...

For more than a decade, publishers attempted to grow ad-supported businesses that depended on massive scale and distribution of free content, but in recent years, many have acknowledged that purely advertising-based business models simply don't work in a world in which Facebook and Google are vacuuming up nearly all ad dollars that migrate online. So they've begun asking their readers to pony up,...