The Business of Content with Simon Owens

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Like a lot of journalists=turned-media–entrepreneurs, Eric Newcomer decided to launch a paid newsletter after leaving his job at Bloomberg in 2020. That model yielded 2,500 subscribers who collectively pay over $400,000 a year to access his newsletter about startups, but that's no longer the biggest part of his business.   Today, Eric generates ove...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   The last few years have been pretty good to the Kansas City Chiefs, what with its multiple Super Bowl championships and a close association with the biggest pop star in the world, but BJ Kissel remembers what it was like to be a fan of the team long before it started regularly winning games. Back in the early 2010s, he began blogging for SB Nation,...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Lon Seidman doesn't operate the largest gadget YouTube channel in the world, but he doesn't need to in order to run a successful media business. That's because he remains hyper focused on reviewing non-sexy products that sell in extremely high volumes. This has allowed him to build a highly lucrative affiliate business, not only on YouTube, but als...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Book publicity is a mixed bag these days. On the one hand, it's never been easier for an author to form a direct relationship with their audience with tools like Substack and TikTok. On the other hand, more books are published each year than ever before, which means competition is fierce. Most newspapers have laid off most of their book critics, bu...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When people sign up for the Alts.co newsletter, they're looking to read its deep dives into alternative investments like art, baseball cards, and rare books. But the most serious investors in its audience want access to actual deal flow, and to gain that access they sign up for Altea, a high-priced membership community that actually vets potential...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Eric Siu has a pretty massive audience; his YouTube channel boasts 161,000 subscribers and his two podcasts – Marketing School and Leveling Up – have generated tens of millions of downloads.    But Eric doesn't bother with traditional media monetization models like advertising or subscriptions. Instead, he leverages his influence to drive clients t...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Keith Pepper bought a chain of print newspapers back in 2020, he received an email from a columnist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution that basically asked if he was crazy. But Keith had a plan for taking a company that generated 98% of its revenue from print advertising and converting it into a digital-first media company.   And he's done ju...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Layoffs in the local news sector are, sadly, a regular occurrence, but the founders of Block Club Chicago decided they weren't going down without a fight.   In November 2017, the news startup DNA Info laid off its entire staff, and it was only a few months later that three of its editors launched a Kickstarter that raised over $183,000;  they used...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For much of its 130-year existence, State House News operated as a standard newswire service. Its journalists covered the Massachusetts state government and it then syndicated their content to regional and national newspapers.    But in the late 90s, owner Craig Sandler realized that internet distribution would allow him to sell direct digital subs...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Most people are familiar with newswires like the Associated Press and Reuters, but a much newer upstart called Stacker has devised a new business model for syndicating content. Rather than charging a fee for its articles, it instead gives away its data journalism to any publisher that wants it. It then charges brands a fee to create and distribute...

My Substack: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Mignon Fogarty isn't just one of the world's most popular podcasters, she's also an incredibly innovative media entrepreneur. She launched her Grammar Girl podcast 18 years ago, and the success of that propelled her book onto the New York Times bestseller list. She also founded Quick & Dirty Tips, a media network she now runs in partnership with Macm...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Most companies buy advertising to drive sales of their products, but Andrew Curtin's first sponsor mostly bought out of pity. It was May 2022 and he had just launched Construction Wave, a B2B outlet that covers the UK's construction industry. He had absolutely no audience, but a major crane manufacturing company bought a $10,000 sponsorship anyway....

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Like a lot of journalists in the mid-2000s, Tim Burrowes grew frustrated with his employer's print mentality and its tendency to treat online publishing as an afterthought. At the time, he worked for an Australian trade magazine that covered that country's media industry.   So in 2008, he and two co-founders decided to launch Mumbrella, a competing...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Alex Halperin launched WeedWeek in 2015, he was entering an industry that had nothing but growth ahead of it. But what he didn't expect was that the fragmented legalization across states meant that it'd be difficult to build a national audience. So a few years ago he pivoted to just covering California's weed industry, and WeedWeek has since b...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   One of the great things about being a college journalism major today is that it's incredibly easy for professors to build their own news sites and allow students to experience every aspect of the publishing process. Not that long ago, journalism students had few avenues for publication outside their college newspaper.   Lydia Chavez took advantage...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Patrick O'Shaughnessy launched his podcast Invest Like the Best in 2016, he had no intention of building it into a media company. He just wanted to use it to interview the world's best investing minds so that he could deepen his own understanding of the industry. But the show proved to be a huge hit, attracting some of the biggest names in fin...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   What does a professional travel photographer do when all international flights are shut down due to a global pandemic? That's a question Gary Arndt found himself asking in the early months of 2020. By that point, he had built up millions of social media followers and an entire career from snapping photos in exotic locales, and within a matter of we...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Jared Newman launched his Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter back in 2016, the streaming TV market was much smaller than it is today, with most TV networks either not having their own streaming app or requiring a cable subscription to access it. But as it turned out, he timed his launch perfectly, as it was only a matter of years before virtually e...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Today, the personal finance content niche is absolutely ginormous. You can't open up YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram without encountering an influencer who gives advice on how to make and save money.   Today's guest Philip Taylor anticipated this content explosion all the way back in 2011. That's when he launched FinCon, a conference specifically des...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   I'm sure just about everybody has had the experience of looking at a celebrity memoir and wondering: did they actually write that? In many cases, they didn't, at least not by themselves. There's actually an entire shadow economy of ghost writers who do the bulk of the work on these books – not just for celebrities, but all kinds of public figures r...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Ben McCarthy didn't set out to create a media company focused on Salesforce, he just began blogging about his use of the product as a way to document the various use cases he encountered. As it turned out, there were thousands of other people who were encountering those same use cases, and via Google searches they began landing on Ben's blog posts....

Get $100 your CEX tickets by entering the discount code OWENS100   My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Joe Pulizzi launched The Tilt in 2021, he already had a pretty good idea of how to build a successful media company. Back in 2017, he had sold his previous media startup, The Content Marketing Institute, to one of the world's largest event conglomerates.   Joe ran The Tilt with...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When it comes to knowing all the intricacies of real estate investment, few are more knowledgeable than Brad Hargreaves. In 2015 he founded Common, a company that manages rental properties and consults  with real estate investors on building design.   And then in 2022 Brad decided to begin sharing his knowledge through a paid newsletter called Thes...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   I spend most of my time on this show interviewing entrepreneurs who founded English-language media outlets – mostly because that's the only language I speak – but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in the media ecosystems from other regions in the world. That's why I was super excited to talk to Andreas Sator, the host of one of the most popular...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Earlier this month, I sent a newsletter to my audience with the subject line: "Ask me a question." Basically I told everyone to jump into the comments section of the post and ask me any questions they have about the media industry or creator economy.   Several of you did pipe in with some amazing questions. I then invited on Alexis Grant, the found...