The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Before William Knight launched Early Morning Media, he had worked for years at a company that specialized in sending press clippings to corporate clients. While these services were mostly utilized by a client's internal communications team, William realized at some point that these same news curation practices would be appreciated by an external audience.   So in 2011, he launched B2B newsletters...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/     The rise of cloud computing introduced all sorts of benefits for the enterprise software space. Not only could license holders access their accounts from virtually anywhere, but it also allowed the software companies to issue updates on a more regular basis. But this also made the sector a lot more complicated and created a need for more experts...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   I think everyone likes to think of themselves as being financially savvy, especially if, like me, you write about business topics, but how many of us truly understand finance terms that are bandied about like gross profit and lifetime value. Like we may know that the term EBITDA stands for "earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortiz...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For most of Instagram's existence, it wasn't thought of as a platform for distributing news, but a growing number of media entrepreneurs have figured out ways to leverage its photo and video features to deliver engaging news digests.   One of those entrepreneurs is Sam Koslowski. Back in 2017, he and his co-founder launched The Daily Aus, a social...

Subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Ask about just any media executive, and they'll tell you that the year 2023 was not a good one for the advertising business. A combination of high interest rates and an uncertain economy made companies extremely skittish, and that caused them to pull back on their marketing spend.   There's some recent signs that advertising spending i...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   By the time Riad Chikhani was 16 years old, he had already built a hugely successful online community for gamers and then sold it for a healthy sum. Two years later, he founded the company that would eventually become GAMURS Group, and while it took far longer to gain traction, it eventually grew into one of the largesting gaming media companies in...

Earlier this month, I sent a newsletter to my audience with the subject line: "Ask me a question." Basically I told everyone to jump in 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 founder of They Got Acquired, to help me answer them.   W...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Jack Karmer and Nick Martell launched their daily newsletter Market Snacks in 2011, they kept their names off the publication so that it wouldn't jeopardize their finance day jobs. But once the newsletter started to attract readers and sponsorship revenue, they decided to come clean. Luckily, their bosses let them continue on with their side h...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   It's no secret that local journalism has struggled since the Great Recessions, with hundreds of newspapers shuttering and thousands of reporters losing their jobs. Over the past few years, entrepreneurs have launched dozens of local news startups to help fill in the gap, but there's still an ongoing debate as to whether local news should be a for-p...

Subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Lucas Grindley knows something about building sustainable revenue streams for media companies. When he was hired to Here Media, a network of LGBT news outlets, it was losing money, but over a period of six years he nurtured it back to profitability.    Now he's the executive director of Next City, a 20-year-old nonprofit magazine dedic...

Sign up for my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   It's been nearly five years since Spotify announced it would diversify its audio offerings beyond music streaming, and while it spent most of that time building its podcast capabilities, it made no secret that it eventually wanted to get into audiobooks.   Then in 2022 it made its first move into the industry by acquiring an audiobooks...

Subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   There are plenty of popular politics newsletters out there, but none with the kind of unique origin story of Wake Up to Politics. It was started by Gabe Fleisher when he was only 9 years old. While the early editions were sent out by a Gmail account and only read by his mom, Gabe kept at it, waking up early every day before school to w...

Subscribe to 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 in 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 questions, and so I spent a few hours jotting down not...

It's been a bad few years for Buzzfeed. After a disastrous IPO in 2022, it's faced a tanking stock price, declining revenue, and a shutdown of its news division.    But things only look to get worse in 2024. As Adweek's Mark Stenberg reports, BuzzFeed faces a fiscal cliff where it's in danger of being delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange, which then would trigger a required payment on its debt....

How do you write about the travel industry when people can't fly on airplanes? That's a question Kelsey Ogletree had to ask herself in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. By that point, she had worked for several years as a freelance travel writer, and like many of her colleagues, she didn't know how the travel restrictions would affect her own career.   So she decided to do something about it....

Ash Read didn't launch a review website about household products because of some lifelong interest in home decor; instead, his interest came about simply because he was moving into a new house and needed to furnish it.   While it was easy to search for products listed on retailers like Amazon and Walmart, he realized that there wasn't a good directory for the direct-to-consumer goods that are sold...

For most of his career as professional ultra marathoner, Dylan Bowman didn't have much of an online presence, but in 2019, he suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands after he broke his left ankle and had to take a year off from racing. That year, he launched a podcast where he interviewed his fellow pro runners, and it pretty quickly became a huge hit.   It didn't take long for Bowm...

In 2011, Rafat Ali launched Skift, a B2B publisher that covers the travel industry. At first, Skift was mainly monetized with advertising, but Rafat quickly realized that scaling a B2B niche outlet required a diverse set of business models that included memberships, research, events, and advertising. He also acquired multiple other media outlets that operated in adjacent industries. In an intervie...

Patrick Walls is the founder of Starter Story, an outlet that's published thousands of case studies on how entrepreneurs built successful businesses. At one point, he was selling upward of $50k a month in sponsorships.   But earlier this year, he not only stopped selling advertising, he also switched from recurring subscriptions to a one-time payment that gave customers permanent access to his con...

It used to be if you wanted to break into broadcast media you first had to start small – by getting a job as a correspondent at a local news station and then working your way up to bigger and bigger markets.   That's the career trajectory that Casey Keirnan followed. He started out covering high school sports in small towns and then eventually landed a job at CBS Interactive, which was trying to c...

If you run any sufficiently large organization, one of the biggest threats to your business is runaway costs. The largest companies can use upwards of thousands of suppliers for everything ranging from software technology to building materials, and how much you spend on all these suppliers can be the determining factor over whether you're profitable or unprofitable.   That's why most large busines...

There's a common criticism lodged against Substack that its model of paid subscriptions could never support original journalism, and instead it only caters to the kind of opinion journalism that can be churned out at a high rate.   Eric Newcomer is proving this criticism wrong. After six years spent reporting at outlets like The Information and Bloomberg, he struck off on his own and launched a ne...

When Jay Shabat launched his newsletter in 2004, he had absolutely no experience in journalism or in operating a media company. This was also long before the era when it became easy to distribute paid newsletters. But what Jay did have was a passionate fascination with the airline industry, and he leveraged that passion to build a loyal readership.   In our interview, we discussed how he found rea...

Today, Android is the number one operating system for smartphones, but when Google launched the product in 2008, the iPhone already had a huge head start. Most consumers didn't know it existed, and even the tech press didn't take it super seriously.   But JR Raphael was an early fan. A freelance tech journalist who wrote for publications like Fast Company and The Verge, JR pitched his editors at C...

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