The Business of Content with Simon Owens

In some ways, Rahul Pandey's career as a YouTuber has been pretty typical. After several years working at large tech companies like Pinterest and Facebook, he started uploading videos that gave career advice to other engineers who are trying to break into the industry. Then once he built a significant following, he left his full-time job in 2022 to focus on this type of educational content full-ti...

When it comes to creating content for online audiences, few people are more experienced than Mark Talkington. He was one of the original editors of ESPN.com and then later spent 20 years as the news editor for MSN.com, the massive web portal owned by Microsoft.   But starting at the beginning of the pandemic, Mark began writing for a much smaller readership: the residents of Palm Springs, Californ...

Of all the media revenue models, subscriptions can be the most tricky to execute well. There are just so many variables at play that impact a publisher's ability to succeed. You have to figure out what to place both in front of and beyond your paywall, how to price your subscription, how to convert free readers into paid subscribers, and how to reduce your churn.   And that's just scratching the s...

The local news industry has seen better days. The last 15 years or so have been pockmarked with mass layoffs, shuttered newspapers, and growing news deserts.   But there have been bright spots in the local news landscape … lean media startups that aim to fill the gaps left by their legacy newspaper counterparts. One such startup is called City Cast. Founded by former Slate editor David Plotz, City...

There's this common saying you hear in academia: those who can't do, teach. But that axiom certainly doesn't apply to Jeremy Caplan. Not only did he have a decade of reporting experience before he started teaching entrepreneurial journalism at the City University of New York, but in 2020 he launched his own entrepreneurial media outlet: Wonder Tools.   Wonder Tools is a free weekly newsletter that...

It's not very easy to find online coverage of the gun industry that isn't hyper polarized. The issue is dominated by a mix of NRA members and gun control activists, and even the traditional media does little more than play referee between these two sides.   When Stephen Gutowski launched The Reload in 2021, his aim was to cut through this noise. Stephen had spent several years covering the issue f...

While paid subscription models have been all the rage for the last decade, more and more creators are turning to online courses as a way to monetize their audiences. Their evergreen nature makes them ideal for generating passive income, and many creators have succeeded at selling them at relatively high price points.   But what's the best way to develop a course that your audience will actually wa...

Let's say you have a pile of money you're sitting on and you want to invest it. If you decide to invest it in stocks, then it's incredibly easy to track the value of your investment on a minute by minute basis. But what if you want to invest in a less-regulated asset class like, say baseball cards or art? How do you even begin to assess the price of these assets, both before and after you've purch...

Historically, foreign correspondents haven't been the type of journalists who break major news stories in the countries they cover. That's because they're typically not as well sourced as the local reporters who grew up in a particular region and have an intimate knowledge of its issues.   But what would happen if you could take the work of local reporters and translate it for English-speaking rea...

Before the major social platforms launch a new product, they'll often run small experiments within a subset of their users to test it out. More often than not, the first person to spot these new products is a guy named Matt Navarra, and his mini scoops have been cited in thousands of news articles over the years.   Matt got his career start running the digital communications for the UK government...

We live in an era where every company is expected to operate as a media company and every business executive is expected to produce thought leadership content. Newsletters and blogs have become crucial mediums for establishing longterm relationships with customers, and you've probably noticed that your LinkedIn feed has been flooded with posts from CEOs and startup founders who want to share their...

When it comes to disruption, few industries have experienced as much upheaval over the past 20 years as the music industry. The lucrative CD era ended with the rise of Napster piracy, and the introduction of Apple's iTunes did little to stem the losses, It's only within the last decade, with the rise of streaming services like Spotify, that music revenue has begun to recover.   Jay Gilbert had a f...

By the time Emanuel Cinca launched his Stacked Marketer newsletter around five years ago, he already had a successful affiliate marketing business, but that business was largely dependent on the whims of other platforms like Facebook and Google. He wanted to build a product that he could monetize directly, and by that point he had grown to admire daily digest newsletters like Morning Brew and The...

When it comes to distinctive newspaper designs, the print edition of The Financial Times stands out. The 135-year-old publication is instantly recognizable for its salmon pink paper, and it's become a status symbol for London's monied elite.   The newspaper's web presence is extremely successful as well. In early 2022, it announced it surpassed 1 million digital subscribers, an especially impressi...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/welcome   As the media industry focuses on revenue diversification, more and more publishers are venturing into live events — both virtual and in-person. Not only can they be monetized in multiple ways, but a well-planned event can provide a great venue to forge a deeper connection with your most engaged audience.   But events are tricky to pull off a...

While podcasting has been around since the mid-aughts, it's only within the last half decade that the industry started generating significant revenue, finally crossing $1 billion in 2021. And until recently, there were very few journalists who were solely dedicated to writing about podcasts. That's a big part of the reason that in 2017 James Cridland decided to launch Podnews, a B2B newsletter tha...

If you read articles about the state of local news, you'll come away with a pretty pessimistic view of the industry. But while legacy newspapers have certainly faced a steep decline, there's a burgeoning explosion of local media startups that are innovating in the space.    One such company is Overstory Media. What started as a single local newsletter operating in Victoria has since expanded into...

B2B used to be the least sexy space in media, but in the last decade we've seen a new crop of B2B media companies that are proving to be far more innovative than their B2C peers. Recently, I convened a panel of experts to talk about all the various aspects of B2B media — including running events, launching paid subscriptions, finding sponsors, and building out niche editorial products.   What you'...

Visit https://memberful.com/simonowens Matt Brown didn't set off to build his own solo newsletter business, but he fell into it after taking a buyout at Vox Media sports site SB Nation during the height of the pandemic – a period when very few media companies were hiring.   While his SB Nation beat covered all of college sports, Matt decided to niche down with his own newsletter – which was called...

Visit Memberful: http://memberful.com/simonowens   When the media outlet Roca News launched in the year 2020, it started creating just about every kind of content you can imagine. There was a newsletter, a podcast, and accounts on every single social media platform.   But this everything-but-the-kitchen sink approach didn't seem to work, so the founders decided to focus mostly on a single platform...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   You've probably noticed that true crime is having a bit of a moment right now.  Podcasts dedicated to the genre dominate the charts, and every week there's a new hit series on one of the major TV streaming services.   Jim Brown approached true crime from a different direction.  Rather than launching a show, he used his tech and product skills to bu...

Visit https://signup.whosponsorsstuff.com/sales-pro/?source=simonowenspodcast   Louie Woodall knows his way around a financial disclosure document. Since graduating college, he's worked for several media outlets that report on the intricacies of financial risk. In 2020, he decided to combine this expertise with his interest in climate change and launched Climate Risk Review, a Substack newsletter...

Visit Memberful: https://memberful.com/simonowens   The podcast industry is around 17 years old, and Libsyn was among the first companies launched to service that industry. For most of that time, it focused on paid podcast hosting, but in recent years it's acquired companies that specialize in podcast advertising and subscriptions.   Libsyn needs that more diverse product offering if it wants to c...

Check out the News Guest podcast: https://bit.ly/news-guest   When Boye Fajinmi started hosting parties with a few of his friends, he had no idea that it would become a sprawling events and media company. They were just looking for a fun way to network with other creative workers like themselves. At the time, Boye worked at Paramount Pictures and was pursuing a traditional Hollywood career, but th...

Get a 10% discount on a subscription: https://simonowens.substack.com/a30836c1   It's incredibly difficult to convert your audience from free readers/viewers/listeners into paying subscribers. In this meeting, we're going to discuss all of the optimization strategies that increase conversion and reduce churn.