The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Visit Memberful: https://memberful.com/simonowens In terms of career advancement, Brandi Kruse was at the top of her game. As a TV news correspondent in the large media market of Seattle, she was paid more than most of her industry peers, and she even hosted her own longform weekly talk show.    But in late 2021, she quit her job and immediately launched her own podcast called Undivided. Within we...

Visit Memberful: http://memberful.com/simonowens   Over the past decade, several major media companies have invested in building out their data journalism operations. ABC News has FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times has The Upshot. And Vox Media runs Vox.com.   These outlets have leveraged publicly available data to explain complicated stories, and the infographics they create are easily shareable...

Visit SparkLoop: https://sparkloop.app/partner-network?utm_campaign=simonowens   If you're aware of Morning Brew, it's probably because of its daily business newsletter. Since its founding in 2015 by two college students, it's grown to over 4 million subscribers, and its news digest format has been copied by dozens of other media startups.   But since getting acquired in 2020 by Business Insider,...

Visit SparkLoop: https:// sparkloop .app/?utm_ campaign=simonowens If there's one thing Twitter's known for, it's character limits. It famously only allowed 140 of them and then later expanded to 280. In some ways, that forced brevity made Twitter what it is today: a real-time commentary on what's going on in the world. But for years, Twitter has been trying to expand beyond its own character limi...

Visit Video Husky: https://bit.ly/vh-simon-owens-pod   When Nick Meacham first joined SportsPro in 2010, it mainly existed as a B2B print magazine that monetized through advertising. The editorial staff was tiny and it didn't have much of a web presence.   But after taking over the business operations, he rapidly expanded it into new ventures – first by launching a series of lucrative conferences...

Visit Video Husky: https://bit.ly/vh-simon-owens- pod   During their combined 20 years at The Wall Street Journal, Bradley Hope and Tom Wright covered some of the most momentous stories to hit the financial world, but none were as consequential to their personal careers as their reporting on Jho Low, a Wharton grad who was caught stealing billions of dollars from investment funds. Their dogged inv...

Visit https://theygotacquired.com/newsletter   When everyday people hear about space-related news, it's usually in association with an organization like NASA or SpaceX. But while Elon Musk is great at grabbing headlines, the space industry actually comprises a vast constellation of companies that generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And it's only set to expand; Morgan Stanley projects...

Visit https://www.transizion.com/ There were a lot of media companies that were vulnerable to the pandemic shutdown, but perhaps none more so than Pop Up Magazine. Not only was its content delivered through live performances, but the hosts made special care during each event to tell the audience that nothing that night would be recorded. Part of the magic, in other words, was the show's ephemerali...

Sign up at https://cex.events/ and use coupon code "Simon" David Kushner had the kind of mainstream success that most writers dream of. His writing regularly appeared in glossy print magazines like Wired and Rolling Stone. Several of his books became national bestsellers. And his work has even been adapted into multiple TV shows and movies.    But in 2021, David decided to bypass legacy media enti...

Sign up at https://cex.events/ and use coupon code "Simon"   When Patrick Trousdale launched his newsletter The Daily Upside in 2019, he didn't have much of a personal brand to build from. In fact, even today, his personal Twitter account has fewer than 300 followers.   What he did have was several years of experience in finance and the willingness to grind out the newsletter each day, even when i...

Sign up at https://cex.events/ and use coupon code "Simon"   When Adam White graduated from the University of Miami in 2017, he had every intention of getting a job in sports administration. In fact, he went through several rounds of interviews at a major organization and was sure he'd get an offer.   But the job never actually materialized, and instead of applying to more open positions, Adam dec...

Get your tickets at https://cex.events/ and use coupon code "Simon"   Pat Walls's most successful startup to date was born in the wake of a previous failed startup. Back in 2016 he and a couple other co-founders had been operating a B2B SaaS platform, but after it struggled to gain traction, they were forced to shut it down.   But Pat never lost the entrepreneurship itch, and in 2017 he started in...

Sign up for my course: http://contentbusiness.org/ When it comes to coverage of the tech sector, few publications can match the journalistic heft of The Information. Launched by former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin in 2013, The Information quickly became an industry powerhouse, attracting some of the world's best journalists who broke many of the biggest scoops over the past decade....

After graduating from Harvard Law School in the early 2000s, Maria Brito was poised to have a successful career as a corporate lawyer. There was just one catch: she hated practicing corporate law. Instead, her true passion was art. Throughout the early 2000s she started visiting New York galleries and even started to recommend pieces for purchase to her friends. Eventually, it dawned on her that h...

As a CBS reporter in Los Angeles, Erica Mandy had a thriving career ahead of her in TV news. But in 2017 she quit her job and launched her own daily news podcast. It's called The Newsworthy, and every morning it gives listeners a 12-minute rundown of the most important headlines. It also delivers weekend longform interviews with newsmakers. After four years in operation, it now generates over 800,...

The Guardian recently announced it reached 1 million paying digital subscribers. What's most incredible about the accomplishment is that the newspaper reached that number without using a paywall. Does that mean that paywalls are overrated? I sat down with Ben Cohen, editor of The Banter, to discuss whether publishers should keep all their content free.    

In 2014, Owen Walker faced a predicament. He was a sports scientist at a professional football club, and his manager asked him if they should buy expensive wearable technology that would help with the team's training. Walker turned to the internet to research whether this kind of technology was effective, but he found there wasn't much good sports science information online. That realization event...

Over the past few years, dozens of star journalists at mainstream media outlets announced that they were quitting their jobs to launch their own ventures, usually on platforms like Substack. As a result, some have drastically increased their income, sometimes into the seven figures.  As more and more writers defected, I and others wondered how legacy media outlets would respond. Would they adapt t...

For the past decade, publishers have utilized metered paywalls to grow their subscription businesses. Under that model, a reader gets to view a certain number of free articles before a paywall pops up and requires them to subscribe.  But how many free articles should a user encounter before they hit a paywall? Increasingly, the answer to that question is: It depends. Publishers are starting to rol...

Over the past several weeks, Spotify made several major announcements in the podcast space. It opened up its advertising ecosystem to anyone who hosts their podcasts on Anchor. It launched the ability for podcast hosts to create video versions of its podcasts. And it reported two major milestones on its quarterly earnings call: that it grew its podcast advertising revenue by 100% over the last yea...

Google has a long and complicated relationship with news publishers. On the one hand, it sends billions of visitors to their websites every year through its main search engine, Google News, and other products. On the other hand, some publishers believe that the Mountain View company has siphoned away ad revenue on the back of their content. Amy Adams Harding, Google's director of analytics and rev...

Snigdha Sur's first idea for a media startup was a kind of Netflix-for-Bollywood streaming service, but when she spoke to investors about the idea, they all pointed out that it would be too easy for Netflix to simply copy her strategy. Though she quickly scrapped that idea, she still wanted to launch some sort of outlet that would service South Asian Americans, a group that she felt was underrepre...

Most subscription strategies have a pretty straightforward value exchange: in exchange for a monthly payment, the subscriber gains access to premium content that's locked behind some kind of paywall. But what if you want to keep all your best content in front of the paywall? What could you still offer to your audience to make a monthly subscription payment worth the price of admission? Thousands o...

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Most major media companies are focused on scale. They want to reach ever larger audiences and then leverage that reach to drive more revenue. To accomplish this, they invest time and resources to create content across all major social platforms, from YouTube to TikTok to Snapchat. The Art of Manliness isn't that kind of media company. Let me give you an example of what I mean: it managed to build...