The Business of Content with Simon Owens

In the spirit of Mental Floss's 20th anniversary, let me give you a few pieces of trivia about the magazine. It made a cameo in two episodes of Friends and an episode of Netflix's The OA. It started as a print magazine but discontinued its print edition in 2016. In addition to its web content, it produces several popular video series on YouTube. And in 2018, it was acquired by Minute Media, a cong...

By the time Richard Rushfield launched his newsletter The Ankler in 2017, he had held journalism jobs at several major media companies that included The Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, and Gawker. But because he served as a behind-the-scenes editor in most of these roles, he didn't have much of a personal brand to speak of, which meant he needed to build a newsletter readership from the ground up. De...

If you're in the media, then you're probably aware of The Daily, the massively successful podcast produced by The New York Times. It now receives over 4 million downloads a day and generates eight figures in revenue for the newspaper. But is it possible to replicate The Daily's success without the institutional support? That's the question Jamie East set out to answer. A year ago, he and a few col...

If you look at the Apple and Spotify podcast charts that track the most downloaded shows every week, you'll notice that many of the most popular podcasts belong to large networks. Organizations like Gimlet Media, Wondery, and NPR are able to pool their resources to promote their content, and this gives their shows a distinct advantage over independent podcasts, even those of similar quality. That'...

David Harper wrote hundreds of thousands of words over a five-year period without making a single penny from his comic book criticism. In 2009, he and a couple friends launched Multiversity Comics, a fan website that went on to be nominated for an Eisner Award, which is basically the comic book equivalent of an Oscar. In 2015, David struck off on his own, launching an incredibly popular podcast an...

Every morning, tens of thousands of people who live in cities like Miami, Portland, and Pittsburg receive a conversational email that updates them on the latest news within their city. These newsletters don't often contain any original reporting, but they've been embraced by their local communities because they're so effective at distilling dozens of newspaper articles, social media posts, and gov...

Daniel Orubo had no intention of becoming a media personality when he graduated with an engineering degree in 2013, but his funny tweets just happened to catch the eye of a Nigerian publishing executive who planned to launch a BuzzFeed-like website called Zikoko. Daniel started out as a senior writer, crafting humorous listicles like the "12 characteristics of Nigerian mothers," but over the next...

These days, nearly every digital publisher utilizes some kind of reader revenue strategy, but when Jessica Lessin quit her Wall Street Journal job and launched The Information in 2013, it was still a novel concept. At that time, the paywalls that existed were usually metered, but Jessica was among the first to place her website's entire library of content behind a hard paywall. If you wanted to ac...

https://simonowens.substack.com/ I just passed my one-year anniversary of launching my paid newsletter, so I decided to dive into some of the biggest lessons I learned during that time.

If you review Kevin Jones's resume on LinkedIn, it's easy to see why he ended up founding a sports podcast network. He's worked in virtually every sector of the sports media industry, from creating content for pro football teams to reporting for traditional radio stations to writing for sports news sites. He also launched Striking Gold, a 49ers-focused podcast that eventually accrued several thous...

Over the past year, thousands of journalists have announced the launch of their paid newsletters, which are often hosted on platforms like Substack. Writers with already-existing large audiences have seen immense success with this strategy, pulling in six figures incomes within weeks of debuting their new newsletters. But the vast majority of writers don't have huge Twitter followings to promote t...

The last 15 years have not been kind to the local news industry, with thousands of newspapers either reducing staff or closing down entirely. But not all newspapers have been affected equally, and some of the hardest hit chains were owned by hedge funds and private equity firms that had no actual interest in investing in journalism. Family-owned newspapers seemed to have fared better, and that see...

According to some estimates, corporations across the world spend upwards of $42 billion a year on content marketing, and they do so with the philosophy that by acting like media companies, they can engender trust with potential customers and drive sales. One of the people who helped sell the corporate world on this marketing philosophy is Joe Pulizzi. In 2007, Joe founded the Content Marketing Ins...

Like a lot of people on the political Left, Geoff Sharpe grew frustrated by how successful conservatives were on Facebook. For years, he watched as right leaning conservative groups built huge Facebook followings, which allowed them to promote their highly partisan views to millions of Canadian citizens. So Geoff and his colleagues decided to do something about it. They initially launched their ow...

There's a common misperception that many non-lawyers have about how legal contracts are written. Most people probably assume that a lawyer writes each contract from scratch, but in reality the lawyer is most likely copy and pasting clauses and sections from already-existing contracts and modifying them for their particular client. One of the resources lawyers often turn to for this is Law Insider....

Over the past year, dozens of writers have left their mainstream media jobs to launch their own standalone newsletters and publications. In almost every case, the writer monetized his content through paid subscriptions, usually with a tool like Substack. Rick Ellis never bothered with paid subscriptions. Instead, his website AllYourScreens.com generates so much traffic each month that he's able to...

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Max Rofagha didn't have a background in media prior to launching Finimize. He also didn't have a background in finance for that matter. It was while conducting research on how to manage his own investments that he saw an opportunity for a daily newsletter aimed at helping millennials become more literate in finance. Flash forward four years and Finimize now has over 1 million subscribers, a staff...

Per Grankvist had the kind of media career most journalists only dream of. He was a high-profile columnist for a leading newspaper and a regular face on one of Sweden's top broadcast networks. But over time he grew disillusioned with mainstream media and its tendency to dumb down coverage of complicated policy issues. So Per quit his traditional media jobs and launched his own outlet. It started w...

Peruse a newsstand full of men's magazines and you'll probably notice a few common themes. The cover either features a bikini model or a suit-clad male celebrity. Inside, you'll find stories meant to appeal to what many in the mid-20th century would have considered the "ideal" man -- articles about scotch, cigars, and custom suits. You won't find many of those kinds of features in MEL Magazine, a...

Lon Seidman didn't launch on YouTube with the goal of becoming a top gadget reviewer. In fact, he stumbled upon that aspect of his career while struggling to run a video local news startup in Connecticut. Almost on a whim, he recorded a video review about one of the cameras he bought for his startup, and to his surprise, the video blew up. Flash forward a decade, and Lon now has tens of millions o...

If you had to make a list of technologies that are most important to the average person's day-to-day life, data centers would sit near the top of that list, and yet chances are you know very little about them. There are a few reasons for this. For one, they're not sexy in the way that an iPhone or a cutting-edge drone is sexy. But also the people and companies who run data centers are fairly secre...

Back in late 2019, nearly all the writers for the beloved sports site Deadspin resigned en masse after butting heads with the private equity executives who owned the website. After they left, there was lots of speculation about where those writers would turn up. Would they simply get new jobs, or would they band together to create their own site? And then in July 2020 we got our answer: they launc...

Abby Glassenberg runs a trade association called the Craft Industry Alliance. It has over 1,600 paying members who work in the arts and crafts industry. It hosts conferences, schedules networking events, publishes industry news, and provides ongoing education. Pretty much the kind of services that most trade associations offer.  But unlike most trade associations, this one grew out of a one-person...

In just about every article about TikTok, it's portrayed as a video repository created by and for teens. Indeed, nearly every single one of its top-earning creators are under the age of 20, and polls have found that it ranks second only to Snapchat as U.S. teens' favorite social media app. Zarna Garg is an exception to the rule in multiple ways. For one, she's a 45-year-old mom who barely even kne...