The Business of Content with Simon Owens

If you traveled back in time 100 years and perused your average newsstand, you'd find dozens of magazines that published serialized fiction. Millions of subscribers eagerly awaited new installments from their favorite authors, and a serialized story in a high circulation magazine could launch a new writer's career. But by the turn of the century, serialized fiction was all but gone. Or at least it...

Polina Marinova had the kind of media career that many journalists dream of. After a brief stint at a media startup, she landed a job at Fortune Magazine and eventually got the role of head writer for Term Sheet, its daily newsletter on deals and dealmakers. After six years there, her resume and profile probably could have gotten her any mainstream media job she wanted. But instead, she left that...

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ So the format to this podcast is pretty straightforward and consistent. I bring on a media entrepreneur or executive and interview them about their craft. But I'm also sort of a media entrepreneur myself, in that six months ago I launched a paid Substack newsletter that I hope to grow into a full-time job. Growth has been slow but steady, and over th...

With the journalism industry in freefall, there's a good chance that your local newspaper is experimenting with some kind of digital subscription offering. In many cases, this involves some kind of metered paywall where you're expected to start paying after consuming a pre-determined number of articles. Hundreds of newspapers have installed paywalls like this, but they've seen mixed results, with...

When Naoise McNally and her business partner launched One Fab Day, neither of them had any experience working for a media company. Naoise didn't even have much knowledge of the wedding industry outside of planning her own wedding. But the lack of wedding-focused internet resources in Ireland presented a clear market opportunity, so they went for it. Flash forward several years, and the site now ha...

Quick question: how big do you think the global freight industry is? If your guess is in the billions, then you're aiming too low. According to some estimates, global logistics generate somewhere in the range of $8 and $12 trillion annually. For Craig Fuller, that number represents a massive opportunity. His company Freight Waves covers this industry across text, video, and podcasts. But Freight W...

When Terrell Johnson launched on Substack, he had no intention of rolling out a paid newsletter. He was just trying to escape Mailchimp's expensive fees and liked that Substack would send his newsletter for free. About a decade earlier, Terrell had created HalfMarathons.net, a running focused website that grew so popular that at one point it was generating six figures in revenue just from Google A...

Josh Spector was blogging before most people even knew what a blog was. Over the span of a decade, he started and abandoned several of them, often before they had a chance to amass much of an audience. But in 2011 he got more serious about audience growth for a blog he ran that focused on teaching standup comedians how to market themselves, and to help drive traffic to it he launched a newsletter....

A year ago, Jesse Singal had a very traditional freelance writing career. When he wasn't working on his book, he'd write articles for places like The Atlantic and New York magazine. The mixture of book advance and freelance revenue provided a reasonably stable income. Today, the economic climate for journalism is much more dire. The Covid-induced recession has led to mass layoffs and a squeeze on...

When Tyler Morin was in high school, he dreamed of going into journalism, but his parents convinced him to major in finance instead. After graduating, he went into the financial sector, but he never lost his ambition to work in media, and he became obsessed with daily newsletters like Morning Brew and theSkimm. After experimenting with a group sports blog, he pivoted to launching a daily newslette...

Arlington Country, Virginia is a suburb of DC. It has over 236,000 residents, thousands of local businesses, and an average household income north of $100,000. With those sorts of attributes, you'd think it would have a vibrant daily newspaper, but instead its citizens mostly rely on the Washington Post metro section and a few weekly newspapers to get their news. Or at least that's all they had up...

Dan Oshinsky didn't apply for an open position to run BuzzFeed's newsletter operations. He just happened to reach out to editor Ben Smith back when BuzzFeed was hiring a bunch of people with weird internet obsessions, and the company hired him without a clearly defined role.  This dynamic granted Dan a lot of leeway in terms of how he approached BuzzFeed's newsletters, and he went on to launch sev...

The audiobook market is massive, with sales projected to hit $3.5 billion this year. What used to be a niche, expensive product is now one of the fastest growing mediums. In fact, The New York Times recently reported that audiobooks are one of the only book formats still growing in sales during the current pandemic-induced recession.  But what does it take to launch a hit audiobook? How does the c...

In the mid-2000s, Digg was one of the most powerful websites on the internet. Powered by its army of users, the platform would send gargantuan amounts of server-crushing traffic to any content featured on its front page. Millions of people visited it each day and it turned its founder Kevin Rose into an internet celebrity.   But you probably know what came next. A misguided redesign triggered a us...

I first discovered Gil Assayas, the musician otherwise known as GLASYS, when one of his YouTube videos made it to the front page Reddit. His amazing keyboard set up and sophisticated musical adaptations of well-known video game soundtracks caught the attention of several gamer subcultures, who then shared his videos widely across social media. I recently sat down with Gil and asked him about how h...

The New York Times gets a lot of credit within the media industry for the blockbuster success of its podcast The Daily,  but The Los Angeles Times was also an early pioneer within the medium. Its narrative true crime podcast Dirty John generated over 30 million downloads and was adapted into a TV show for Bravo. The newspaper has since gone on to launch ambitious shows chronicling the criminal tri...

Jono Dry is the type of artist whose work is sold in European galleries by art dealers. He only finishes a few pieces a year, and most of his purchased pieces likely reside in the private collections of rich people, closed off from the public. But that hasn't stopped millions of people from viewing his work. That's because Jono films himself drawing each piece and uploads gorgeous time-lapse video...

We've seen several media companies launch over the past few years that specialize in sending out newsletters that summarize each day's news. Newsletters like theSkimm, The Hustle, and Morning Brew speak to their readers in a conversational style and have been embraced by millions of loyal subscribers. The folks behind 6AM City took that model and applied it to local news. Operating out of cities l...

Ben Cohen isn't the world's biggest fan of Facebook. The founder of a political news website called The Daily Banter, Ben worked hard to build up his reach on Facebook, and for a few years he made a decent living selling advertising against his content. But after the 2016 election, Facebook pivoted away from news, and virtually overnight The Daily Banter lost 90% of its traffic. Not only could he...

Alexis Grant didn't start her career with the goal of building several media businesses. She simply wanted work as a reporter. After college, she got a job at the Houston Chronicle and then later accepted a role editing the careers section at US News & World Report. But something about the business of media intrigued her, and while at US News & World Report she launched a side hustle running socia...

Because I write and podcast so much about the business of media, I regularly get emails from founders of niche media companies who want to tell me about their successful ventures. A few months ago, I received an email from a guy who identified himself only as Meathead, and after reading only a few paragraphs I knew I wanted to have him as a guest for my podcast. Meathead, who's been writing about...

If you wanted to become a professional standup comedian in the 1990s, the path was pretty straightforward. You started by going to amateur open mic nights, where you would hone your act. Eventually, you'd develop five to 10 minutes of solid material and maybe get a slot opening for a bigger comedian. From there you'd work yourself up to bigger and bigger gigs, and if you were really talented and l...

Let's say you're a writer who wants to publish your work to the web and eventually monetize it. These days you have plenty of options. You might open a Medium account and join the platform's partner program. Or maybe you launch a Substack newsletter. If you're really ambitious, you could throw together a Wordpress website and integrate it with a payment tool like Stripe. Or you could just launch a...

When we talk about the media industry, we're usually discussing publishers that are geared toward a broad audience -- outlets like The New York Times or CNN or NPR. Even more niche publications like The Verge or Bon Appetit are designed to attract tens of millions of readers each month. But there's also an entire ecosystem of business-oriented publishers that operate in extremely narrow niches --...

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has expressed a lot of frustration with the large platforms that dominate our online browsing. In 2018, for instance, he complained that Facebook captures a lot of value from publishers and argued that it should share more of its revenue with them. That same year, he floated a merger of several digital media companies so they'd have more bargaining power against the plat...