The Business of Content with Simon Owens

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. If there’s a major story in tech, chances are that an Information reporter is chasing it.    So it wasn’t exactly a surprise when, in January 2021, the publication put out a job ad for a Creator Economy reporter. With an estimated $100 billion in annual revenue, the Creator Economy has not only launched the careers for thousands of creators, but it’s also become the core focus for many of the world’s largest tech platforms. Venture capitalists are now pouring billions of dollars into Creator Economy startups, and creators themselves are upending entire industries that include beauty, commerce, health, and entertainment.   In April 2021, The Information announced that it had hired Kaya Yurieff, a former CNN tech reporter, to helm its Creator Economy coverage, and she’s since launched a daily newsletter that, in addition to publishing regular feature stories, also rounds up deals, trends, and product launches.    Given the relative newness of the Creator Economy beat, I wanted to get a better idea of how Yurieff shapes her coverage. In a recent interview, she walked me through her weekly routine for news gathering, her methods for assessing startup founders’ claims, and where she thinks the industry is heading in the near future. 

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 high net worth individuals would pay her for the recommendations that she was giving out for free. In 2009, Maria quit her law firm job and launched a new career as an art buying consultant. She also invested a significant portion of her time into creating online content, first with a blog and then later on social media. She eventually grew her audience to over 200,000 followers across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and email, and she’s leveraged this audience to sign book deals, run brand sponsorship campaigns, and bring in dozens of wealthy clients that include Gwyneth Paltrow and Sean "Diddy" Combs. In a recent interview, she explained to me her content creation process, her philosophy on Instagram sponsorship deals, and why so many high net worth individuals trust her to buy art for their collections, often after seeing only a static iPhone photo of the piece she’s recommending for purchase.

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 800,000 downloads per month and has a growing team. I spoke to Erica about why she made the jump from TV to podcasts, how she found her audience, and whether the daily news podcast space is becoming saturated.

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 eventually led to the launch of Science for Sport, one of the leading information hubs that translates peer-reviewed sports science for a lay audience. The outlet has been embraced as a resource by pro and college teams, and Owen recently sold it to one of the world’s largest sports technology companies.  In our interview, Owen walked me through how he built the site’s audience, his monetization strategies, and why he never focused on building his own personal brand.

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 their business models so that their writers could capture more of the value that they generate? Last week, The Atlantic announced that it's partnering with about a dozen writers to author standalone newsletters for the magazine. Though the partnership details are somewhat vague, they could provide a framework for how media outlets will compete with platforms like Substack moving forward. To discuss these moves, I sat down with communications consultant Jonathan Rick. We dove into The Atlantic's newsletter strategy and discussed whether it's effective enough to lure independent journalists back into the warm embrace of legacy media.

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 roll out dynamic paywalls that assign varying weights to different kinds of stories. If you’re reading a business article, for instance, you may only get to read three free articles before hitting a paywall, but if you’re perusing real estate listings you might get unlimited free access. The Globe and Mail has taken the idea of the dynamic paywall to the next level: it’s developed a sophisticated AI that’s able to analyze user behavior and determine the exact moment that a reader is most likely to subscribe. The AI is so powerful that the newspaper’s editors now allow it to automate the placement of stories on its homepage and social media. I recently sat down with Gordon Edall, the person who runs the product team that developed the AI. We talked about how the paywall was initially designed, his experience recruiting data scientists, and why the Globe and Mail is licensing its AI product to other publishers.

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 year and that it surpassed Apple as the #1 podcast player in the U.S. What do all these announcements mean for the podcast industry? To figure it out, I invited on Jaclyn Schiff, CEO of a company called Podreacher. We discussed whether Spotify is a threat to the open podcast ecosystem and if it can become the YouTube of podcasting.

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 revenue optimization for news and publishing, believes the search giant has the potential to provide a net benefit to publishers. Over the past several years, her team has developed a suite of tools aimed at helping media outlets to optimize their content so it reaches a bigger audience and drives more revenue. In our interview, Amy walked me through these tools and explained how they work. She also talked about why publishers need to adopt many of the strategies that ecommerce platforms developed over a decade ago.

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 underrepresented in mainstream media. This led to the launch of a free weekly newsletter that amassed several hundred readers. That free newsletter eventually evolved into The Juggernaut, a subscription-funded publisher that has a dedicated and growing fan base. I interviewed Snigdha about how she convinced YCombinator to let in a media startup, why she launched a hard paywall, and whether she’ll ever introduce advertising into her revenue mix.