The Business of Content with Simon Owens

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 no longer pay his own salary, but he was also struggling to keep his stable of writers on board. Out of desperation, he moved the Banter over to Substack and doubled down on paid subscriptions. That was in early 2019. I recently checked in with Ben to see how his efforts are going and how a presidential election year affects subscription growth for a political newsletter.

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 social media and blogs for corporate clients. Eventually, she drummed up enough business to quit her day job and focus on content marketing full time. In fact, she launched an entire marketing agency that specialized in producing branded content. One of her clients was a personal finance website called The Penny Hoarder, and she was so successful at growing its audience that the company eventually acquired her agency and installed her as its editor in chief. By the time she left The Penny Hoarder a few years later, it was generating tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. I recently interviewed Alexis about how she helped scale these companies and what she plans to do next.

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 food on the internet since the days of dial-up AOL, started the website AmazinRibs.com almost as a lark. Flash forward 15 years, and it’s the preeminent authority on all things barbecue. It generates a healthy mix of revenue from advertising, affiliate sales, books, and paid subscriptions, and it grew its business without help from any venture backing. I recently interviewed Meathead about writing for AOL when it was the biggest game in town, running the third most popular wine magazine, and stumbling into a website venture that made him one of the most famous people within the barbecue scene.

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 lucky, you’d land a slot on a late-night talk show, or, even better, get signed to an hour-long special for HBO. These days, the path for the aspiring comedian is completely different. Sure, there’s still the open mic nights and the club gigs. But there’s also a bevvy of online platforms that you can leverage to sharpen your craft and build a following. You might collaborate with other comedians and write sketches for a YouTube channel. You can practice your one-liners on Twitter. And you’ll definitely want to launch a podcast. As a full-time standup comedian, Joel Byars has employed several of these strategies. I interviewed Byars about how comedians market themselves in this golden age of standup comedy and asked him why he decided to self-produce his own comedy special.

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 an account on Ghost, a publishing platform created a few years ago by a guy named John O’Nolan. Before founding Ghost, John was the deputy head of design at Wordpress, and though he was always a fan of the open source CMS, he thought he could create something a little bit better. So John launched a Kickstarter campaign, and after raising tens of thousands of dollars, he developed Ghost. Today, it’s used by some of the world’s largest brands, and his hope now is that independent writers will use it to monetize their content. I spoke to John about the platform and why he thinks a writer should choose it over a competitor like Substack or Patreon.

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 -- outlets aimed at sewage workers, electricians, and grocery store executives. Though their readerships are relatively small, they represent industries that collectively generate hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Because of this, B2B niche publishers, when run well, can be immensely profitable. Industry Dive is one such B2B publisher. Founded in 2012, the company now produces publications that cover over a dozen industries. I sat down with one of its co-founders Sean Griffey to talk about Industry Dive’s origin story and how it bootstrapped its way to north of $22 million in annual revenue.

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 platforms. And then recently he wrote a memo in which he lamented that publishers didn’t receive enough credit for the consumer purchases they drive. “The two most important players in this chain are the publisher who inspired a consumer to take action and the companies that actually deliver the product But most of the profit is captured by digital middlemen who didn’t create much value.” In the memo, he promised that BuzzFeed was working hard to solve this attribution problem. To get an idea of how BuzzFeed plans to solve this problem, I recently spoke to Rich Reid, its senior vice president of global content. We talked about Bring Me, BuzzFeed’s travel vertical that publishes a wide range of video and text content across its website and social channels. Recently, Bring Me formed an ad partnership with Hilton, and I asked Reid about how his team designed the campaign so that BuzzFeed gets full credit for any business it sends Hilton’s way.

It’s been nearly a decade since The New York Times launched its metered paywall, and its success has spurred just about every digital publisher to test out some form of reader revenue strategy. Many have followed in the Times’s footsteps and debuted metered paywalls. Others have rolled out various membership options, offering everything from behind-the-scenes footage to exclusive commenting features to convince readers to open their wallets. But which tactics actually work? And how should publishers determine what to charge? To answer these questions, I spoke to Jacob Donnely. Donnely is the managing director of audience and growth at Coindesk, one of the leading cryptocurrency publishers, and runs his own paid newsletter about the publishing industry. We talked about how to design the perfect subscription offering and debated whether subscription fatigue is actually real.

In its most recent earnings report, Twitter revealed that it has over 139 million daily users, but the company’s first podcast it launched in 2019 was designed to only appeal to a tiny fraction of those users. The show is called Character Count and is hosted by Joe Wadlington, a creative lead in the department that helps educate small businesses on how to leverage Twitter in their marketing. And that’s the focus of Character Count, highlighting some of the most effective ways in which businesses utilize Twitter. Recent guests have worked for Dungeons and Dragons, Grindr, and Dropbox. I recently interviewed Wadlington about his podcast strategy and the role the show plays in helping improve Twitter’s bottom line.

Where you can subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/p/discount So this is the 68th episode of my podcast, and if you’ve been listening to it for any amount of time, you’d know that it never has ads. And while I don’t have anything against podcasts that have advertising, I don’t envision a future for this podcast where I’m reading promos for Squarespace of Mailchimp. But at the same time, I’d like for this podcast to contribute to my income, mostly so I can justify spending more time on it. During a good month, I might put out a new episode each week, but I’ve had busy months where I was lucky if I could produce more than a single episode.  If I can start making money from this podcast, then it’ll be easier for me to justify spending more time on it, and then everyone gets to benefit. And I didn’t want to do just a quick promo and then be done with it. Given that most of my listeners actually care about business models for content, I wanted to go deep on my decision making process, and to do that I enlisted the help of my friend Jaclyn Schiff. Jaclyn is a content expert like me who specializes in converting podcast episodes into shareable articles for clients. You can find her work at podreacher.com. She recently interviewed me about my history covering the business of content and how I came up with my monetization strategy.