The Business of Content with Simon Owens

In 2017, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed titled “How Antitrust Undermines Press Freedom.” It was written by David Chavern, the head of the News Media Alliance, a trade group that represents over 2,000 publishers. In it, he argues that Facebook and Google have effectively cornered the digital ad market, eating up all its growth, and that this has come at the expense of the very content creators that these two companies rely on, content creators Facebook and Google refuse to fairly compensate. “The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together,” wrote Chavern. “If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook—pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data—they could build a more sustainable future for the news business.” Earlier this decade, several book publishers banned together to negotiate ebook prices with Apple in a direct effort to undermine Amazon’s command of the market, and they were slapped with a lawsuit from the Department of Justice for violating antitrust laws, hence why the News Media Alliance is seeking a special exemption. But do publishers deserve one? And even if they do, would they be able to get such legislation passed through such a divided Congress? These are the questions I asked David Chavern for this week’s episode.

Name just about any media beat, and you’ll find plenty of people trying to predict the future. Political pundits argue over who will win the next election. Finance journalists report on economic forecasts and claims from analysts over where a stock will be six months from now. Even entertainment bloggers will try to hash out which film, song, or TV show will win at the next awards ceremony. But in most cases, those predictions will be wrong. In fact, many studies have shown that a crowd of everyday people will, on average, make better predictions than the experts who work in that particular field. That’s why a lot of attention has been paid lately to betting markets, which can provide real-time odds for any particular outcome ranging from a presidential election to winner of the best picture Oscar. There’s just one problem: most states outlaw online gambling, meaning many of the most well-known betting markets don’t operate within the U.S. But a relatively new prediction market app, called Futuur, gets around this hurdle by using fictional currency. I interviewed Tom Bennett, the founder of Futuur, about how his app works and how its predictions matched up against those made by other famous forecasters like FiveThirtyEight.

Subscriptions are all the rage in the media industry right now. Facing diminishing ad rates, publishers have turned to the paid subscription model as a way to draw revenue directly from the users that consume their content. Publishers ranging from The New York Times to The Washington Post to The Financial Times have announced they’ve reached north of a million subscribers. It seems like every day a different publisher is announcing the launch of a metered paywall or membership service. But getting a news consumer to actually open up their wallet and subscribe is harder than it looks, and the space is only getting more competitive as publishers continue to launch subscription offerings. So what are the actions a publisher can take to make it more likely for a casual reader to convert into a paying subscriber? A new study from digital publishing platform Twipe sought to answer this question. Researcher Mary-Katharine Phillips surveyed 4,000 news consumers across Europe and the U.S. to gain a better understanding of how they consume the news and what drives their news diet. I interviewed Phillips about what percentage of news consumers are willing to pay for digital news, what drives them to subscribe, and what kind of news formats they prefer.

You can’t write a history of Web 2.0 without including the contributions of Brian Alvey. After getting his start doing design work for traditional publications like TV Guide and BusinessWeek, Alvey teamed up with his childhood friend Jason Calacanis to launch a series of online publications. Eventually, the two created Weblogs, Inc, a blog network that went on to be sold to AOL. The content management system Alvey built would eventually power AOL’s portal and much of its websites. But Alvey didn’t stop there; he’d go on to build publishing platforms that would power everything from TMZ to Rupert Murdoch’s ambitious iPad app The Daily. I interviewed Alvey about what it was like to run a blog network in Web 2.0’s early days, how he ended up in a 45 minute meeting with Jeff Bezos, and why the iPad failed to save the media industry.

In 2014, Ben Thompson, a blogger who writes about the business of technology, announced he was quitting his job so he could write full time. His business model? He would send out four newsletters a week. One of those newsletters would be free, and if you wanted access to the other three, then you had to pay $10 per month. Within a year, Thompson had 2,000 subscribers, which, if you do the math, means he was generating $200,000 a year. At that point, he stopped publicly disclosing his subscriber numbers, but some predict that he’s increased his subscriber numbers by several thousand. Thompson was an early pioneer in the realm of paid newsletters, and since then there have been several other writers who struck out on their own with similar models. There’s Nick Quah’s podcast newsletter Hot Pod. There’s political writer Judd Legum’s Popular Information. Many of these newsletter writers have had to string together multiple services, from Mailchimp to Stripe, in order to manage their businesses. Now we’re seeing a few new companies on the market that want to serve as all-in-one platforms for paid email newsletters. Once such platform is called Substack, and it recently surpassed 25,000 paying subscribers for its participating newsletter writers. I interviewed the company’s cofounder Hamish McKenzie about the rise of paid newsletters, how to convert readers of a free newsletter into paying subscribers, and why his service is preferable to other membership platforms like Patreon.

Monica Reinagel had no background in broadcasting or radio when she launched a podcast called Nutrition Diva in 2008, but she was a trained nutritionist, had published several books, and was writing a regular column at a popular health website, and this was just the sort of background that Quick and Dirty Tips, a podcast network run by the book publisher Macmillan, was looking for when she reached out to it to ask if the company would consider taking her on. Flash forward a decade, and Reinagel now has over 500 episodes under her belt, and they’ve generated a collective 35 million downloads. I sat down with her recently to discuss how she benefited from joining a podcast network, where she gets the ideas for new topics, and why she has to be super picky when choosing which brands she’ll allow to sponsor her show.

Just about everyone’s experienced a scenario like this: you read a highly-nuanced article on a topic you find interesting. You then decide to share it on Facebook. Within minutes, a Facebook friend leaves a comment arguing with the premise of the article, and it’s immediately obvious that this person hasn’t actually read the piece in question. In fact, the vast majority of social media users will interact with content without actually clicking through and consuming it. One study from Columbia University found that 59 percent of links shared on social media aren’t even clicked on. Data collected from Hubspot found that “there is no correlation between retweets and clicks.” So what does this really mean for how we absorb information on social media? And how are we impacted by the commentary that social media users will often add when they’re sharing a link?York College political science professor Nick Anspach wanted to answer these questions, so he devised an experiment to find out what information is retained when social media users see a post but don’t click through to the source article. I interviewed Anspach about his results and whether social media has generated a net negative effect on how we monitor current events.

Sam Parr never set out to launch a media company. A few years ago, he was fresh from selling a company he had founded and was looking for something else to do. He decided to recruit about a dozen entrepreneurs as speakers and hosted an event he called Hustlecon. The event was a success, and Parr expanded it into a media website that published daily content. But while the site generated some viral hits, Parr eventually became convinced that the email inbox would produce a much more intimate experience and a better delivery system, so he relaunched The Hustle as a standalone newsletter. Since then, The Hustle has amassed a growing number of diehard followers who evangelize the newsletter to their friends, converse in a private Facebook group, and even meet up in person. I interviewed Parr about what strategies he used to grow the subscriber base, how his editorial team goes about picking daily topics, and what kind of companies like to advertise on a newsletter.

While it seems like every publisher, from The New York Times to Vox, is making significant investments in podcasting, one could argue that Slate was the earliest to invest in the medium. It launched the Slate Political Gabfest -- a panel show with three regular hosts -- all the way back in 2005. Since then, Slate has debuted dozens of new podcasts, which collectively generate millions of downloads each month. And starting in 2009, shortly after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, it started hosting live events centered around these podcasts. Slate has since expanded its live events business, and it now hosts sold-out shows in cities all across the U.S. I recently sat down with Faith Smith, the executive producer for Slate Live. We discussed how her team selects which cities to tour in, how she negotiates with event venues, and what podcast fans are willing to pay in order to watch a live podcast recording.

Chris Grady didn’t know much about the webcomic world when he launched Lunarbaboon, a semi-autobiographical comic about family and parenthood. But shortly after launching the comic, he started sharing it to Reddit, and suddenly Lunarbaboon was being seen and shared by tens of thousands of people. Flash forward a few years, and Lunarbaboon has over a million followers on Facebook. Grady generates $1,500 a month on Patreon and has launched several successful Kickstarter projects related to his comic. His latest Kickstarter, this one for a board game he helped illustrate and create, has already generated $50,000 in backing. I interviewed Grady about what it takes to maintain a successful webcomic, how he grew his audience, and why popular webcomics often make much more money from merchandise than they do from ads.