The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Would you read a 1,300-word newsletter about garden sheds? What about a 1,400-word piece on lettuce? A little over a year ago, the business-focused publication Quartz made a bet that you would, launching a daily newsletter called Quartz Obsession. The aim of the product? Take the most mundane topics imaginable and -- through narration, numbers, and quotes -- prove to the reader that these topics are not mundane at all. Unlike many publication newsletters that simply round up links to articles on the publication’s site, Quartz Obsession is a standalone newsletter that can be completely consumed within the inbox. It’s seen open rates as high as 80 percent and thousands of readers have written in to suggest topics. Why did Quartz launch a product that steered clear of the editorial topics it usually covers on its website? And how does it pick each day’s topics? To answer these questions, I turned to Jessanne Collins, who edits the newsletter.

Recently, an industry website called The Drum reported that The Financial Times, the London-based business publication, is projected to hit 1 million paying digital subscribers by next year. This is impressive, not just because only a handful of publications have hit this milestone, but also because The Financial Times has done so while maintaining a hard paywall. Unlike companies that use metered paywalls like The New York Times and Washington Post,  The Financial Times hits users with a subscriber login page on the vast majority of its articles. This presents a challenge for a social media editor: how do you promote content when most of your followers won’t be able to see it? To get an overview of The Financial Times’ social media strategy, I interviewed Jake Grovum, its head of social. He told me about how the Times’ has leveraged Instagram stories, what metrics his team is judged by, and why the newspaper hasn’t invested resources into Snapchat.

Long before Facebook started generating billions of dollars on self-service native ads, Henry Copeland had invented a self-service native advertising platform for blogs. And he was building early content management systems for newspapers well before products like Wordpress would go on to power much of the internet. These days, Copeland is focused on augmented reality, and he think that today’s AR products are the equivalent of the blog advertising widgets he was developing in the early 2000s. In other words, we haven’t even hit the tipping point that will make AR ubiquitous, woven into the fabric of our daily lives. What will that world look like? And what technologies still need to be invented before we can reach that point? I asked Copeland about these topics, and given his previous track record of spotting trends that would go on to sprout multi-billion dollar industries, I think we should listen to what he has to say.  

If you follow the digital media sector, you’ve likely noticed that advertising as a business model is on the wane. With the Facebook and Google duopoly sucking up just about all the advertising money flowing online, publishers have been forced to find alternate revenue sources to fund their content. One such source: subscriptions. More and more publishers are rolling out subscription and membership programs, and many have been successful. One such success? Innovation Leader, a small business-focused publication that launched in 2013. It carries no advertising, has a hard paywall, and charges subscribers $695 a year. I recently sat down with one of its cofounders, Scott Kirsner, and asked him about why he settled on such a high price point, how the publication markets to new subscribers, and how it approaches content development.

In 2010, a college dropout named Kyle Taylor launched a blogspot account. He was taking on odd side jobs in an attempt to crawl his way out of debt, and the blog was a way to write about lessons he learned on making and saving money. Traffic was scarce, at first, but over a period of years the blog slowly gained an audience. Eventually, brands started approaching Taylor about publishing sponsored posts, and revenue for the site, which was called The Penny Hoarder, quickly grew. Flash forward a few more years, and The Penny Hoarder now has a huge audience, dozens of full-time staffers, and millions in annual revenue. To get a better understanding of how the site grew this big, I interviewed John Schlander, The Penny Hoarder’s managing editor. I asked him about how his staff develops its story ideas, how the site makes money, and whether the rise of the gig economy plays a part in its success. Let’s jump right into it.

When Christopher Wink graduated college in 2008, he had no intention of launching a media company. He just wanted an entry level journalism job that would allow him to work his way up within the industry. But back then, when newspapers were hemorrhaging revenue and announcing mass layoffs, there weren’t a lot of journalism jobs to pass around. So, out of desperation, he and a couple other college friends launched a Wordpress blog called Technically Philly. It covered the local tech scene, an industry that at the time was largely ignored by regional news organizations. Eventually, the blog gained traction and profitability, and the growth allowed Wink and his friends to launch local tech blogs in Brooklyn, Baltimore, DC, and Delaware. I interviewed Wink about the early days of running an unknown tech blog, what it takes to launch a site in a new city, and why he’s never been all that interested in building out an advertising business.

Back in January, Facebook made an announcement that shocked the publishing world: It was tweaking its Newsfeed algorithm so there would be less emphasis on Facebook pages and more focus on what your friends were sharing. Reach for Facebook pages was expected to plummet, and publishers that had grown addicted to Facebook’s free referral traffic girded themselves for an all-out decimation of their businesses. But while there have been some clear victims of the algorithm change, the actual data for who’s been hurt by it is noisy. Some publishers have seen a dip in Facebook engagement, while others have remained steady or even improved. That’s the case for U.S. publishers, at least. But what about Europe? To find out, I interviewed Steve El-Sharawy, head of innovation at EzyInsights, a platform that tracks Facebook engagement for publishers. I asked El-Sharawy about how European publishers reacted to the announced algorithm changes and whether there are any clear winners and losers in the ordeal.

It’s impossible to know which company launched the first branded podcast, but one of the earliest well known examples was GE’s The Message. Produced in collaboration with Panoply, The Message was a science fiction documentary that generated millions of downloads and a rabid fanbase. Ever since GE’s runaway success with the medium, other major brands have waded into the podcast waters, with large companies like Walmart and Goldman Sachs launching their own shows in recent years. But what makes a branded podcast good? How do you avoid making it sound like just another ad? And how does a successful podcast help a company’s bottom line? To answer these questions, I interviewed Rachael King, founder of the podcast consulting company Pod People. She recently helped produce podcasts for companies like Samsung and Medium, and we talked about the rise in demand for the services she offers and how one develops the skillset needed to become a podcast consultant.

Will Sommer grew up in a conservative household and garnered an early interest in Rush Limbaugh and other right wing media figures. When he went to college, his politics changed, but his obsession with conservative media never went away. In late 2016, that obsession paid off. Sommer was one of the first reporters to write about Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that a DC pizza parlor was the home of a child sex ring. After a man was arrested for firing a gun inside the restaurant, his reporting gained national relevance. Shortly afterward, he launched Right Richter, and he soon became one of the foremost experts on the obscure right wing media outlets that, in some cases, produce conspiracies that bubble all the way up to Donald Trump’s Twitter account.

Back in 2013, the Obama Administration rolled out a new version of Healthcare.gov, with disastrous results. It was the public unveiling of the Obamacare exchanges that would allow anyone to buy health insurance on the open market, and yet the website was almost impossible to navigate without encountering errors that would prevent you from signing up for insurance. At the time, Charles Gaba was running a freelance web designer business in Michigan and writing for the liberal blog Daily Kos during his free time. Frustrated by the botched rollout and the amount of misinformation floating around about how many people had actually enrolled in the exchanges, he made a public call to other Daily Kos bloggers to help him count the number of Obamacare enrollees. That project eventually evolved into ACAsignups.net, a standalone blog that eventually captured the attention of policymakers, journalists, and anyone interested in the state of U.S. healthcare. Traffic to his blog exploded, and he became an overnight celebrity in the healthcare space. I interviewed Gaba about how he’s monetizing his website and the role he’s played in helping save Obamacare from GOP sabotage.