The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Every year we get new articles questioning whether “email is dead.” With the proliferation of social media and messaging apps, it seems only natural to ask what will replace a decades-old electronic messaging system that really hasn’t changed much in all the years we’ve used it.   But email has remained resilient, and it’s even experienced a renaissance of sorts lately. In the wake of Facebook’s algorithm changes that are designed to hurt content providers, more and more publishers are launching new email newsletter products. It’s impossible these days to fire up a podcast or watch a YouTube video without encountering an ad for Mailchimp. And of all the email providers, Gmail is king. The Google-operated service has over 1 billion users and is one of the few major email platforms that is actually continuing to innovate. In 2014, it opened up its API to developers, allowing them to build new products that Gmail users can install. It was around this time that Ajay Goel was on the lookout for an opportunity to launch a new business. It was while he was looking around for a tool that would send mass emails that he came up with the idea for Gmass, an add-on that allows users to schedule and send mass emails directly from their Gmail accounts. I interviewed Goel about his long career of building email-based tools and why he doesn’t think email’s going away anytime soon.

There’s no question that newsletters are on the rise. Legacy publishers are constantly launching new newsletter products. Quartz’s Obsession newsletter, for instance, picks seemingly random topics and goes deeps on them. Vox’s Voxcare newsletter, a favorite of mine, covers new developments in healthcare policy. But we’re also seeing a number of media startups that are producing newsletters without corresponding websites. The Hustle, a business-news oriented newsletter that has over 500,000 subscribers, keeps all its content contained within its newsletter and publishes none of it to its website. The same can be said for theSkimm, a female-focused newsletter launched by two former NBC producers, and Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter. So what’s the business model for these types of newsletters? Of course many of them rely on advertising, but we’re also seeing a number of new products enter the market that allow newsletter publishers to charge money to their subscribers, often in exchange for access to extra premium newsletters. For example, Hot Pod, a newsletter about the podcast industry, sends out a weekly free newsletter each Tuesday and a second one every Friday for subscribers who pay $7 a month. Given the rise of paid newsletters, we’ve seen a number of new platforms spring up to service this type of publisher. One of those platforms is Revue, a newsletter distribution platform that was designed with content publishers in mind. I interviewed its founder Martijn de Kuijper about the platform’s offerings and the best way for publishers to convert casual newsletter readers into paying subscribers.

With over 150 million users, Spotify has the ability to launch the careers of previously-unknown music artists. It does this by featuring these artists on its playlists, which are maintained by a mixture of users, Spotify staff, and algorithms. Playlists count for half of all listening on Spotify, and getting your song listed on a few of the most influential lists, some of which boast millions of subscribers, has the ability to thrust you onto the Billboard 100 charts. Several rap artists featured on Rap Caviar, one of the app’s most powerful lists, have become overnight sensations. But with individual users wielding that much power, it shouldn’t be surprising that some have succumbed to illicit backroom deals in which artists pay the playlist owners to include their songs, a practice that’s been illegal since the payola scandals in the 1950s that led to a Congressional investigation into radio DJs. Daily Dot managing editor Austin Powell recently published his investigation into the black market for Spotify playlists. I interviewed Powell about how these markets operate and what Spotify is doing to stop it.

The influencer marketing industry is estimated to generate $2 billion a year, with $1.6 billion coming from Instagram influencers alone. That number is only set to increase, with 39 percent of marketers saying they plan to increase their influencer marketing budget this year. It’s now pretty much impossible to open up Instagram or YouTube without seeing #sponsored posts popping up from your favorite stars, from Kim Kardashian all the way down to food Instagrammers who only have a few thousand followers. But whenever there’s this much money on the line, you always have people who are trying to game the system. It’s incredibly easy these days to inflate your follower count by purchasing bots or engaging in other kinds of shady activity. If you’re a company who’s thinking of hiring a social media influencer, how can you ensure that their followers are real? Well, you’ll probably turn to someone like Erick Schwab, the COO of a company called SYLO. SYLO is a tech platform that can scan social media accounts and detect fraudulent activity. I interviewed Schwab about the state of social media influencer fraud and how his platform is able to tell when an Instagram account is propped up by an army of bots.

Think Progress was founded in 2005 as an offshoot of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. What started as a bloggy website has grown into a fully staffed news organization that employs beat writers and conducts investigative reporting. The site has generated real impact, most recently when it published a list of companies that had established corporate partnerships with the NRA. Activists seized on the list and used social media to pressure many of these companies to drop their partnerships. I recently sat down with Judd Legum, Think Progress’s founding editor, and asked him about how the site operates, why it decided to leave the Medium platform, and how it managed to generate $500,000 from its readers after Trump was elected.

Technorati rankings. Full RSS feeds vs partial RSS feeds. Blogrolls. The Techmeme leaderboards. Blogspot vs Wordpress vs Typepad. If you were a blogger over the mid-aughts, these were just a few of the things you might have obsessed over as you catapulted blog post after blog post into the ether, hoping someone would notice and provide you precious links and send even more precious readers. Back then, the internet felt huge, but the number of actual content producers was tiny compared to today, and distribution of content was much less centralized. A-list bloggers duked it out while the rest of us B and C-list bloggers pined desperately for attention from these internet demigods, who they themselves only wanted recognition and legitimacy bestowed upon them by the Mainstream Media. I remember all this because I was right there at ground zero, plugging away as a blogger while I went to college and later worked as a newspaper journalist. And so was my guest, Bill Beutler, who worked at a DC publication called The Hotline and launched a blog called The Blogometer. Tune in while we reminisce about a bygone era when we didn’t live or die by the Facebook algorithm and the internet was a Wild West composed of various ideological fiefdoms.

Welcome to Night Vale. The Message. Steal the Stars. Homecoming. The Bright Sessions. All are fiction podcasts that have seen downloads in the millions. Some have been optioned for television or film adaptation. All were launched in just the last few years. For much of the early to mid 20th century, millions of listeners tuned in each week to listen to radio dramas and fiction broadcasts in genres ranging from adventure (Superman) to science fiction (War of the Worlds) to crime noir (Dragnet). But by the early 60s, due to the rise of television, the radio drama faded in popularity, and most were canceled by the end of 1962. Though some broadcasters continued to dabble in the medium, most people today have grown up without having listened to a single radio play. Podcasting, however, has led to a resurgence in this kind of audio fiction, and a whole new generation of fans are tuning in to new episodes, attending live events, and ordering merchandise online. Why are we seeing this resurgence in what was thought to be a bygone medium? To answer this, I interviewed Alasdair Stuart, the owner of Escape Artists Inc, which produces a number of popular fiction podcasts in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

Podcasting as a medium has been around for about 13 years now, and for most of that time you’d find that most podcasts were platform agnostic. When a new episode was released, it would appear pretty much simultaneously across all podcast apps. Sure, podcasters placed most of their promotional efforts on iTunes, but that’s because it accounted for most of all podcast listening. But over the last few years, the podcast and audio app space has gotten more competitive, and because of this we’ve seen some of these apps marketing exclusive content. Spotify, for instance, has signed deals with podcast companies like Gimlet so that it gets an exclusive window on new episodes before they’re published to all the other podcast apps. In some cases, podcast apps are actually bankrolling and producing their own podcasts in an effort to differentiate themselves from other apps. The hit show Missing Richard Simmons was produced by Stitcher Premium and exclusively windowed there (this apparently pissed off the executives at Apple, since they refused to feature the show on iTunes). Audible launched Audible Channels, a platform for its own podcasts that aren’t available on any other apps. And now add Castbox to the list of podcast apps that are producing their own shows. An app with 15 million downloads, Castbox has recently launched “Off Track with Hinch and Rossi,” a show about auto racing, and it has several other podcasts in development. I recently interviewed Peter Vincer, head of global strategic partnerships at Castbox, about why the company is producing its own shows and whether podcast apps are taking a page from Netflix’s strategy.

In 2014, former Major League Baseball player Derek Jeter launched a media company with a novel premise. Called The Players’ Tribune, it’s a sports site that’s produced and written by pro athletes themselves. Many wondered if this would result in what are essentially bland, rewritten press releases that would be typed up by publicists, but in its few years of existence, The Players’ Tribune has produced some astoundingly raw first-person journalism. In 2017, for instance, NBA player Isaiah Thomas wrote about the gut-wrenching pain he felt when the Boston Celtics decided to pawn him off on another team. Kevin Durant used the site to announce his move to Golden State. While not every article at the Players’ Tribune is Pulitzer-worthy, it certainly has brought forth pro athlete perspectives that you won’t find anywhere else. Could the same idea work for famous musicians, artists, directors, and actors? Several years ago, a record label owner named Ian Wheeler launched a publication called Talkhouse, and it’s essentially The Players’ Tribune, but for artists instead of athletes I recently interviewed Wheeler about Talkhouse and whether famous Hollywood and music artists actually need their own media outlet.

If you want to subscribe and listen to podcasts, there are dozens of apps to choose from, including podcast-specific apps like Stitcher and even music streaming apps like Spotify. But anyone who works in the industry knows that Apple is the king of podcasts; its podcast app, which it spun off from iTunes a few years ago, accounts for more than 50 percent of all podcast use. This is why Apple’s podcast rankings can be so important for driving discovery and downloads. There’s one master list of the top 200 most popular podcasts at any given moment, and then there are also dozens of content categories, each with its own top 200 list. Making it to the top of one of these lists can drive thousands of fresh downloads and put a podcast on the map. But how does Apple rank its podcasts? And what’s the best way to make it onto one of its lists? To answer this question, I interviewed Dan Misener, the head of audience development at a company called Pacific Content, which specializes in helping brands develop their own podcasts. For over a year, Misener ran an experiment in which he took snapshots of the Apple podcast charts and kept track of which content categories showed up most consistently. I interviewed Misener about his findings and what strategies his company uses to get a client podcast ranked.