The Business of Content with Simon Owens

This week I interviewed a guy named Ernie Smith. Why do I think Smith is so fascinating? Because over the past decade he’s created two successful media properties, each with the absolute opposite goal of the other. The first was a Tumblr account called ShortFormBlog. It amassed over 140,000 followers and was one of the hyperreactive news aggregators that thrived in the aughts. Every single day Smith logged in and plucked the most interesting quotes and stats from news stories and served them up in a tightly-packaged news product. The blog was so successful that it was covered in the pages of both Newsweek and Time (back when these were still relevant publications). And then just when ShortFormBlog was at the height of its popularity, Smith abandoned it and launched a newsletter called Tedium. Unlike ShortFormBlog, Tedium would only be published twice a week and, instead of chasing headlines, it would tackle the most boring subjects imaginable and try to make them interesting. Several of its issues have gone incredibly viral and the newsletter now has over 10,000 subscribers. Smith and I talked about why he made the switch and whether it’s possible to run a profitable independent newsletter.

If you run a hit podcast, you might have a couple avenues open to your for monetization. You could host live events and charge admissions, like what we’ve seen with Slate’s Political Gabfest and Pod Save America. You could, like Gimlet Media, launch a membership program and charge $60 a year for free tshirts, exclusive bonus content, and access to a private slack channel. Or you might turn to running sponsored ads within your podcasts, an approach that generated $220 million for podcasts in 2017. But Macmillan’s podcast network is more diversified than most. The book publisher has been producing podcasts since 2007, and in addition to selling host-read sponsorships, it’s also generated revenue from running programmatic ads on its website. But what’s perhaps most interesting is how it’s leveraged podcasts to elevate the brands of its authors in order to sell more books and audiobooks. I recently sat down and interviewed Kathy Doyle, vice president of podcasting at Macmillan, about the publisher’s strategy heading into 2018 as it expands its podcast lineup.

For the past several years, Twitter’s been a punching bag, both for tech writers and Wall Street analysts. It remained unprofitable, was a magnet for trolls, and, worst of all, its user growth came to a halt. But in just the past few months we’ve seen some meaningful signs of life at the embattled social network. For one, it had its first profitable quarter in, well, forever. But it also saw growth in other areas. For one, though monthly active user growth is flat, it saw a sharp increase in daily active users. Also, a report from Social Flow found that Twitter traffic to news sites has increased while Facebook referral traffic has fallen. Is this the sign of a company turnaround? Or just a temporary blip at an otherwise struggling company? I recently discussed these questions with Jonathan Rick, a digital media consultant based in Washington, DC.

The last decade hasn’t been kind to local news. While the entire news industry has experienced hardship, local newspapers have been hit particularly hard. A recent article in the American Prospect detailed how newspaper chains have been bought up by private equity firms and then were systematically cut to the bone, the private equity firms wringing out every last cent of profit before closing the newspapers for good. Even tech companies have struggled to make local news profitable. AOL famously launched Patch, a network of hyperlocal news sites, only to sell it off a few years later. That’s what makes Mike Shapiro’s success so interesting. Shapiro was working as a lawyer when, in a bid to spend more time with his kids, he launched a news site for his New Jersey town. That site soon spawned two new sites, and then blossomed from there. The TAPInto network now boasts dozens of sites all across New Jersey. I recently interviewed Shapiro about how he has managed to find success in local news where so many other companies have failed.

According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the sixth most visited website in the U.S. and the fifth most visited in the world. When you Google famous people, places, or companies, their Wikipedia pages usually come up as the first or second result. If you’re a company that already has a Wikipedia page, then monitoring what’s written on it is vital to your reputation management strategy. If you don’t have your own Wikipedia page, then you may aspire to create one for yourself. But this is where companies often get into trouble. Wikipedia has strict conflict of interest rules, and the site’s army of dedicated editors and admins are often quick to reverse undisclosed edits from conflicted parties. Abuse the rules too much, and you may get yourself banned or, even worse, attract attention to your page from activists who want to do your brand harm. So what’s a company to do if it wants to edit its Wikipedia page without running afoul of Wikipedia’s rules? You’ll want to call a guy like Bill Beutler. Beutler, founder of a company called Beutler Ink, has been conducting Wikipedia consulting for almost a decade and led a coalition of PR firms in developing a code of ethics for Wikipedia editing. I spoke to Bill about how he fell into his line of work and how he navigates Wikipedia’s regulations on behalf of clients.

Branded podcasts are on the rise. With one out of every four Americans saying they listen to at least one podcast a month, companies are increasingly incorporating the medium into their content marketing strategies, and in some cases these branded podcasts are really taking off with listeners. The first major success of a branded podcast was The Message, a joint venture between the Panoply Network and GE. The science fiction serial has generated over 8 million downloads and, during its run, stayed at the top of the iTunes charts. Gimlet Media, one of the largest and most well-funded podcast networks, recently launched its branded content studio Gimlet Creative, and it’s since created narrative podcasts for Tinder and eBay. Suddenly, there’s strong demand for people who can leverage their podcast expertise to help companies launch podcasts that their target consumers will actually want to listen to. One of those people is Ernesto Gluecksmann. Ernesto is the co-founder of Human Factor Media, a podcast consulting company that works with associations to launch and produce podcasts. I recently interviewed Ernesto about how he launched the company and what makes for a successful branded podcast.

For more than a decade, publishers attempted to grow ad-supported businesses that depended on massive scale and distribution of free content, but in recent years, many have acknowledged that purely advertising-based business models simply don’t work in a world in which Facebook and Google are vacuuming up nearly all ad dollars that migrate online. So they’ve begun asking their readers to pony up, launching various forms of paywalls that require paid subscriptions for those wanting to access gated content. There are three kinds of paywalls that have emerged: there’s the hard paywall where virtually all content is gated off. There’s the metered paywall, where the user gets access to a certain number of free articles before the paywall is triggered. And then there’s the freemium model, where a publisher will publish most of its content for free while reserving extra goodies for those willing to pony up money. So what should these extra goodies be? Discounted tickets to live events? Access to a private Slack channel? Physical objects? Or just exclusive content? To answer this question, I interviewed Adam Rowe, a journalist for Tech.Co. Rowe recently wrote about subscription services and argued that publishers should put their best content in front of the paywall. He explained his reasoning in our interview.