The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Exploring the success and growth of newsletter advertising amidst economic uncertainty, analyzing sectors investing in ads. Insights on tracking tools, direct response ads, and challenges like privacy concerns and cookie deprecation. Also, a look at the impact of crypto market trends on newsletter advertising.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   By the time Riad Chikhani was 16 years old, he had already built a hugely successful online community for gamers and then sold it for a healthy sum. Two years later, he founded the company that would eventually become GAMURS Group, and while it took far longer to gain traction, it eventually grew into one of the largesting gaming media companies in the world, with outlets that include Dot Esports, Gamepur, and Gamer Journalist.   In my interview with Riad, we talked about his early business pivots, why he invested big in esports, and how he drives synergies between 17 different publications.  

Earlier this month, I sent a newsletter to my audience with the subject line: “Ask me a question.” Basically I told everyone to jump in the comments section of the post and ask me any questions they have about the media industry or creator economy.   Several of you did pipe in with some amazing questions. I then invited on Alexis Grant, the founder of They Got Acquired, to help me answer them.   We answered questions on a range of topics like   How to monetize newsletters on LinkedIn How we’d go about launching a local news outlet from scratch The future of paid newsletters How The Messenger should have spent its $50 million in VC cash.   This Q&A episode is actually part of an ongoing series. Every single month I’ll allow my subscribers to submit questions, and I’m going to do my very best to answer at least one question from every single subscriber. The only way to submit questions is by becoming a paid subscriber to my substack newsletter.    Subscribers also receive a calendly link from me that allows them to book a half-hour introductory phone call. Many of my subscribers use it as an opportunity to tell me about their own media businesses and pick my brain on strategy.   To subscribe, go to https://simonowens.substack.com/  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Jack Karmer and Nick Martell launched their daily newsletter Market Snacks in 2011, they kept their names off the publication so that it wouldn’t jeopardize their finance day jobs. But once the newsletter started to attract readers and sponsorship revenue, they decided to come clean. Luckily, their bosses let them continue on with their side hustle.   Flash forward about a half decade, and Market Snacks had gained enough traction that they both decided to go to business school so they could learn to scale the company. Around that same time, they teamed up with a large podcast network to launch a daily companion show, and almost immediately it was featured on the Apple Podcast app.   This success didn’t go unnoticed. Robinhood, which at the time was a fast-growing stock trading app, came on at first as a sponsor, but a few months later decided to outright buy Market Snacks to leverage it as a marketing channel for the app.   Jack and Nick continued to host the podcast while managing the rest of the Market Snacks team, and then in 2022 they went to the Robinhood executive team with a radical proposition: they wanted to spin off the daily podcast and acquire it from Robinhood. Amazingly, their bosses went for it, and that year they renamed the podcast to The Best One Yet.   In my interview with Jack and Nick, we discussed how they came up with the idea for the newsletter, why Robinhood allowed them to take the podcast back, and what they’ve done with the company ever since they became full owners.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   It’s no secret that local journalism has struggled since the Great Recessions, with hundreds of newspapers shuttering and thousands of reporters losing their jobs. Over the past few years, entrepreneurs have launched dozens of local news startups to help fill in the gap, but there’s still an ongoing debate as to whether local news should be a for-profit or nonprofit industry.   Berkeleyside is one of the few organizations that has tried both models. For the first several years of its existence, it was a for-profit entity, but then in 2019 its founders switched it over to a nonprofit model, and it’s since expanded into three separate verticals that cover the bay area, with a fourth launch planned for 2024.   In an interview, co-founder Lance Knobel walked me through how Berkeleyside came to be, why it switched to a nonprofit model, and how it generates revenue through a combination of grants, memberships, sponsorships, and large donations.  

Subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Lucas Grindley knows something about building sustainable revenue streams for media companies. When he was hired to Here Media, a network of LGBT news outlets, it was losing money, but over a period of six years he nurtured it back to profitability.    Now he’s the executive director of Next City, a 20-year-old nonprofit magazine dedicated to urban policy and equitable cities. When he first joined, the publication was almost entirely reliant on large grants, but he’s since diversified its revenue by building up its ad sales and small-donor memberships. Recently, it crossed the threshold of 1,000 paying members.   In a recent interview, Lucas walked me through his successful tenure at Here Media and explained how he’s brought a similar playbook to Next City.  

Sign up for my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   It’s been nearly five years since Spotify announced it would diversify its audio offerings beyond music streaming, and while it spent most of that time building its podcast capabilities, it made no secret that it eventually wanted to get into audiobooks.   Then in 2022 it made its first move into the industry by acquiring an audiobooks distributor called Findaway. Later that year, it launched the ability to purchase audiobooks through spotify. And then finally in late 2023 it rolled out audiobook streaming as part of its paid subscription.   There’s been one group that’s watched these developments closely: audiobook authors. They’re understandably nervous about how Spotify’s bundled offering will affect their own income, and many are deeply skeptical of the company’s intentions.   So will Spotify’s audiobook streaming be good for authors? That’s a question I put to Jane Friedman, the writer behind the publishing industry newsletter The Hot Sheet. She walked me through the current landscape of digital audiobook sales and explained how Spotify’s revenue sharing arrangement works.  

Gabe Fleisher, started Wake Up To Politics when he was only 9 years old and now a senior at Georgetown. He talks about his motivation, monetization strategies, and future plans for the newsletter. Also discusses the appeal of a daily email newsletter, incorporating original reporting, interactions with media executives, driving donations, and continuing the publication full-time.

The podcast covers topics such as the difference between creator-led companies and traditional media outlets, non-traditional media business models, launching a media business in 2024, the inefficiency of traditional PR and advertising, creating engaging editorial content, balancing freelance writing and newsletters, the involvement of sponsors and blurring lines in the event space, and building momentum in the Creator Economy.

It’s been a bad few years for Buzzfeed. After a disastrous IPO in 2022, it’s faced a tanking stock price, declining revenue, and a shutdown of its news division.    But things only look to get worse in 2024. As Adweek’s Mark Stenberg reports, BuzzFeed faces a fiscal cliff where it’s in danger of being delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange, which then would trigger a required payment on its debt. Such an event would be disastrous for the company’s future.   I recently interviewed Mark about the dangers of the fiscal cliff and how likely it is to happen. We also discussed all the mistakes BuzzFeed made that led it up to this position.