The Business of Content with Simon Owens

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.  

Kelsey Ogletree, freelance travel writer and founder of Pitchcraft, discusses how she built a membership community for PR pros. Topics include adapting to the travel industry during the pandemic, the concept of press trips, selling out paid workshops, and creating a membership community for PR pros and freelance writers.

Ash Read didn’t launch a review website about household products because of some lifelong interest in home decor; instead, his interest came about simply because he was moving into a new house and needed to furnish it.   While it was easy to search for products listed on retailers like Amazon and Walmart, he realized that there wasn’t a good directory for the direct-to-consumer goods that are sold directly through a company’s website. So he created a database of direct-to-consumer companies and published it to the web. The audience feedback was so strong that he decided to build out an entire website dedicated to covering and reviewing D2C home products.   Ash launched Living Cozy in 2020, and over the next few years he scaled the site to over 350,000 monthly pageviews. What started out as simple product curation soon led to an in-depth review process and him hiring a network of freelance writers to review items like sofas and beds.    How did Ash manage to break into such a saturated market category that was already dominated by much larger websites? In an interview, we talked about his introduction to direct-to-consumer products, his clever use of search keywords, and how he coordinated the shipment of large pieces of furniture to reviewers all over the world.  

For most of his career as professional ultra marathoner, Dylan Bowman didn’t have much of an online presence, but in 2019, he suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands after he broke his left ankle and had to take a year off from racing. That year, he launched a podcast where he interviewed his fellow pro runners, and it pretty quickly became a huge hit.   It didn’t take long for Bowman to realize that the podcast provided a huge opportunity for his post-racing career, so in late 2020 he and a co-founder launched Free Trail, a media outlet that operates a podcast network, a YouTube channel, and even its own ultramarathon races.   In an interview, Dylan walked me through how he built the company, his monetization strategy, and why it represents the future of sports media.  

In 2011, Rafat Ali launched Skift, a B2B publisher that covers the travel industry. At first, Skift was mainly monetized with advertising, but Rafat quickly realized that scaling a B2B niche outlet required a diverse set of business models that included memberships, research, events, and advertising. He also acquired multiple other media outlets that operated in adjacent industries. In an interview, Rafat walked us through this journey and explained how he managed to simplify the company’s value proposition while embracing the complexity of multiple revenue models. We also spoke to Walter Frick, who ran the membership program for business publisher Quartz for nearly three years. He answered our questions about what motivates readers to convert into subscribers and what he learned when Quartz made the radical decision to completely remove its website paywall.