The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Check out the News Guest podcast: https://bit.ly/news-guest   When Boye Fajinmi started hosting parties with a few of his friends, he had no idea that it would become a sprawling events and media company. They were just looking for a fun way to network with other creative workers like themselves. At the time, Boye worked at Paramount Pictures and was pursuing a traditional Hollywood career, but the success of those early parties led him to believe that he could build something of his own.   Flash forward a decade, and The Future Party – which is what the company came to be called – now hosts dozens of events a year and works with some of the largest luxury brands in the world. It also publishes a daily newsletter that reaches 150,000 people.    Boye and I sat down to discuss The Future Party’s origin story, its monetization strategy, and why they decided to expand beyond events into media.

Get a 10% discount on a subscription: https://simonowens.substack.com/a30836c1   It’s incredibly difficult to convert your audience from free readers/viewers/listeners into paying subscribers. In this meeting, we’re going to discuss all of the optimization strategies that increase conversion and reduce churn.

Visit Memberful: https://memberful.com/simonowens In terms of career advancement, Brandi Kruse was at the top of her game. As a TV news correspondent in the large media market of Seattle, she was paid more than most of her industry peers, and she even hosted her own longform weekly talk show.    But in late 2021, she quit her job and immediately launched her own podcast called Undivided. Within weeks of the launch, she amassed over 2,000 paying subscribers on Patreon, and she now delivers her commentary and interviews to over 200,000 followers across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.   How did Brandi find this audience, and why did she ditch her well-paying job in TV? In our interview, she explained how she grew a large following on Facebook and used it as a launching pad for her independent career. She also told me about her efforts to expand beyond local news and into national politics.  

Visit Memberful: http://memberful.com/simonowens   Over the past decade, several major media companies have invested in building out their data journalism operations. ABC News has FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times has The Upshot. And Vox Media runs Vox.com.   These outlets have leveraged publicly available data to explain complicated stories, and the infographics they create are easily shareable on social media.   But most media outlets don’t have the resources to hire an expensive data team, especially if they operate at the local level.   That’s where Stacker comes in. Rather than producing journalism for its owned and operated site, it distributes its content as a newswire that can be syndicated by any news company. What’s more, it doesn’t even charge for this service. That means virtually every news outlet has access to its top-quality reporting.   How can Stacker afford to give away its content for free? To answer that question, I brought on co-founder Noah Greenberg. He walked me through Stacker’s origin story, how it found its initial publishing partners, and how it developed its monetization strategy.

Visit SparkLoop: https://sparkloop.app/partner-network?utm_campaign=simonowens   If you’re aware of Morning Brew, it’s probably because of its daily business newsletter. Since its founding in 2015 by two college students, it’s grown to over 4 million subscribers, and its news digest format has been copied by dozens of other media startups.   But since getting acquired in 2020 by Business Insider, Morning Brew has expanded into new niches in verticals. Not only has it launched several B2B industry newsletters, but it also invested heavily in podcast and video production.   That’s where Dan Toomey comes in. After graduating college in 2020, he pitched Morning Brew’s founders on the idea of him coming on board to create video, and to his surprise, they went for it.   After experimenting with several different formats, Dan started creating sketch comedy videos for TikTok, and it worked. Every morning he woke up, scanned that day’s business news, and chose a topic to parody on video.    In our interview, Dan talked about how he came up with the format, his daily routine for writing scripts, and Morning Brew’s strategy to grow beyond TikTok and launch new video series.

Visit SparkLoop: https://sparkloop.app/?utm_campaign=simonowens If there’s one thing Twitter’s known for, it’s character limits. It famously only allowed 140 of them and then later expanded to 280. In some ways, that forced brevity made Twitter what it is today: a real-time commentary on what’s going on in the world. But for years, Twitter has been trying to expand beyond its own character limits, first by launching features like photos, gifs, and videos. It launched a threading tool that allows you to string several tweets together. In 2021, it acquired newsletter platform Revue. And then just recently, it debuted a new tool called Notes. Though it’s still in the testing phase, Notes will allow users to publish longer blog posts within their Twitter feed.  But is this something users actually want? Or will it eventually join the very large graveyard of social media features that never caught on?  To answer this question, I brought on Ernie Smith. Not only is Ernie one of the foremost experts on publishing platforms and newsletters, he also got early access to Twitter Notes and tested them out for himself. He gave me his initial reactions to the tool and we discussed whether it would usher in an era of longform writing to Twitter.

Visit Video Husky: https://bit.ly/vh-simon-owens-pod   When Nick Meacham first joined SportsPro in 2010, it mainly existed as a B2B print magazine that monetized through advertising. The editorial staff was tiny and it didn’t have much of a web presence.   But after taking over the business operations, he rapidly expanded it into new ventures – first by launching a series of lucrative conferences that targeted multiple industries within pro sports, and then by rapidly building out its digital operations.   In an interview, Nick explained to me why he made such a big bet on events, how the company adapted during the pandemic shutdown, and where he sees more opportunities to monetize the outlet’s digital content – including his plans to launch a subscription paywall. 

Visit Video Husky: https://bit.ly/vh-simon-owens-pod   During their combined 20 years at The Wall Street Journal, Bradley Hope and Tom Wright covered some of the most momentous stories to hit the financial world, but none were as consequential to their personal careers as their reporting on Jho Low, a Wharton grad who was caught stealing billions of dollars from investment funds. Their dogged investigation led to the publication of the book Billion Dollar Whale, an instant bestseller that transformed them into A-list writers, on par with Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell.   Rather than simply returning to their newspaper jobs, they partnered on a new media entity called Project Brazen. Unlike most digital media companies, Project Brazen has no ambitions to churn out large quantities of web content. Instead, it only focuses on ambitious, investigative storytelling that can be adapted into multiple mediums that include podcasts, books, film, and television.   How does Project Brazen go about vetting and staffing these projects, and what are the best ways to monetize serialized storytelling? Those are some of the questions I put to co-founder Bradley Hope in today’s interview.   

Visit https://theygotacquired.com/newsletter   When everyday people hear about space-related news, it’s usually in association with an organization like NASA or SpaceX. But while Elon Musk is great at grabbing headlines, the space industry actually comprises a vast constellation of companies that generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And it’s only set to expand; Morgan Stanley projects it’ll reach $1.25 trillion by 2040.   Given the size and growth of this industry, it’s probably a surprise to no one who listens to this podcast that there’s an enormous opportunity for the B2B media outlets that cover it. One of the most exciting entrants into that space is Payload, a daily newsletter that launched in 2021.   Though Payload was bootstrapped for its first several months, it announced a $650,000 seed round last year that was led by Winklevoss Capital, the venture firm run by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. It’s since hired an editorial staff and landed its first major sponsors.   Payload was founded by Mo Islam and Ari Lewis, and in December 2021 I interviewed Mo about the newsletter’s origin, its audience development strategy, and its plans to monetize its influential readership.

Visit https://www.transizion.com/ There were a lot of media companies that were vulnerable to the pandemic shutdown, but perhaps none more so than Pop Up Magazine. Not only was its content delivered through live performances, but the hosts made special care during each event to tell the audience that nothing that night would be recorded. Part of the magic, in other words, was the show’s ephemerality.    Of course, there was no way Pop Up Magazine could continue delivering on that promise once all in-person events went away. Instead, it had to adapt by somehow taking the magic of a live performance and delivering it over the internet.   Not only did the magazine succeed in this endeavor, but the new restraints forced it to diversify revenue and expand its audience. With live events now returning, it’s arguably stronger than ever.   How did its staff accomplish this? In an interview last year, founder Chas Edwards walked me through Pop Up Magazine’s pivot, from the hellish first weeks of the pandemic to its recent return to live events.