The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

Max Rofagha didn't have a background in media prior to launching Finimize. He also didn't have a background in finance for that matter. It was while conducting research on how to manage his own investments that he saw an opportunity for a daily newsletter aimed at helping millennials become more literate in finance. Flash forward four years and Finimize now has over 1 million subscribers, a staff of financial analysts, and a worldwide community of young professionals who often meet up for in-person events. I recently interviewed Max about his early audience development strategy, how his subscribers organize their own in-person events, and why he decided to launch a subscription-funded mobile app.

Per Grankvist had the kind of media career most journalists only dream of. He was a high-profile columnist for a leading newspaper and a regular face on one of Sweden's top broadcast networks. But over time he grew disillusioned with mainstream media and its tendency to dumb down coverage of complicated policy issues. So Per quit his traditional media jobs and launched his own outlet. It started with just an Instagram account that explained thorny election issues, but from there it blossomed into an entire media outlet that spanned across social media, podcasts, and newsletters. I recently interviewed Per about how he built the company, his approach to monetization, and whether he misses working for mainstream media publications.

Peruse a newsstand full of men's magazines and you'll probably notice a few common themes. The cover either features a bikini model or a suit-clad male celebrity. Inside, you'll find stories meant to appeal to what many in the mid-20th century would have considered the "ideal" man -- articles about scotch, cigars, and custom suits. You won't find many of those kinds of features in MEL Magazine, a digital-only publication that launched in 2015. Owned and operated by Dollar Shave Club, MEL aims its content at the under-40, educated, likely-urban male...a man less inclined to traditional gender roles who is much more in touch with his feelings and spends an inordinate amount of time on the internet. I recently interviewed editor-in-chief Josh Schollmeyer about how he came to define this 21st century male, where his staff sources its article ideas, and how Dollar Shave Club will profit from its investment in the magazine.

Lon Seidman didn't launch on YouTube with the goal of becoming a top gadget reviewer. In fact, he stumbled upon that aspect of his career while struggling to run a video local news startup in Connecticut. Almost on a whim, he recorded a video review about one of the cameras he bought for his startup, and to his surprise, the video blew up. Flash forward a decade, and Lon now has tens of millions of views across YouTube and Amazon. He managed to carve out a niche among a crowded field of gadget reviewers, and he's now making a pretty good living through a mixture of YouTube advertising, affiliate sales, and Patreon subscriptions. We walked through how he accomplished all this in our interview.

If you had to make a list of technologies that are most important to the average person's day-to-day life, data centers would sit near the top of that list, and yet chances are you know very little about them. There are a few reasons for this. For one, they're not sexy in the way that an iPhone or a cutting-edge drone is sexy. But also the people and companies who run data centers are fairly secretive, mostly to protect their machines from any sort of attack. This combination of secrecy and obscurity has made Rich Miller's expertise very lucrative. He's spent the last two decades covering data center tech for various news outlets he's owned. His current site, Data Center Frontier, is a must-read for anyone working in the $60 billion+ industry. I interviewed Rich about how he accidentally fell into the beat, why he sold his first data center site, and what made him want to start a brand new one from scratch.

Back in late 2019, nearly all the writers for the beloved sports site Deadspin resigned en masse after butting heads with the private equity executives who owned the website. After they left, there was lots of speculation about where those writers would turn up. Would they simply get new jobs, or would they band together to create their own site? And then in July 2020 we got our answer: they launched Defector, an employee-owned publication that would be monetized mostly through paid subscriptions. To build the site, they turned to a guy named Austin Smith. Austin is the founder of an agency called Alley Interactive, and over the past decade he's helped build and maintain the websites of many of the most well-known news publishers in the world. I sat down and interviewed Austin about his career in media, what goes into building a good publishing platform, and why he's recently begun working with news startups like Defector to help them get off the ground.

Abby Glassenberg runs a trade association called the Craft Industry Alliance. It has over 1,600 paying members who work in the arts and crafts industry. It hosts conferences, schedules networking events, publishes industry news, and provides ongoing education. Pretty much the kind of services that most trade associations offer. But unlike most trade associations, this one grew out of a one-person blog. Abby started it as a hobby, but it soon amassed a large audience, which then led to a book deal, a thriving Etsy store, and a popular podcast. I recently interviewed Abby about why she went the trade association route and how she's growing its revenue by 20% a month.

In just about every article about TikTok, it's portrayed as a video repository created by and for teens. Indeed, nearly every single one of its top-earning creators are under the age of 20, and polls have found that it ranks second only to Snapchat as U.S. teens' favorite social media app. Zarna Garg is an exception to the rule in multiple ways. For one, she's a 45-year-old mom who barely even knew TikTok existed a year ago. And while most top users traffic in dance videos, lip syncs, and comedy sketches, Zarna's specialty is standup comedy. Many of her jokes aim to capture the South Asian immigrant experience, and she says she's carved out a niche explored by very few comedians, both inside the U.S. and in India. I interviewed Zarna about how she cracked the TikTok algorithm, what impact her success has had on her comedy career, and how she's leveraging that success to try to break into Hollywood.

If you traveled back in time 100 years and perused your average newsstand, you'd find dozens of magazines that published serialized fiction. Millions of subscribers eagerly awaited new installments from their favorite authors, and a serialized story in a high circulation magazine could launch a new writer's career. But by the turn of the century, serialized fiction was all but gone. Or at least it was in written and audio form. TV shows, on the other hand, began to adopt complex, serialized narratives, and by 2015 these kinds of shows were dominating both online and offline discussion. That's the same year a new app called Serial Box launched. Serial Box operates a lot like a TV studio. Its stories are delivered in weekly installments. Each series is written by a collaborative writers room. The most successful series will often continue for multiple seasons. There's only one major difference: instead of producing TV shows, Serial Box publishes text and audio stories that could be read or listened to in the same way you consume a novel. I recently interviewed co-founder Molly Barton about Serial Box's origin story, how the company produces new series, and why she's pursuing adaptations outside of the Serial Box app.

Polina Marinova had the kind of media career that many journalists dream of. After a brief stint at a media startup, she landed a job at Fortune Magazine and eventually got the role of head writer for Term Sheet, its daily newsletter on deals and dealmakers. After six years there, her resume and profile probably could have gotten her any mainstream media job she wanted. But instead, she left that steady job in March -- in the beginning of a massive recession -- to focus on her Substack newsletter full-time. The newsletter is called The Profile, and though she was running it as a side hustle while working at Fortune, she didn't debut the paid version until after she left. I recently interviewed Polina about why she decided to make the jump during such uncertain economic times, how she differentiates the free from the paid content, and her strategy for growing the newsletter's audience these past six months.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ So the format to this podcast is pretty straightforward and consistent. I bring on a media entrepreneur or executive and interview them about their craft. But I'm also sort of a media entrepreneur myself, in that six months ago I launched a paid Substack newsletter that I hope to grow into a full-time job. Growth has been slow but steady, and over the six-month period I've experimented with a number of strategies to boost signups. Some worked, others didn't. I've still got a ways to go before it's completely replaced my consulting income, but I think I've made enough progress that it's worth pausing and looking back at some of the lessons I've learned along the way. So strap yourself in, because we're about to dive deep on my paid newsletter strategy.

With the journalism industry in freefall, there's a good chance that your local newspaper is experimenting with some kind of digital subscription offering. In many cases, this involves some kind of metered paywall where you're expected to start paying after consuming a pre-determined number of articles. Hundreds of newspapers have installed paywalls like this, but they've seen mixed results, with many reporting disappointing revenue numbers. But is content the only thing an audience will pay for? That's a question Doug Lesmerises, a Cleveland.com sports columnist, sought to answer. A few years ago he co-founded a popular sports podcast but had a difficult time attracting advertisers. Then some executives from his newspaper's parent company approached him with a new product called Subtext. It provides a simple way to allow paying subscribers to exchange text messages with Doug and other hosts. The service was a surprise hit, and Doug now uses the app to crowdsource questions for the podcast and send his paying subscribers quick-hit analysis when Ohio sports news breaks. I interviewed Doug about how he incorporated texting into his show and what other local journalism outfits can learn from his success.

When Naoise McNally and her business partner launched One Fab Day, neither of them had any experience working for a media company. Naoise didn't even have much knowledge of the wedding industry outside of planning her own wedding. But the lack of wedding-focused internet resources in Ireland presented a clear market opportunity, so they went for it. Flash forward several years, and the site now has a full time staff and an interesting business model. Instead of relying on traditional advertising, it charges wedding vendors to be listed in an index it curates for readers. I recently interviewed Naoise about One Fab Day's founding, how she settled on a business model, and what she hopes the site can accomplish now that it's owned by a major media company.

Quick question: how big do you think the global freight industry is? If your guess is in the billions, then you're aiming too low. According to some estimates, global logistics generate somewhere in the range of $8 and $12 trillion annually. For Craig Fuller, that number represents a massive opportunity. His company Freight Waves covers this industry across text, video, and podcasts. But Freight Waves is a lot more than just a trade publication; it also delivers data and intelligence. In fact, it's much more analogous to a Bloomberg LP, which in addition to its massive media business also generates billions of dollars a year from its expensive Bloomberg terminals. I interviewed Craig about how he built his expertise in freight, where the company sources its data, and why it recently took on venture capital investment.

When Terrell Johnson launched on Substack, he had no intention of rolling out a paid newsletter. He was just trying to escape Mailchimp's expensive fees and liked that Substack would send his newsletter for free. About a decade earlier, Terrell had created HalfMarathons.net, a running focused website that grew so popular that at one point it was generating six figures in revenue just from Google Adsense. His free newsletter served mostly as a form of marketing for the website, but he eventually began to wonder if his most engaged readers would be willing to pay for it. So he flipped on Substack's payment features, and while it wasn't an overnight success, he's gradually grown it into an impressive community of paid subscribers. I interviewed Terrell about where he got the idea for HalfMarathons.net, how he built up an audience, and why he eventually grew to distrust Google as his primary traffic driver.

Josh Spector was blogging before most people even knew what a blog was. Over the span of a decade, he started and abandoned several of them, often before they had a chance to amass much of an audience. But in 2011 he got more serious about audience growth for a blog he ran that focused on teaching standup comedians how to market themselves, and to help drive traffic to it he launched a newsletter. Pretty quickly, he grew addicted to the newsletter medium, and a few years later he merged a couple of newsletters he was running into a single list and renamed it For the Interested. Since 2016, he's been sending out new issues each week featuring ideas to help creators to produce, promote, and profit from their creations. For the Interested now has over 25,000 subscribers, and Josh recently launched a paid spinoff newsletter. I recently interviewed Josh about how he grew his audience, the role his newsletter plays in his consulting business, and why he thinks so many writers are approaching paid newsletters the wrong way.

A year ago, Jesse Singal had a very traditional freelance writing career. When he wasn't working on his book, he'd write articles for places like The Atlantic and New York magazine. The mixture of book advance and freelance revenue provided a reasonably stable income. Today, the economic climate for journalism is much more dire. The Covid-induced recession has led to mass layoffs and a squeeze on freelancer budgets. Some publications have closed up shop completely. But in many ways, Jesse's income streams are more secure than ever. That's because he launched a paid newsletter through Substack and co-hosts a hit podcast that monetizes through Patreon. Together, these two sources generate a nice six-figure income for him. I recently interviewed Jesse about why he decided to monetize his audience directly, how he designed his paid offerings, and whether he thinks platforms like Substack and Patreon can replace the income for laid-off and underemployed journalists.

When Tyler Morin was in high school, he dreamed of going into journalism, but his parents convinced him to major in finance instead. After graduating, he went into the financial sector, but he never lost his ambition to work in media, and he became obsessed with daily newsletters like Morning Brew and theSkimm. After experimenting with a group sports blog, he pivoted to launching a daily newsletter called The Water Coolest. The Water Coolest found an audience and quickly grew to tens of thousands of subscribers. I recently interviewed Tyler about the founding of his company, how he found his first advertisers, and why he decided to launch a paid version.

Arlington Country, Virginia is a suburb of DC. It has over 236,000 residents, thousands of local businesses, and an average household income north of $100,000. With those sorts of attributes, you'd think it would have a vibrant daily newspaper, but instead its citizens mostly rely on the Washington Post metro section and a few weekly newspapers to get their news. Or at least that's all they had up until about a decade ago. In January 2010, a former TV news producer named Scott Brodbeck launched Arlington Now, an online only news site dedicated specifically to Arlington. It quickly grew an audience and revenue base, and Scott has since launched several other sites covering Northern Virginia. I recently interviewed Scott about the founding of Arlington Now, how his journalists approach their coverage, and why he doesn't consider Google and Facebook to be much of a threat to his advertising revenue.

Dan Oshinsky didn't apply for an open position to run BuzzFeed's newsletter operations. He just happened to reach out to editor Ben Smith back when BuzzFeed was hiring a bunch of people with weird internet obsessions, and the company hired him without a clearly defined role. This dynamic granted Dan a lot of leeway in terms of how he approached BuzzFeed's newsletters, and he went on to launch several products, including multiple online courses and the newsletter This Week In Cats. A few years later he got hired to run newsletters at The New Yorker, which was focused on building out its paid digital subscriptions. Recently, he left that job to run his own newsletter consultancy. I recently interviewed Dan about how he built out BuzzFeed's newsletter strategy, the role of newsletters in driving paid subscriptions, and why he left such a prestigious job to strike off on his own.

The audiobook market is massive, with sales projected to hit $3.5 billion this year. What used to be a niche, expensive product is now one of the fastest growing mediums. In fact, The New York Times recently reported that audiobooks are one of the only book formats still growing in sales during the current pandemic-induced recession. But what does it take to launch a hit audiobook? How does the choice in narrator influence sales? And are book publishers worried about the market dominance of Amazon-owned Audible? These are all questions I put to Scott Dickey, the CEO of a company called Podium Audio. Podium is an audiobook studio that specializes in signing deals with self-published authors. It was the studio that produced the audiobook version of The Martian, the book that was made into a hit film starring Matt Damon.

In the mid-2000s, Digg was one of the most powerful websites on the internet. Powered by its army of users, the platform would send gargantuan amounts of server-crushing traffic to any content featured on its front page. Millions of people visited it each day and it turned its founder Kevin Rose into an internet celebrity. But you probably know what came next. A misguided redesign triggered a user revolt, and its audience abandoned it for Reddit and other platforms. Before long, it seemed destined to follow in the footsteps of Myspace and Friendster. Its story didn't end there. In 2012, the site sold to the startup studio Betaworks, which immediately went about trying to revive the Digg brand. In 2018, it was purchased by a company called BuySellAds. I recently interviewed Todd Garland, Digg's new owner and CEO. We discussed its current editorial operations, its monetization strategy, and his plans to restore Digg to its former glory.

I first discovered Gil Assayas, the musician otherwise known as GLASYS, when one of his YouTube videos made it to the front page Reddit. His amazing keyboard set up and sophisticated musical adaptations of well-known video game soundtracks caught the attention of several gamer subcultures, who then shared his videos widely across social media. I recently sat down with Gil and asked him about how he grew his fanbase and in what ways his viral videos have translated into career success.

The New York Times gets a lot of credit within the media industry for the blockbuster success of its podcast The Daily, but The Los Angeles Times was also an early pioneer within the medium. Its narrative true crime podcast Dirty John generated over 30 million downloads and was adapted into a TV show for Bravo. The newspaper has since gone on to launch ambitious shows chronicling the criminal trial of Bill Cosby and the famous murders committed by Betty Broderick. I recently interviewed Clint Schaff, VP of strategy and development, about the paper's podcast productions. He walked me through how shows get made, their monetization strategy, and his views on selling IP to TV studios and Spotify.

Jono Dry is the type of artist whose work is sold in European galleries by art dealers. He only finishes a few pieces a year, and most of his purchased pieces likely reside in the private collections of rich people, closed off from the public. But that hasn't stopped millions of people from viewing his work. That's because Jono films himself drawing each piece and uploads gorgeous time-lapse videos to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. On YouTube alone these videos have generated over 8 million views, and his success on social media has transformed him into a world-famous artist. I recently interviewed Jono about how he built his following and in what ways he's been able to leverage that following to advance his career.

We've seen several media companies launch over the past few years that specialize in sending out newsletters that summarize each day's news. Newsletters like theSkimm, The Hustle, and Morning Brew speak to their readers in a conversational style and have been embraced by millions of loyal subscribers. The folks behind 6AM City took that model and applied it to local news. Operating out of cities like Greenville, SC and Chattanooga, TN, each newsletter mines local newspapers, businesses, and social media accounts to produce a daily snapshot of the goings on in that urban center. To date, it's grown to over 230,000 subscribers and monetizes primarily through custom, native ads. I recently interviewed co-founder Ryan Johnston about how each newsletter operates and whether he thinks his company is producing quality local news.

Ben Cohen isn't the world's biggest fan of Facebook. The founder of a political news website called The Daily Banter, Ben worked hard to build up his reach on Facebook, and for a few years he made a decent living selling advertising against his content. But after the 2016 election, Facebook pivoted away from news, and virtually overnight The Daily Banter lost 90% of its traffic. Not only could he no longer pay his own salary, but he was also struggling to keep his stable of writers on board. Out of desperation, he moved the Banter over to Substack and doubled down on paid subscriptions. That was in early 2019. I recently checked in with Ben to see how his efforts are going and how a presidential election year affects subscription growth for a political newsletter.

Alexis Grant didn't start her career with the goal of building several media businesses. She simply wanted work as a reporter. After college, she got a job at the Houston Chronicle and then later accepted a role editing the careers section at US News & World Report. But something about the business of media intrigued her, and while at US News & World Report she launched a side hustle running social media and blogs for corporate clients. Eventually, she drummed up enough business to quit her day job and focus on content marketing full time. In fact, she launched an entire marketing agency that specialized in producing branded content. One of her clients was a personal finance website called The Penny Hoarder, and she was so successful at growing its audience that the company eventually acquired her agency and installed her as its editor in chief. By the time she left The Penny Hoarder a few years later, it was generating tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. I recently interviewed Alexis about how she helped scale these companies and what she plans to do next.

Because I write and podcast so much about the business of media, I regularly get emails from founders of niche media companies who want to tell me about their successful ventures. A few months ago, I received an email from a guy who identified himself only as Meathead, and after reading only a few paragraphs I knew I wanted to have him as a guest for my podcast. Meathead, who's been writing about food on the internet since the days of dial-up AOL, started the website AmazinRibs.com almost as a lark. Flash forward 15 years, and it's the preeminent authority on all things barbecue. It generates a healthy mix of revenue from advertising, affiliate sales, books, and paid subscriptions, and it grew its business without help from any venture backing. I recently interviewed Meathead about writing for AOL when it was the biggest game in town, running the third most popular wine magazine, and stumbling into a website venture that made him one of the most famous people within the barbecue scene.

If you wanted to become a professional standup comedian in the 1990s, the path was pretty straightforward. You started by going to amateur open mic nights, where you would hone your act. Eventually, you'd develop five to 10 minutes of solid material and maybe get a slot opening for a bigger comedian. From there you'd work yourself up to bigger and bigger gigs, and if you were really talented and lucky, you'd land a slot on a late-night talk show, or, even better, get signed to an hour-long special for HBO. These days, the path for the aspiring comedian is completely different. Sure, there's still the open mic nights and the club gigs. But there's also a bevvy of online platforms that you can leverage to sharpen your craft and build a following. You might collaborate with other comedians and write sketches for a YouTube channel. You can practice your one-liners on Twitter. And you'll definitely want to launch a podcast. As a full-time standup comedian, Joel Byars has employed several of these strategies. I interviewed Byars about how comedians market themselves in this golden age of standup comedy and asked him why he decided to self-produce his own comedy special.

Let's say you're a writer who wants to publish your work to the web and eventually monetize it. These days you have plenty of options. You might open a Medium account and join the platform's partner program. Or maybe you launch a Substack newsletter. If you're really ambitious, you could throw together a Wordpress website and integrate it with a payment tool like Stripe. Or you could just launch an account on Ghost, a publishing platform created a few years ago by a guy named John O'Nolan. Before founding Ghost, John was the deputy head of design at Wordpress, and though he was always a fan of the open source CMS, he thought he could create something a little bit better. So John launched a Kickstarter campaign, and after raising tens of thousands of dollars, he developed Ghost. Today, it's used by some of the world's largest brands, and his hope now is that independent writers will use it to monetize their content. I spoke to John about the platform and why he thinks a writer should choose it over a competitor like Substack or Patreon.

When we talk about the media industry, we're usually discussing publishers that are geared toward a broad audience -- outlets like The New York Times or CNN or NPR. Even more niche publications like The Verge or Bon Appetit are designed to attract tens of millions of readers each month. But there's also an entire ecosystem of business-oriented publishers that operate in extremely narrow niches -- outlets aimed at sewage workers, electricians, and grocery store executives. Though their readerships are relatively small, they represent industries that collectively generate hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Because of this, B2B niche publishers, when run well, can be immensely profitable. Industry Dive is one such B2B publisher. Founded in 2012, the company now produces publications that cover over a dozen industries. I sat down with one of its co-founders Sean Griffey to talk about Industry Dive's origin story and how it bootstrapped its way to north of $22 million in annual revenue.

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has expressed a lot of frustration with the large platforms that dominate our online browsing. In 2018, for instance, he complained that Facebook captures a lot of value from publishers and argued that it should share more of its revenue with them. That same year, he floated a merger of several digital media companies so they'd have more bargaining power against the platforms. And then recently he wrote a memo in which he lamented that publishers didn't receive enough credit for the consumer purchases they drive. "The two most important players in this chain are the publisher who inspired a consumer to take action and the companies that actually deliver the product But most of the profit is captured by digital middlemen who didn't create much value." In the memo, he promised that BuzzFeed was working hard to solve this attribution problem. To get an idea of how BuzzFeed plans to solve this problem, I recently spoke to Rich Reid, its senior vice president of global content. We talked about Bring Me, BuzzFeed's travel vertical that publishes a wide range of video and text content across its website and social channels. Recently, Bring Me formed an ad partnership with Hilton, and I asked Reid about how his team designed the campaign so that BuzzFeed gets full credit for any business it sends Hilton's way.

It's been nearly a decade since The New York Times launched its metered paywall, and its success has spurred just about every digital publisher to test out some form of reader revenue strategy. Many have followed in the Times's footsteps and debuted metered paywalls. Others have rolled out various membership options, offering everything from behind-the-scenes footage to exclusive commenting features to convince readers to open their wallets. But which tactics actually work? And how should publishers determine what to charge? To answer these questions, I spoke to Jacob Donnely. Donnely is the managing director of audience and growth at Coindesk, one of the leading cryptocurrency publishers, and runs his own paid newsletter about the publishing industry. We talked about how to design the perfect subscription offering and debated whether subscription fatigue is actually real.

In its most recent earnings report, Twitter revealed that it has over 139 million daily users, but the company's first podcast it launched in 2019 was designed to only appeal to a tiny fraction of those users. The show is called Character Count and is hosted by Joe Wadlington, a creative lead in the department that helps educate small businesses on how to leverage Twitter in their marketing. And that's the focus of Character Count, highlighting some of the most effective ways in which businesses utilize Twitter. Recent guests have worked for Dungeons and Dragons, Grindr, and Dropbox. I recently interviewed Wadlington about his podcast strategy and the role the show plays in helping improve Twitter's bottom line.

Where you can subscribe to my newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/p/discount So this is the 68th episode of my podcast, and if you've been listening to it for any amount of time, you'd know that it never has ads. And while I don't have anything against podcasts that have advertising, I don't envision a future for this podcast where I'm reading promos for Squarespace of Mailchimp. But at the same time, I'd like for this podcast to contribute to my income, mostly so I can justify spending more time on it. During a good month, I might put out a new episode each week, but I've had busy months where I was lucky if I could produce more than a single episode. If I can start making money from this podcast, then it'll be easier for me to justify spending more time on it, and then everyone gets to benefit. And I didn't want to do just a quick promo and then be done with it. Given that most of my listeners actually care about business models for content, I wanted to go deep on my decision making process, and to do that I enlisted the help of my friend Jaclyn Schiff. Jaclyn is a content expert like me who specializes in converting podcast episodes into shareable articles for clients. You can find her work at podreacher.com. She recently interviewed me about my history covering the business of content and how I came up with my monetization strategy.

There are few people as knowledgeable about web publishing as Scott Rosenberg. In 1995, he and a group of other San Francisco Examiner journalists launched Salon.com, one of the first online magazines. An early blogger, he wrote the definitive history of the blogosphere and published it as a book in 2009. Today, Rosenberg is the tech editor for Axios, a website launched in 2017 by Politico founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. Since its debut, Axios has tried to upend the paradigm for how news can be delivered. Instead of adhering to the structure of the traditional news article, Axios reporters strive for succinctness by delivering information in a bulleted, just-the-facts-ma'am form. As co-founder Jim VandeHei explained in a 2017 interview, "Ninety percent of stories either shouldn't have been written or should have been 10 percent the length. Most people do not want to spend five minutes on 1500 words of mediocrity on something that has one interesting fact, figure or quote." In my interview with Scott Rosenberg, he told me about Salon's first viral story and explained why the online magazine was way ahead of its time, in both the way it delivered news and how it monetized content. We also discussed Axios's approach to news gathering and whether it's "Be smart" tagline is patronizing or enlightening.

In 2020, Netflix is projected to spend $17 billion on content. Disney will spend $24 billion and AT&T will shell out over $14 billion. With all that money on the line, there's an enormous amount of demand for new intellectual property that can be adapted into movies and TV shows, and a lot of that IP is being drawn directly from magazines. The Oscar-winning film Argo, for instance, is based on a 2007 Wired article, and the critically-acclaimed Netflix miniseries Unbelievable is based on a longform Propublica article published in 2015. This rising demand means that Hollywood is throwing larger and larger sums of money at journalists just to option their articles. All that money has had a distorting effect on the entire magazine industry, with writers increasingly pitching more narrative articles in the hopes of luring a Hollywood agent. At least that's according to journalist James Pogue, who recently wrote a piece for the Baffler about what he sees as the negative impact of the streaming wars on magazine journalism. I recently interviewed Pogue about this phenomenon and why he thinks it's changing longform reporting for the worse.

Of all the algorithms that influence our daily internet browsing habits, few are more closely scrutinized than the one that governs YouTube. Through the homepage, the recommendations that appear on the side of videos, and the trending tab, YouTube's algorithm has the ability to shower a video with millions of views and transform its unknown users into overnight stars. It's because of this very influence that so many people get angry about it. Whether it's YouTube stars who are worried about their ability to reach their fans or liberal critics who say YouTube promotes right-wing extremism, there are plenty of politicians, journalists, and activists who are up in arms and ready to accuse YouTube executives of all sorts of nefarious evil. But how many of these accusations are merely conspiracy theories born out of paranoia? To answer that question, I interviewed Chris Stokel-Walker, a journalist who covers YouTube for an online magazine called Fast Forward. Stokel-Walker and I went deep on the YouTube algorithm and the ways its biggest stars game it to their benefit.

I think it's safe to say at this point that digital publishers recognize the importance of email newsletters. In 2016, Facebook pulled the rug out from underneath a media industry that had, until then, relied on it for hockey stick growth, and over the next several years publishers generally warmed to the idea that the decentralized distribution offered by email newsletters would prove more reliable than the fickle whims of social media giants. Today, nearly every media company has a robust email marketing strategy, and some news startups interact with their readerships almost entirely within the inbox. We've also seen the launch of platforms that make it easier for individual writers to distribute their own newsletters and monetize them through paid subscriptions. So are newsletters reaching a saturation point? Are they generating real ad revenue? And can newsletters actually replace Facebook as a referral source? These are just some of the questions I put toward Ernie Smith, the creator and editor of Tedium, a fantastic newsletter that almost operates as a kind of Wikipedia of obscure topics. Smith also runs a popular Facebook group for the newsletter industry, and he's one of the most knowledgeable people I know when it comes to newsletter trends.

Back in 2010, the world was still skeptical of Wikipedia. High school teachers and college professors warned students to never, ever use it for research. If you ever tried to cite it in an argument, your opponent would mock it as unreliable. Late night hosts like Stephen Colbert would enlist their audiences to flood a specific Wikipedia page and vandalize it. Celebrities and major companies would treat it as a vanity project, editing their own pages while making absolutely no effort to disclose their conflict of interest. Flash forward to 2020, and Wikipedia certainly has more respect. The Wikimedia Foundation, which acts as its official steward, has tens of millions of dollars in the bank. While college professors don't view it as a primary source for research, they'll sometimes endorse it as a starting point for said research. And nearly everyone recognizes it as one of the most influential websites on the internet. But though tens of millions of people use Wikipedia every day, most only have a passing understanding of how a core group of a few thousand volunteer editors perform the vast majority of contributions to its articles. One of those editors is Bill Beutler. For the past decade, Bill has consulted with hundreds of brands, helping them to edit their Wikipedia pages without running afoul of the platform's strict rules. I recently interviewed Bill about the problems that have plagued Wikipedia for the past decade and the issues its community will need to address in the decade to come.

Back in June, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a report estimating that the podcast industry generated $479 million in 2018 and is projected to make $1 billion by 2021. Not only is this a tiny pittance compared to the money generated by other mediums like TV and search, but podcasting has also been limited by its over-reliance on advertising. Unlike, say, Netflix or The New York Times, most podcast companies have struggled to diversify their revenue beyond advertising, and most major podcast apps don't provide a way for podcasters to directly collect money from their listeners. But several companies, like Spotify and Luminary, are attempting to bundle exclusive podcasts and sell access to them behind a subscription paywall. Other platforms assist individual podcasters in converting their listeners into paying subscribers. The company Glow fits into the latter category. Founded a little over a year ago, Glow developed technology that allows a podcast's paying subscribers to listen to paywalled episodes on their podcast player of choice. I recently interviewed its co-founder Amira Valliani about how she's solving the paywall problem and why she thinks paid podcast subscriptions will eventually scale.

In November, a company called Minute Media announced it was acquiring The Players' Tribune, the website founded by Derek Jeter that regularly collaborates with pro sports athletes on first-person storytelling. Though the name Minute Media might not be familiar to most people, chances are you've encountered one of the sites it owns, especially if you follow sports. Over the past few years, it's slowly amassed an amalgam of sports properties that cover everything from global soccer to esports. It also owns Mental Floss, the quirky trivia magazine that was founded in 2001. I recently sat down with President and CRO Rich Routman to discuss why he thinks Minute Media is different from many of the other venture funded digital media sites out there. We talked about the company's video strategy, how it approaches advertising, and why it expanded into non-sports content when it acquired Mental Floss.

More than a decade ago, before most people even knew what a podcast was, Macmillan, one of the largest book publishers in the world, launched a podcast network. Called Quick and Dirty Tips, the network consisted of short, scripted podcasts that delivered evergreen, practical advice on a range of topics from grammar to money management. In the years since, Macmillan has continued to invest in its podcast division, expanding into narrative shows and even teleplays. For this episode, I interviewed Kathy Doyle, vice president of podcasting, about where the company has seen the most success and how podcasting allowed it to diversify its revenue.

Jane Friedman has spent almost the entirety of her professional career working in book publishing. In the mid-aughts, she began writing about the industry, both for professional outlets and her own blog. A few years ago, she launched a paid newsletter that now generates the majority of her income. I recently interviewed Friedman about her work. We discussed how she grew her newsletter into a sustainable business, and then we talked about the current state of book publishing. One aspect of this world that's long fascinated me is self-publishing, so I asked Friedman to fill me in on how this market is maturing and where self-published writers are seeing success.

If you listen to the podcast called Startup, then you've heard host Alex Blumberg go into exquisite detail about the trials and tribulations of launching a VC-funded podcast network. In earlier seasons, we got a firsthand look about what it was like to pitch venture capitalists, hire talent, and grow the business. In the final season of Startup, Blumberg walked us through Spotify's $230 million acquisition of Gimlet. But what about bootstrapped podcast networks that don't have access to millions of dollars of venture capital money? How do they get off the ground and scale? To answer these questions, I spoke to Jeff Umbro, the founder of the Podglomerate. We talked about his early mistakes in trying to partner with shows for his network and why it can be incredibly difficult to monetize a show with a small audience.

Advance Publications is one of the largest media companies in the world. It owns dozens of newspapers, the Conde Nast magazine empire, and even Reddit. A few years ago, it launched the Alpha Group, a tech incubator that would launch small startups and try to grow them into thriving, standalone businesses. One of those startups was called The Tylt, a platform that allows its users to participate in online opinion polls on a wide range of issues. The Tylt was successful enough that Alpha Group spun it off as its own company. Recently, The Tylt hired Selena Roberts, a seasoned journalist who's written for The New York Times and Sports Illustrated, to serve as its executive editor. I recently sat down with Roberts to learn about the site's editorial ambitions and whether online, unscientific polls have any journalistic value.

Agnes Kozera knows a thing or two about helping content creators monetize their content. In 2013, she and a co-founder launched Famebit, a platform that helped YouTubers match with brands that were willing to sponsor their videos. The company was so successful that it was eventually acquired by YouTube in 2016. This year, Kozera and that same co-founder are launching Podcorn, a platform designed to help podcasters monetize their shows. Like Famebit, it will serve as an online marketplace where brands can post RFPs for projects and be matched with participating podcasters. I interviewed Kozera about why such a platform is needed, how the current podcast advertising landscape is flawed, and why podcasters with small-to-mid-sized audiences currently have such a difficult time finding sponsors.

Clive Thompson has the kind of career that most writers would envy. He's written two books for major publishing houses. He has a monthly column at Wired magazine. And he writes regular features for The New York Times Magazine and other glossy magazines. But that kind of success didn't come to him overnight. In fact, Thompson spent years toiling away writing for small publications making very little money. I recently interviewed him to discuss how he made his big break, what it takes to write the perfect magazine pitch, and why book publishers are more likely to award contracts to established journalists.