The Business of Content with Simon Owens

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.

These days, nearly every major news organization employs multiple reporters who aggressively cover the tech industry, but a decade ago tech coverage was dominated by blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, and VentureBeat. Back then, these blogs churned out scoop after scoop, competed for traffic, and sometimes even went to war with each other. Among the earliest of these blogs was ReadWriteWeb. Launched in 2003, it was founded by Richard MacManus, a New Zealander who was inspired to launch a site after reading the work of blog pioneer Dave Winer. Within a few years, MacManus began selling ads and was able to hire a global staff of reporters. I recently interviewed MacManus about the early days of tech blogging and why, for his latest writing project, he decided to eschew blogging entirely and launch a newsletter instead.

In 2005, a computer software engineer named Gabe Rivera launched the site that would eventually become Techmeme. Governed by algorithms, Techmeme aggregated the day's tech news, and it eventually became so influential that bloggers and journalists would vie to get their articles featured on the site. Flash forward to 2018, and Techmeme announced that it would expand its news curation into a daily podcast. I recently sat down with host Brian McCullough to talk about how he came up with the idea for a daily tech podcast and what he's doing to expand it into an entire podcast network.

The last decade hasn't been kind to local newspapers. According to one study, 1,800 newspapers have shut down since 2004, and many of those that survived are facing tighter margins, layoffs, and corporate consolidation. There are myriad reasons for this retrenchment. Part of the blame is on hedge funds that buy up local media companies and then squeeze them dry. Others point to major platforms like Facebook, Google, and Craigslist, all of which have siphoned away a large portion of the local advertising newspapers traditionally relied on. Despite these headwinds, we've seen a few digital-first upstarts thrive in the local news market. One such company is Village Media, which started out as a single news site in an Ontario city and has since grown to 11 sites spread out across Canada. I recently interviewed Jeff Elgie, Village Media's CEO, about the company's history and how it's succeeded where so many legacy newspapers have struggled or failed.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau recently estimated that podcast industry revenue grew by 53 percent last year and is projected to reach $1 billion by 2021. With so much year-over-year growth, it shouldn't be any surprise that many media companies are aggressively expanding their podcast operations. This is certainly true for Vox Media, which over the past few years has launched over 150 podcasts on topics that include technology, politics, and sports. The audio medium is now an eight-figure business for Vox. I recently sat down with Marty Moe, the head of Vox Media Studios, to talk about how the company is monetizing these podcasts, what he thinks about Spotify's entry into podcasting, and why he thinks he can grow Vox's podcast revenue from eight to nine figures.

Back in 2011, LinkedIn announced that it was hiring Dan Roth, who was then the editor of Fortune.com, to serve as its editor in chief. Given LinkedIn's then role as mostly a repository for online resumes, the move had many scratching their heads. Over the next few years, though, Roth's team would roll out a number of editorial products. It started by curating outside news sources, sending LinkedIn users to articles published by business publications like The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider. Then it rolled out a blogging platform that was only available to influential users like Richard Branson and Bill Gates. Eventually, it then opened up its blogging platform to all users. During all this time, LinkedIn was steadily hiring journalists from some of the world's top business publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fortune. Today, it has an editorial staff of 60, and these editors are responsible for everything from curating user content to producing their own original reporting.I recently sat down with Linkedin senior editor at large Isabelle Roughol. I asked her about how LinkedIn editors go about curating content, how they distribute this content on LinkedIn, and how they approach original reporting projects.

For a few years, Ben Cohen was living the dream. His political opinion site, The Daily Banter, was growing in leaps and bounds, generating enough traffic and ad revenue to support several full-time writers. At its height, the site was getting upwards of 6 million unique visitors a month, fueled in large part by readers sharing his content on Facebook. But you probably know what happened next. In January 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was pivoting away from news, and that publishers would see a decline in exposure in the Newsfeed. Virtually overnight, Cohen saw his Facebook traffic drop by 90%. He tried to hold out as long as he could, but eventually Cohen reached a point where he either had to radically change his business model or shut down the website completely. In the end, he did both. He shut down his website and launched a newsletter. Sign up, and you received two free newsletters a week. Pay a little extra, and you got two additional newsletters. I recently interviewed Cohen about what went into his decision to pivot and how his readership responded to the announcement.

With social platforms like Facebook throttling distribution for news and the online ad market collapsing, more and more writers are turning to paid newsletters as a way to make a living. In a November 2018 episode of this podcast, I interviewed Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, a platform that made it easy for writers to launch newsletters and charge subscribers to receive exclusive issues of those newsletters. At the time, McKenzie said that Substack writers had converted a combined 25,000 readers into paying subscribers. Flash forward to today, and that number is up to 40,000. In fact, BuzzFeed recently reported that the 12 top writers on Substack make over $160,000 a year each. For this week's episode, I interviewed one of those writers: Robert Cottrell. Ten years ago, Cottrell founded a website called The Browser. He would comb through thousands of articles a day and pick the five he found most interesting, adding a dash of commentary to go along with each pick. As time wore on, he began to notice that many of his readers were signing up for an email digest of his daily recommendations. In 2013, he launched a paid version of the newsletter, and in the intervening years it's grown to over 10,000 subscribers. I interviewed Cottrell about how he goes about choosing articles every day, what his longterm ambitions are for the newsletter, and why he recently hired a CEO.

It seems like not a week goes by without another online publisher announcing a subscription paywall, but that didn't make me any less surprised when Business Insider debuted its own paid subscription product. Founded in 2007 by Henry Blodget, Business Insider took boring, staid business reporting and curated it with a bloggy, conversational voice. Funded by digital advertising, BI tested the theory that a digital media company could scale its way to profitability with free content. But in 2015, Business Insider was acquired by Axel Springer, a German media company that fiercely protects its intellectual property and is a firm believer that consumers should pay for content. In 2017, Business Insider launched Prime, a subscription product which places some of this site's daily reporting behind a paywall. Though it still publishes plenty of free content, you'll have to cough up around $10 a month if you want to access its most deeply-reported articles. To get insights into Business Insider's paywall strategy, I interviewed Claudius Senst, its head of consumer subscriptions. I asked him how editors decide whether to place an article behind the paywall, what converts readers into paying subscribers, and why Business Insider didn't follow in the footsteps of The Washington Post and New York Times by launching a metered paywall.

If you've been working in local news over the past decade, chances are that your job hasn't felt very secure. One study estimated that as many 1,800 local newspapers have shut down since 2004, and those that have survived have faced steep budget cuts and layoffs. Hedge funds have been purchasing newspapers, saddling them with debt, and bleeding them dry, while the Facebook/Google duopoly have diverted more and more local advertising toward their own services. Last year, Facebook launched a feature that would allow users to be shown more local news in their Newsfeed, but it recently admitted that one in three U.S. users lived in areas that didn't produce enough local news for Facebook to curate. But not all local news operations have struggled. A New Jersey based media company called TAPinto has launched 81 local news sites and is still growing. While most of those sites are located in New Jersey, the company has recently branched out into Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Florida. I recently interviewed Mike Shapiro, TAPinto's founder, and asked him about why his model seems to be working. We also discussed other failed local news projects and whether Facebook's efforts to boost local news are actually working. To see my previous interview with Shapiro, go here: https://bit.ly/2Wdvhl4

Back in January, I wrote an article for New York magazine asking whether it's time for the U.S. government to enact stricter regulation on social media influencers. I pointed to investigations from news outlets like The New York Times that uncovered companies that have sold hundreds of millions of fake followers to willing buyers, most of whom wanted to inflate their online influence. In many cases, these fake followings were then used to dupe unsuspecting brands into purchasing sponsored Instagram posts. The rising prevalence of fraud within the Instagram influencer community has led to greater scrutiny and efforts to detect such fraud. To do so, brands now often use software like HypeAuditor, which scans an influencer's account in search of automated and fraudulent activity. HypeAuditor recently leveraged its data to generate a report on the current state of Instagram influencer fraud. I interviewed Yaro Pat, HypeAuditor's product owner, about the results of the report and how Instagram fraudsters are getting more sophisticated in how they game the Instagram algorithm.

John Yedinak didn't have a traditional journalism background when he started his media company. He was working in the mortgage industry when he read an interview with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. The interview inspired him to launch his own blog on the reverse mortgage industry, and as the blog's audience grew, he began to realize that there was a massive market out there for niche, B2B publications. In 2012, he officially launched the Aging Media Network, a constellation of sites that cover the businesses that service the aging population, from hospice care to senior housing. I recently sat down with Yedinak to talk about how his team built the audience for the publications, how they monetize the sites, and why they focus on advertising instead of paid subscriptions.

Peruse through the vast video archive at The New York Times, and you'll come across plenty of your standard short documentary films, the kinds with voiceover, b-roll footage, and original interviews. But you'll also encounter some experimental fare. There's the fake infomercial advertising a phone hotline for racists. There's an entire animated series geared toward parents. And then there's the ongoing series, called Diary of a Song, which uses a mixture of low quality Skype footage and animation to walk the viewer through how a hit song was made. Overseeing much of this production is Nancy Gauss, executive director of video at The New York Times. I recently interviewed Gauss about her team's approach to video creation and how it fits in with The Times's larger goals in driving brand loyalty and paid subscriptions.

Advance Publications is one of the world's largest media companies. It owns Conde Nast, home to magazines like The New Yorker and Vogue, as well as dozens of newspapers across the U.S. It even has a majority stake in Reddit. A few years ago, it launched Alpha Group, an incubator meant to launch brand new tech products and grow them into fully functional companies. Rather than acting like a traditional media company, Alpha Group takes a much more expansive view as to what constitutes a 21-century media company, and its products span a wide range of functions, from a social polling app to a Facebook chat bot. I sat down with David Cohn, a senior director at Alpha Group, to talk about how the company comes up with new product ideas and what it's like to try to launch multiple tech companies from scratch.

Founded in 1998, MoveOn.org started as a progressive email group and pioneered political online advocacy. Over the past two decades it's leveraged its massive email list to raise millions of dollars for left-wing candidates and push for a number of progressive legislative issues. As the internet evolved, so did MoveOn, and today its reach spans millions of followers across the web's biggest social platforms. In recent years, it's placed significant emphasis on creating online video, and its videos now generate millions of views each week across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I recently sat down with Sara Kenigsberg, MoveOn's senior video producer. I asked about why MoveOn's videos aren't designed well for YouTube, how she chooses her video topics, and which social platform is best for broadcasting live video.

It started in 2009 in San Francisco. A couple of journalists got the idea of putting together a magazine, but instead of setting it to print, they would perform it live. Pop-Up Magazine, as the event was called, was a huge hit, and the founders had to seek out larger and larger theaters in order to meet demand. In 2015, they decided to take the show on the road, touring Pop-Up Magazine across several major cities. I recently sat down with Chas Edwards, co-founder and president of Pop-Up Magazine. I asked him about the logistics of creating a live magazine from scratch, how the company makes money, and what the future holds for it now that it's been purchased by the Emerson Collective.

The Atlantic may be a 160-year-old institution, but it isn't shy about experimenting with new things. It was one of the first traditional publications to go all-in on digital media in the late-aughts and managed to achieve profitability from the move pretty quickly. It experimented with brand new verticals like The Atlantic Wire and Quartz. Recently, it was acquired by Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective, which has been investing in forward-thinking media sites. And since 2012, it's been running an in-house creative agency called Atlantic 57. The idea is simple: let's take the editorial insights we've gleaned from running a magazine for 160 years and use that to launch online publications for major brands and non-profits. I recently interview Margaret Myers, a longtime journalist who works on one of these editorial projects for insurance company Allstate. I asked her about her past life as a traditional journalist and how she leverages that expertise in developing content for The Renewal Project, the online publication she manages for Allstate.

When Ben Collins launched his blog about Google Sheets, which is basically Google's version of Excel, he didn't intend for it to become a full-time business. He was just documenting his learning process and hoped the blog would serve as an online portfolio for when he went out to seek full-time employment. But he was surprised to learn that there was an actual audience for his blog posts, and within six months he had thousands of visitors flooding his website searching for how to perform specific actions within Google Sheets. Eventually, this led to his first paying client, and before he knew it Collins had more incoming business than he knew what to do with. But he wanted to create something a little more scalable, so he started developing an online course for those looking to master the Google Sheets platform. Within months of launching this course, he was generating thousands of dollars a month in passive income. I interviewed Collins about how he designed his course, how he marketed it, and how he decided on how to price it.