The Business of Content with Simon Owens

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.

In 2017, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed titled "How Antitrust Undermines Press Freedom." It was written by David Chavern, the head of the News Media Alliance, a trade group that represents over 2,000 publishers. In it, he argues that Facebook and Google have effectively cornered the digital ad market, eating up all its growth, and that this has come at the expense of the very content creators that these two companies rely on, content creators Facebook and Google refuse to fairly compensate. "The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together," wrote Chavern. "If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook—pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data—they could build a more sustainable future for the news business." Earlier this decade, several book publishers banned together to negotiate ebook prices with Apple in a direct effort to undermine Amazon's command of the market, and they were slapped with a lawsuit from the Department of Justice for violating antitrust laws, hence why the News Media Alliance is seeking a special exemption. But do publishers deserve one? And even if they do, would they be able to get such legislation passed through such a divided Congress? These are the questions I asked David Chavern for this week's episode.

Name just about any media beat, and you'll find plenty of people trying to predict the future. Political pundits argue over who will win the next election. Finance journalists report on economic forecasts and claims from analysts over where a stock will be six months from now. Even entertainment bloggers will try to hash out which film, song, or TV show will win at the next awards ceremony. But in most cases, those predictions will be wrong. In fact, many studies have shown that a crowd of everyday people will, on average, make better predictions than the experts who work in that particular field. That's why a lot of attention has been paid lately to betting markets, which can provide real-time odds for any particular outcome ranging from a presidential election to winner of the best picture Oscar. There's just one problem: most states outlaw online gambling, meaning many of the most well-known betting markets don't operate within the U.S. But a relatively new prediction market app, called Futuur, gets around this hurdle by using fictional currency. I interviewed Tom Bennett, the founder of Futuur, about how his app works and how its predictions matched up against those made by other famous forecasters like FiveThirtyEight.

Subscriptions are all the rage in the media industry right now. Facing diminishing ad rates, publishers have turned to the paid subscription model as a way to draw revenue directly from the users that consume their content. Publishers ranging from The New York Times to The Washington Post to The Financial Times have announced they've reached north of a million subscribers. It seems like every day a different publisher is announcing the launch of a metered paywall or membership service. But getting a news consumer to actually open up their wallet and subscribe is harder than it looks, and the space is only getting more competitive as publishers continue to launch subscription offerings. So what are the actions a publisher can take to make it more likely for a casual reader to convert into a paying subscriber? A new study from digital publishing platform Twipe sought to answer this question. Researcher Mary-Katharine Phillips surveyed 4,000 news consumers across Europe and the U.S. to gain a better understanding of how they consume the news and what drives their news diet. I interviewed Phillips about what percentage of news consumers are willing to pay for digital news, what drives them to subscribe, and what kind of news formats they prefer.

You can't write a history of Web 2.0 without including the contributions of Brian Alvey. After getting his start doing design work for traditional publications like TV Guide and BusinessWeek, Alvey teamed up with his childhood friend Jason Calacanis to launch a series of online publications. Eventually, the two created Weblogs, Inc, a blog network that went on to be sold to AOL. The content management system Alvey built would eventually power AOL's portal and much of its websites. But Alvey didn't stop there; he'd go on to build publishing platforms that would power everything from TMZ to Rupert Murdoch's ambitious iPad app The Daily. I interviewed Alvey about what it was like to run a blog network in Web 2.0's early days, how he ended up in a 45 minute meeting with Jeff Bezos, and why the iPad failed to save the media industry.

In 2014, Ben Thompson, a blogger who writes about the business of technology, announced he was quitting his job so he could write full time. His business model? He would send out four newsletters a week. One of those newsletters would be free, and if you wanted access to the other three, then you had to pay $10 per month. Within a year, Thompson had 2,000 subscribers, which, if you do the math, means he was generating $200,000 a year. At that point, he stopped publicly disclosing his subscriber numbers, but some predict that he's increased his subscriber numbers by several thousand. Thompson was an early pioneer in the realm of paid newsletters, and since then there have been several other writers who struck out on their own with similar models. There's Nick Quah's podcast newsletter Hot Pod. There's political writer Judd Legum's Popular Information. Many of these newsletter writers have had to string together multiple services, from Mailchimp to Stripe, in order to manage their businesses. Now we're seeing a few new companies on the market that want to serve as all-in-one platforms for paid email newsletters. Once such platform is called Substack, and it recently surpassed 25,000 paying subscribers for its participating newsletter writers. I interviewed the company's cofounder Hamish McKenzie about the rise of paid newsletters, how to convert readers of a free newsletter into paying subscribers, and why his service is preferable to other membership platforms like Patreon.

Monica Reinagel had no background in broadcasting or radio when she launched a podcast called Nutrition Diva in 2008, but she was a trained nutritionist, had published several books, and was writing a regular column at a popular health website, and this was just the sort of background that Quick and Dirty Tips, a podcast network run by the book publisher Macmillan, was looking for when she reached out to it to ask if the company would consider taking her on. Flash forward a decade, and Reinagel now has over 500 episodes under her belt, and they've generated a collective 35 million downloads. I sat down with her recently to discuss how she benefited from joining a podcast network, where she gets the ideas for new topics, and why she has to be super picky when choosing which brands she'll allow to sponsor her show.

Just about everyone's experienced a scenario like this: you read a highly-nuanced article on a topic you find interesting. You then decide to share it on Facebook. Within minutes, a Facebook friend leaves a comment arguing with the premise of the article, and it's immediately obvious that this person hasn't actually read the piece in question. In fact, the vast majority of social media users will interact with content without actually clicking through and consuming it. One study from Columbia University found that 59 percent of links shared on social media aren't even clicked on. Data collected from Hubspot found that "there is no correlation between retweets and clicks." So what does this really mean for how we absorb information on social media? And how are we impacted by the commentary that social media users will often add when they're sharing a link?York College political science professor Nick Anspach wanted to answer these questions, so he devised an experiment to find out what information is retained when social media users see a post but don't click through to the source article. I interviewed Anspach about his results and whether social media has generated a net negative effect on how we monitor current events.

Sam Parr never set out to launch a media company. A few years ago, he was fresh from selling a company he had founded and was looking for something else to do. He decided to recruit about a dozen entrepreneurs as speakers and hosted an event he called Hustlecon. The event was a success, and Parr expanded it into a media website that published daily content. But while the site generated some viral hits, Parr eventually became convinced that the email inbox would produce a much more intimate experience and a better delivery system, so he relaunched The Hustle as a standalone newsletter. Since then, The Hustle has amassed a growing number of diehard followers who evangelize the newsletter to their friends, converse in a private Facebook group, and even meet up in person. I interviewed Parr about what strategies he used to grow the subscriber base, how his editorial team goes about picking daily topics, and what kind of companies like to advertise on a newsletter.

While it seems like every publisher, from The New York Times to Vox, is making significant investments in podcasting, one could argue that Slate was the earliest to invest in the medium. It launched the Slate Political Gabfest -- a panel show with three regular hosts -- all the way back in 2005. Since then, Slate has debuted dozens of new podcasts, which collectively generate millions of downloads each month. And starting in 2009, shortly after President Barack Obama's inauguration, it started hosting live events centered around these podcasts. Slate has since expanded its live events business, and it now hosts sold-out shows in cities all across the U.S. I recently sat down with Faith Smith, the executive producer for Slate Live. We discussed how her team selects which cities to tour in, how she negotiates with event venues, and what podcast fans are willing to pay in order to watch a live podcast recording.

Chris Grady didn't know much about the webcomic world when he launched Lunarbaboon, a semi-autobiographical comic about family and parenthood. But shortly after launching the comic, he started sharing it to Reddit, and suddenly Lunarbaboon was being seen and shared by tens of thousands of people. Flash forward a few years, and Lunarbaboon has over a million followers on Facebook. Grady generates $1,500 a month on Patreon and has launched several successful Kickstarter projects related to his comic. His latest Kickstarter, this one for a board game he helped illustrate and create, has already generated $50,000 in backing. I interviewed Grady about what it takes to maintain a successful webcomic, how he grew his audience, and why popular webcomics often make much more money from merchandise than they do from ads.

Would you read a 1,300-word newsletter about garden sheds? What about a 1,400-word piece on lettuce? A little over a year ago, the business-focused publication Quartz made a bet that you would, launching a daily newsletter called Quartz Obsession. The aim of the product? Take the most mundane topics imaginable and -- through narration, numbers, and quotes -- prove to the reader that these topics are not mundane at all. Unlike many publication newsletters that simply round up links to articles on the publication's site, Quartz Obsession is a standalone newsletter that can be completely consumed within the inbox. It's seen open rates as high as 80 percent and thousands of readers have written in to suggest topics. Why did Quartz launch a product that steered clear of the editorial topics it usually covers on its website? And how does it pick each day's topics? To answer these questions, I turned to Jessanne Collins, who edits the newsletter.

Recently, an industry website called The Drum reported that The Financial Times, the London-based business publication, is projected to hit 1 million paying digital subscribers by next year. This is impressive, not just because only a handful of publications have hit this milestone, but also because The Financial Times has done so while maintaining a hard paywall. Unlike companies that use metered paywalls like The New York Times and Washington Post, The Financial Times hits users with a subscriber login page on the vast majority of its articles. This presents a challenge for a social media editor: how do you promote content when most of your followers won't be able to see it? To get an overview of The Financial Times' social media strategy, I interviewed Jake Grovum, its head of social. He told me about how the Times' has leveraged Instagram stories, what metrics his team is judged by, and why the newspaper hasn't invested resources into Snapchat.

Long before Facebook started generating billions of dollars on self-service native ads, Henry Copeland had invented a self-service native advertising platform for blogs. And he was building early content management systems for newspapers well before products like Wordpress would go on to power much of the internet. These days, Copeland is focused on augmented reality, and he think that today's AR products are the equivalent of the blog advertising widgets he was developing in the early 2000s. In other words, we haven't even hit the tipping point that will make AR ubiquitous, woven into the fabric of our daily lives. What will that world look like? And what technologies still need to be invented before we can reach that point? I asked Copeland about these topics, and given his previous track record of spotting trends that would go on to sprout multi-billion dollar industries, I think we should listen to what he has to say.

If you follow the digital media sector, you've likely noticed that advertising as a business model is on the wane. With the Facebook and Google duopoly sucking up just about all the advertising money flowing online, publishers have been forced to find alternate revenue sources to fund their content. One such source: subscriptions. More and more publishers are rolling out subscription and membership programs, and many have been successful. One such success? Innovation Leader, a small business-focused publication that launched in 2013. It carries no advertising, has a hard paywall, and charges subscribers $695 a year. I recently sat down with one of its cofounders, Scott Kirsner, and asked him about why he settled on such a high price point, how the publication markets to new subscribers, and how it approaches content development.

In 2010, a college dropout named Kyle Taylor launched a blogspot account. He was taking on odd side jobs in an attempt to crawl his way out of debt, and the blog was a way to write about lessons he learned on making and saving money. Traffic was scarce, at first, but over a period of years the blog slowly gained an audience. Eventually, brands started approaching Taylor about publishing sponsored posts, and revenue for the site, which was called The Penny Hoarder, quickly grew. Flash forward a few more years, and The Penny Hoarder now has a huge audience, dozens of full-time staffers, and millions in annual revenue. To get a better understanding of how the site grew this big, I interviewed John Schlander, The Penny Hoarder's managing editor. I asked him about how his staff develops its story ideas, how the site makes money, and whether the rise of the gig economy plays a part in its success. Let's jump right into it.

When Christopher Wink graduated college in 2008, he had no intention of launching a media company. He just wanted an entry level journalism job that would allow him to work his way up within the industry. But back then, when newspapers were hemorrhaging revenue and announcing mass layoffs, there weren't a lot of journalism jobs to pass around. So, out of desperation, he and a couple other college friends launched a Wordpress blog called Technically Philly. It covered the local tech scene, an industry that at the time was largely ignored by regional news organizations. Eventually, the blog gained traction and profitability, and the growth allowed Wink and his friends to launch local tech blogs in Brooklyn, Baltimore, DC, and Delaware. I interviewed Wink about the early days of running an unknown tech blog, what it takes to launch a site in a new city, and why he's never been all that interested in building out an advertising business.

Back in January, Facebook made an announcement that shocked the publishing world: It was tweaking its Newsfeed algorithm so there would be less emphasis on Facebook pages and more focus on what your friends were sharing. Reach for Facebook pages was expected to plummet, and publishers that had grown addicted to Facebook's free referral traffic girded themselves for an all-out decimation of their businesses. But while there have been some clear victims of the algorithm change, the actual data for who's been hurt by it is noisy. Some publishers have seen a dip in Facebook engagement, while others have remained steady or even improved. That's the case for U.S. publishers, at least. But what about Europe? To find out, I interviewed Steve El-Sharawy, head of innovation at EzyInsights, a platform that tracks Facebook engagement for publishers. I asked El-Sharawy about how European publishers reacted to the announced algorithm changes and whether there are any clear winners and losers in the ordeal.

It's impossible to know which company launched the first branded podcast, but one of the earliest well known examples was GE's The Message. Produced in collaboration with Panoply, The Message was a science fiction documentary that generated millions of downloads and a rabid fanbase. Ever since GE's runaway success with the medium, other major brands have waded into the podcast waters, with large companies like Walmart and Goldman Sachs launching their own shows in recent years. But what makes a branded podcast good? How do you avoid making it sound like just another ad? And how does a successful podcast help a company's bottom line? To answer these questions, I interviewed Rachael King, founder of the podcast consulting company Pod People. She recently helped produce podcasts for companies like Samsung and Medium, and we talked about the rise in demand for the services she offers and how one develops the skillset needed to become a podcast consultant.

Will Sommer grew up in a conservative household and garnered an early interest in Rush Limbaugh and other right wing media figures. When he went to college, his politics changed, but his obsession with conservative media never went away. In late 2016, that obsession paid off. Sommer was one of the first reporters to write about Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that a DC pizza parlor was the home of a child sex ring. After a man was arrested for firing a gun inside the restaurant, his reporting gained national relevance. Shortly afterward, he launched Right Richter, and he soon became one of the foremost experts on the obscure right wing media outlets that, in some cases, produce conspiracies that bubble all the way up to Donald Trump's Twitter account.

Back in 2013, the Obama Administration rolled out a new version of Healthcare.gov, with disastrous results. It was the public unveiling of the Obamacare exchanges that would allow anyone to buy health insurance on the open market, and yet the website was almost impossible to navigate without encountering errors that would prevent you from signing up for insurance. At the time, Charles Gaba was running a freelance web designer business in Michigan and writing for the liberal blog Daily Kos during his free time. Frustrated by the botched rollout and the amount of misinformation floating around about how many people had actually enrolled in the exchanges, he made a public call to other Daily Kos bloggers to help him count the number of Obamacare enrollees. That project eventually evolved into ACAsignups.net, a standalone blog that eventually captured the attention of policymakers, journalists, and anyone interested in the state of U.S. healthcare. Traffic to his blog exploded, and he became an overnight celebrity in the healthcare space. I interviewed Gaba about how he's monetizing his website and the role he's played in helping save Obamacare from GOP sabotage.

Every year we get new articles questioning whether "email is dead." With the proliferation of social media and messaging apps, it seems only natural to ask what will replace a decades-old electronic messaging system that really hasn't changed much in all the years we've used it. But email has remained resilient, and it's even experienced a renaissance of sorts lately. In the wake of Facebook's algorithm changes that are designed to hurt content providers, more and more publishers are launching new email newsletter products. It's impossible these days to fire up a podcast or watch a YouTube video without encountering an ad for Mailchimp. And of all the email providers, Gmail is king. The Google-operated service has over 1 billion users and is one of the few major email platforms that is actually continuing to innovate. In 2014, it opened up its API to developers, allowing them to build new products that Gmail users can install. It was around this time that Ajay Goel was on the lookout for an opportunity to launch a new business. It was while he was looking around for a tool that would send mass emails that he came up with the idea for Gmass, an add-on that allows users to schedule and send mass emails directly from their Gmail accounts. I interviewed Goel about his long career of building email-based tools and why he doesn't think email's going away anytime soon.

There's no question that newsletters are on the rise. Legacy publishers are constantly launching new newsletter products. Quartz's Obsession newsletter, for instance, picks seemingly random topics and goes deeps on them. Vox's Voxcare newsletter, a favorite of mine, covers new developments in healthcare policy. But we're also seeing a number of media startups that are producing newsletters without corresponding websites. The Hustle, a business-news oriented newsletter that has over 500,000 subscribers, keeps all its content contained within its newsletter and publishes none of it to its website. The same can be said for theSkimm, a female-focused newsletter launched by two former NBC producers, and Lena Dunham's Lenny Letter. So what's the business model for these types of newsletters? Of course many of them rely on advertising, but we're also seeing a number of new products enter the market that allow newsletter publishers to charge money to their subscribers, often in exchange for access to extra premium newsletters. For example, Hot Pod, a newsletter about the podcast industry, sends out a weekly free newsletter each Tuesday and a second one every Friday for subscribers who pay $7 a month. Given the rise of paid newsletters, we've seen a number of new platforms spring up to service this type of publisher. One of those platforms is Revue, a newsletter distribution platform that was designed with content publishers in mind. I interviewed its founder Martijn de Kuijper about the platform's offerings and the best way for publishers to convert casual newsletter readers into paying subscribers.

With over 150 million users, Spotify has the ability to launch the careers of previously-unknown music artists. It does this by featuring these artists on its playlists, which are maintained by a mixture of users, Spotify staff, and algorithms. Playlists count for half of all listening on Spotify, and getting your song listed on a few of the most influential lists, some of which boast millions of subscribers, has the ability to thrust you onto the Billboard 100 charts. Several rap artists featured on Rap Caviar, one of the app's most powerful lists, have become overnight sensations. But with individual users wielding that much power, it shouldn't be surprising that some have succumbed to illicit backroom deals in which artists pay the playlist owners to include their songs, a practice that's been illegal since the payola scandals in the 1950s that led to a Congressional investigation into radio DJs. Daily Dot managing editor Austin Powell recently published his investigation into the black market for Spotify playlists. I interviewed Powell about how these markets operate and what Spotify is doing to stop it.

The influencer marketing industry is estimated to generate $2 billion a year, with $1.6 billion coming from Instagram influencers alone. That number is only set to increase, with 39 percent of marketers saying they plan to increase their influencer marketing budget this year. It's now pretty much impossible to open up Instagram or YouTube without seeing #sponsored posts popping up from your favorite stars, from Kim Kardashian all the way down to food Instagrammers who only have a few thousand followers. But whenever there's this much money on the line, you always have people who are trying to game the system. It's incredibly easy these days to inflate your follower count by purchasing bots or engaging in other kinds of shady activity. If you're a company who's thinking of hiring a social media influencer, how can you ensure that their followers are real? Well, you'll probably turn to someone like Erick Schwab, the COO of a company called SYLO. SYLO is a tech platform that can scan social media accounts and detect fraudulent activity. I interviewed Schwab about the state of social media influencer fraud and how his platform is able to tell when an Instagram account is propped up by an army of bots.

Think Progress was founded in 2005 as an offshoot of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. What started as a bloggy website has grown into a fully staffed news organization that employs beat writers and conducts investigative reporting. The site has generated real impact, most recently when it published a list of companies that had established corporate partnerships with the NRA. Activists seized on the list and used social media to pressure many of these companies to drop their partnerships. I recently sat down with Judd Legum, Think Progress's founding editor, and asked him about how the site operates, why it decided to leave the Medium platform, and how it managed to generate $500,000 from its readers after Trump was elected.

Technorati rankings. Full RSS feeds vs partial RSS feeds. Blogrolls. The Techmeme leaderboards. Blogspot vs Wordpress vs Typepad. If you were a blogger over the mid-aughts, these were just a few of the things you might have obsessed over as you catapulted blog post after blog post into the ether, hoping someone would notice and provide you precious links and send even more precious readers. Back then, the internet felt huge, but the number of actual content producers was tiny compared to today, and distribution of content was much less centralized. A-list bloggers duked it out while the rest of us B and C-list bloggers pined desperately for attention from these internet demigods, who they themselves only wanted recognition and legitimacy bestowed upon them by the Mainstream Media. I remember all this because I was right there at ground zero, plugging away as a blogger while I went to college and later worked as a newspaper journalist. And so was my guest, Bill Beutler, who worked at a DC publication called The Hotline and launched a blog called The Blogometer. Tune in while we reminisce about a bygone era when we didn't live or die by the Facebook algorithm and the internet was a Wild West composed of various ideological fiefdoms.

Welcome to Night Vale. The Message. Steal the Stars. Homecoming. The Bright Sessions. All are fiction podcasts that have seen downloads in the millions. Some have been optioned for television or film adaptation. All were launched in just the last few years. For much of the early to mid 20th century, millions of listeners tuned in each week to listen to radio dramas and fiction broadcasts in genres ranging from adventure (Superman) to science fiction (War of the Worlds) to crime noir (Dragnet). But by the early 60s, due to the rise of television, the radio drama faded in popularity, and most were canceled by the end of 1962. Though some broadcasters continued to dabble in the medium, most people today have grown up without having listened to a single radio play. Podcasting, however, has led to a resurgence in this kind of audio fiction, and a whole new generation of fans are tuning in to new episodes, attending live events, and ordering merchandise online. Why are we seeing this resurgence in what was thought to be a bygone medium? To answer this, I interviewed Alasdair Stuart, the owner of Escape Artists Inc, which produces a number of popular fiction podcasts in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

Podcasting as a medium has been around for about 13 years now, and for most of that time you'd find that most podcasts were platform agnostic. When a new episode was released, it would appear pretty much simultaneously across all podcast apps. Sure, podcasters placed most of their promotional efforts on iTunes, but that's because it accounted for most of all podcast listening. But over the last few years, the podcast and audio app space has gotten more competitive, and because of this we've seen some of these apps marketing exclusive content. Spotify, for instance, has signed deals with podcast companies like Gimlet so that it gets an exclusive window on new episodes before they're published to all the other podcast apps. In some cases, podcast apps are actually bankrolling and producing their own podcasts in an effort to differentiate themselves from other apps. The hit show Missing Richard Simmons was produced by Stitcher Premium and exclusively windowed there (this apparently pissed off the executives at Apple, since they refused to feature the show on iTunes). Audible launched Audible Channels, a platform for its own podcasts that aren't available on any other apps. And now add Castbox to the list of podcast apps that are producing their own shows. An app with 15 million downloads, Castbox has recently launched "Off Track with Hinch and Rossi," a show about auto racing, and it has several other podcasts in development. I recently interviewed Peter Vincer, head of global strategic partnerships at Castbox, about why the company is producing its own shows and whether podcast apps are taking a page from Netflix's strategy.

In 2014, former Major League Baseball player Derek Jeter launched a media company with a novel premise. Called The Players' Tribune, it's a sports site that's produced and written by pro athletes themselves. Many wondered if this would result in what are essentially bland, rewritten press releases that would be typed up by publicists, but in its few years of existence, The Players' Tribune has produced some astoundingly raw first-person journalism. In 2017, for instance, NBA player Isaiah Thomas wrote about the gut-wrenching pain he felt when the Boston Celtics decided to pawn him off on another team. Kevin Durant used the site to announce his move to Golden State. While not every article at the Players' Tribune is Pulitzer-worthy, it certainly has brought forth pro athlete perspectives that you won't find anywhere else. Could the same idea work for famous musicians, artists, directors, and actors? Several years ago, a record label owner named Ian Wheeler launched a publication called Talkhouse, and it's essentially The Players' Tribune, but for artists instead of athletes I recently interviewed Wheeler about Talkhouse and whether famous Hollywood and music artists actually need their own media outlet.

If you want to subscribe and listen to podcasts, there are dozens of apps to choose from, including podcast-specific apps like Stitcher and even music streaming apps like Spotify. But anyone who works in the industry knows that Apple is the king of podcasts; its podcast app, which it spun off from iTunes a few years ago, accounts for more than 50 percent of all podcast use. This is why Apple's podcast rankings can be so important for driving discovery and downloads. There's one master list of the top 200 most popular podcasts at any given moment, and then there are also dozens of content categories, each with its own top 200 list. Making it to the top of one of these lists can drive thousands of fresh downloads and put a podcast on the map. But how does Apple rank its podcasts? And what's the best way to make it onto one of its lists? To answer this question, I interviewed Dan Misener, the head of audience development at a company called Pacific Content, which specializes in helping brands develop their own podcasts. For over a year, Misener ran an experiment in which he took snapshots of the Apple podcast charts and kept track of which content categories showed up most consistently. I interviewed Misener about his findings and what strategies his company uses to get a client podcast ranked.

This week I interviewed a guy named Ernie Smith. Why do I think Smith is so fascinating? Because over the past decade he's created two successful media properties, each with the absolute opposite goal of the other. The first was a Tumblr account called ShortFormBlog. It amassed over 140,000 followers and was one of the hyperreactive news aggregators that thrived in the aughts. Every single day Smith logged in and plucked the most interesting quotes and stats from news stories and served them up in a tightly-packaged news product. The blog was so successful that it was covered in the pages of both Newsweek and Time (back when these were still relevant publications). And then just when ShortFormBlog was at the height of its popularity, Smith abandoned it and launched a newsletter called Tedium. Unlike ShortFormBlog, Tedium would only be published twice a week and, instead of chasing headlines, it would tackle the most boring subjects imaginable and try to make them interesting. Several of its issues have gone incredibly viral and the newsletter now has over 10,000 subscribers. Smith and I talked about why he made the switch and whether it's possible to run a profitable independent newsletter.

If you run a hit podcast, you might have a couple avenues open to your for monetization. You could host live events and charge admissions, like what we've seen with Slate's Political Gabfest and Pod Save America. You could, like Gimlet Media, launch a membership program and charge $60 a year for free tshirts, exclusive bonus content, and access to a private slack channel. Or you might turn to running sponsored ads within your podcasts, an approach that generated $220 million for podcasts in 2017. But Macmillan's podcast network is more diversified than most. The book publisher has been producing podcasts since 2007, and in addition to selling host-read sponsorships, it's also generated revenue from running programmatic ads on its website. But what's perhaps most interesting is how it's leveraged podcasts to elevate the brands of its authors in order to sell more books and audiobooks. I recently sat down and interviewed Kathy Doyle, vice president of podcasting at Macmillan, about the publisher's strategy heading into 2018 as it expands its podcast lineup.

For the past several years, Twitter's been a punching bag, both for tech writers and Wall Street analysts. It remained unprofitable, was a magnet for trolls, and, worst of all, its user growth came to a halt. But in just the past few months we've seen some meaningful signs of life at the embattled social network. For one, it had its first profitable quarter in, well, forever. But it also saw growth in other areas. For one, though monthly active user growth is flat, it saw a sharp increase in daily active users. Also, a report from Social Flow found that Twitter traffic to news sites has increased while Facebook referral traffic has fallen. Is this the sign of a company turnaround? Or just a temporary blip at an otherwise struggling company? I recently discussed these questions with Jonathan Rick, a digital media consultant based in Washington, DC.