The Business of Content with Simon Owens

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.

The last decade hasn't been kind to local news. While the entire news industry has experienced hardship, local newspapers have been hit particularly hard. A recent article in the American Prospect detailed how newspaper chains have been bought up by private equity firms and then were systematically cut to the bone, the private equity firms wringing out every last cent of profit before closing the newspapers for good. Even tech companies have struggled to make local news profitable. AOL famously launched Patch, a network of hyperlocal news sites, only to sell it off a few years later. That's what makes Mike Shapiro's success so interesting. Shapiro was working as a lawyer when, in a bid to spend more time with his kids, he launched a news site for his New Jersey town. That site soon spawned two new sites, and then blossomed from there. The TAPInto network now boasts dozens of sites all across New Jersey. I recently interviewed Shapiro about how he has managed to find success in local news where so many other companies have failed.

According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the sixth most visited website in the U.S. and the fifth most visited in the world. When you Google famous people, places, or companies, their Wikipedia pages usually come up as the first or second result. If you're a company that already has a Wikipedia page, then monitoring what's written on it is vital to your reputation management strategy. If you don't have your own Wikipedia page, then you may aspire to create one for yourself. But this is where companies often get into trouble. Wikipedia has strict conflict of interest rules, and the site's army of dedicated editors and admins are often quick to reverse undisclosed edits from conflicted parties. Abuse the rules too much, and you may get yourself banned or, even worse, attract attention to your page from activists who want to do your brand harm. So what's a company to do if it wants to edit its Wikipedia page without running afoul of Wikipedia's rules? You'll want to call a guy like Bill Beutler. Beutler, founder of a company called Beutler Ink, has been conducting Wikipedia consulting for almost a decade and led a coalition of PR firms in developing a code of ethics for Wikipedia editing. I spoke to Bill about how he fell into his line of work and how he navigates Wikipedia's regulations on behalf of clients.

Branded podcasts are on the rise. With one out of every four Americans saying they listen to at least one podcast a month, companies are increasingly incorporating the medium into their content marketing strategies, and in some cases these branded podcasts are really taking off with listeners. The first major success of a branded podcast was The Message, a joint venture between the Panoply Network and GE. The science fiction serial has generated over 8 million downloads and, during its run, stayed at the top of the iTunes charts. Gimlet Media, one of the largest and most well-funded podcast networks, recently launched its branded content studio Gimlet Creative, and it's since created narrative podcasts for Tinder and eBay. Suddenly, there's strong demand for people who can leverage their podcast expertise to help companies launch podcasts that their target consumers will actually want to listen to. One of those people is Ernesto Gluecksmann. Ernesto is the co-founder of Human Factor Media, a podcast consulting company that works with associations to launch and produce podcasts. I recently interviewed Ernesto about how he launched the company and what makes for a successful branded podcast.

For more than a decade, publishers attempted to grow ad-supported businesses that depended on massive scale and distribution of free content, but in recent years, many have acknowledged that purely advertising-based business models simply don't work in a world in which Facebook and Google are vacuuming up nearly all ad dollars that migrate online. So they've begun asking their readers to pony up, launching various forms of paywalls that require paid subscriptions for those wanting to access gated content. There are three kinds of paywalls that have emerged: there's the hard paywall where virtually all content is gated off. There's the metered paywall, where the user gets access to a certain number of free articles before the paywall is triggered. And then there's the freemium model, where a publisher will publish most of its content for free while reserving extra goodies for those willing to pony up money. So what should these extra goodies be? Discounted tickets to live events? Access to a private Slack channel? Physical objects? Or just exclusive content? To answer this question, I interviewed Adam Rowe, a journalist for Tech.Co. Rowe recently wrote about subscription services and argued that publishers should put their best content in front of the paywall. He explained his reasoning in our interview.