The Business of Content with Simon Owens

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…

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 con…

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…

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 l…

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 indu…

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 …

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 s…

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 wi…

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 healt…

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 …

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 an…

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 mix…

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 market…

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…

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 t…

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…

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 …

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 the…

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 work…

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 goa…