The Business of Content with Simon Owens

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Lucas Grindley knows something about building sustainable revenue streams for media companies. When he was hired to Here Media, a networ…

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It’s been nearly five years since Spotify announced it would diversify its audio offerings beyond music streaming, and while it spent mos…

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There are plenty of popular politics newsletters out there, but none with the kind of unique origin story of Wake Up to Politics. It was…

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Earlier this month, I sent a newsletter to my audience with the subject line: “Ask me a question.” Basically I told everyone to jump in …

It’s been a bad few years for Buzzfeed. After a disastrous IPO in 2022, it’s faced a tanking stock price, declining revenue, and a shutdown of its news division. 

But things only look to get worse …

How do you write about the travel industry when people can’t fly on airplanes? That’s a question Kelsey Ogletree had to ask herself in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. By that point, she had wo…

Ash Read didn’t launch a review website about household products because of some lifelong interest in home decor; instead, his interest came about simply because he was moving into a new house and ne…

For most of his career as professional ultra marathoner, Dylan Bowman didn’t have much of an online presence, but in 2019, he suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands after he broke his…

In 2011, Rafat Ali launched Skift, a B2B publisher that covers the travel industry. At first, Skift was mainly monetized with advertising, but Rafat quickly realized that scaling a B2B niche outlet r…

Patrick Walls is the founder of Starter Story, an outlet that’s published thousands of case studies on how entrepreneurs built successful businesses. At one point, he was selling upward of $50k a mon…

It used to be if you wanted to break into broadcast media you first had to start small – by getting a job as a correspondent at a local news station and then working your way up to bigger and bigger …

If you run any sufficiently large organization, one of the biggest threats to your business is runaway costs. The largest companies can use upwards of thousands of suppliers for everything ranging fr…

There’s a common criticism lodged against Substack that its model of paid subscriptions could never support original journalism, and instead it only caters to the kind of opinion journalism that can …

When Jay Shabat launched his newsletter in 2004, he had absolutely no experience in journalism or in operating a media company. This was also long before the era when it became easy to distribute pai…

Today, Android is the number one operating system for smartphones, but when Google launched the product in 2008, the iPhone already had a huge head start. Most consumers didn’t know it existed, and e…

In some ways, Rahul Pandey’s career as a YouTuber has been pretty typical. After several years working at large tech companies like Pinterest and Facebook, he started uploading videos that gave caree…

When it comes to creating content for online audiences, few people are more experienced than Mark Talkington. He was one of the original editors of ESPN.com and then later spent 20 years as the news …

Of all the media revenue models, subscriptions can be the most tricky to execute well. There are just so many variables at play that impact a publisher’s ability to succeed. You have to figure out wh…

The local news industry has seen better days. The last 15 years or so have been pockmarked with mass layoffs, shuttered newspapers, and growing news deserts.

But there have been bright spots in the…