The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Over the past several weeks, Spotify made several major announcements in the podcast space.

It opened up its advertising ecosystem to anyone who hosts their podcasts on Anchor. It launched the abilit…

Google has a long and complicated relationship with news publishers. On the one hand, it sends billions of visitors to their websites every year through its main search engine, Google News, and other…

Snigdha Sur’s first idea for a media startup was a kind of Netflix-for-Bollywood streaming service, but when she spoke to investors about the idea, they all pointed out that it would be too easy for …

Most subscription strategies have a pretty straightforward value exchange: in exchange for a monthly payment, the subscriber gains access to premium content that’s locked behind some kind of paywall.

Most major media companies are focused on scale. They want to reach ever larger audiences and then leverage that reach to drive more revenue. To accomplish this, they invest time and resources to cre…

In the spirit of Mental Floss’s 20th anniversary, let me give you a few pieces of trivia about the magazine. It made a cameo in two episodes of Friends and an episode of Netflix’s The OA. It started …

By the time Richard Rushfield launched his newsletter The Ankler in 2017, he had held journalism jobs at several major media companies that included The Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, and Gawker. But b…

If you’re in the media, then you’re probably aware of The Daily, the massively successful podcast produced by The New York Times. It now receives over 4 million downloads a day and generates eight fi…

If you look at the Apple and Spotify podcast charts that track the most downloaded shows every week, you’ll notice that many of the most popular podcasts belong to large networks. Organizations like …

David Harper wrote hundreds of thousands of words over a five-year period without making a single penny from his comic book criticism. In 2009, he and a couple friends launched Multiversity Comics, a…

Every morning, tens of thousands of people who live in cities like Miami, Portland, and Pittsburg receive a conversational email that updates them on the latest news within their city. These newslett…

Daniel Orubo had no intention of becoming a media personality when he graduated with an engineering degree in 2013, but his funny tweets just happened to catch the eye of a Nigerian publishing execut…

These days, nearly every digital publisher utilizes some kind of reader revenue strategy, but when Jessica Lessin quit her Wall Street Journal job and launched The Information in 2013, it was still a…

https://simonowens.substack.com/

I just passed my one-year anniversary of launching my paid newsletter, so I decided to dive into some of the biggest lessons I learned during that time.

If you review Kevin Jones’s resume on LinkedIn, it’s easy to see why he ended up founding a sports podcast network. He’s worked in virtually every sector of the sports media industry, from creating c…

Over the past year, thousands of journalists have announced the launch of their paid newsletters, which are often hosted on platforms like Substack. Writers with already-existing large audiences have…

The last 15 years have not been kind to the local news industry, with thousands of newspapers either reducing staff or closing down entirely. But not all newspapers have been affected equally, and so…

According to some estimates, corporations across the world spend upwards of $42 billion a year on content marketing, and they do so with the philosophy that by acting like media companies, they can e…

Like a lot of people on the political Left, Geoff Sharpe grew frustrated by how successful conservatives were on Facebook. For years, he watched as right leaning conservative groups built huge Facebo…