The Business of Content with Simon Owens

When Tyler Morin was in high school, he dreamed of going into journalism, but his parents convinced him to major in finance instead. After graduating, he went into the financial sector, but he never …

Arlington Country, Virginia is a suburb of DC. It has over 236,000 residents, thousands of local businesses, and an average household income north of $100,000. With those sorts of attributes, you’d t…

Dan Oshinsky didn’t apply for an open position to run BuzzFeed’s newsletter operations. He just happened to reach out to editor Ben Smith back when BuzzFeed was hiring a bunch of people with weird in…

The audiobook market is massive, with sales projected to hit $3.5 billion this year. What used to be a niche, expensive product is now one of the fastest growing mediums. In fact, The New York Times …

In the mid-2000s, Digg was one of the most powerful websites on the internet. Powered by its army of users, the platform would send gargantuan amounts of server-crushing traffic to any content featur…

I first discovered Gil Assayas, the musician otherwise known as GLASYS, when one of his YouTube videos made it to the front page Reddit. His amazing keyboard set up and sophisticated musical adaptati…

The New York Times gets a lot of credit within the media industry for the blockbuster success of its podcast The Daily,  but The Los Angeles Times was also an early pioneer within the medium. Its nar…

Jono Dry is the type of artist whose work is sold in European galleries by art dealers. He only finishes a few pieces a year, and most of his purchased pieces likely reside in the private collections…

We’ve seen several media companies launch over the past few years that specialize in sending out newsletters that summarize each day’s news. Newsletters like theSkimm, The Hustle, and Morning Brew sp…

Ben Cohen isn’t the world’s biggest fan of Facebook. The founder of a political news website called The Daily Banter, Ben worked hard to build up his reach on Facebook, and for a few years he made a …

Alexis Grant didn’t start her career with the goal of building several media businesses. She simply wanted work as a reporter. After college, she got a job at the Houston Chronicle and then later acc…

Because I write and podcast so much about the business of media, I regularly get emails from founders of niche media companies who want to tell me about their successful ventures. A few months ago, I…

If you wanted to become a professional standup comedian in the 1990s, the path was pretty straightforward. You started by going to amateur open mic nights, where you would hone your act. Eventually, …

Let’s say you’re a writer who wants to publish your work to the web and eventually monetize it. These days you have plenty of options. You might open a Medium account and join the platform’s partner …

When we talk about the media industry, we’re usually discussing publishers that are geared toward a broad audience -- outlets like The New York Times or CNN or NPR. Even more niche publications like …

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has expressed a lot of frustration with the large platforms that dominate our online browsing. In 2018, for instance, he complained that Facebook captures a lot of value fr…

It’s been nearly a decade since The New York Times launched its metered paywall, and its success has spurred just about every digital publisher to test out some form of reader revenue strategy. Many …

In its most recent earnings report, Twitter revealed that it has over 139 million daily users, but the company’s first podcast it launched in 2019 was designed to only appeal to a tiny fraction of th…

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So this is the 68th episode of my podcast, and if you’ve been listening to it for any amount of time, you’d know t…

There are few people as knowledgeable about web publishing as Scott Rosenberg. In 1995, he and a group of other San Francisco Examiner journalists launched Salon.com, one of the first online magazine…