The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Holly Moore, executive editor leading Axios Local operations with a background in product and audience roles, explains AI-driven approaches to expanding into smaller cities. She discusses shrinking staffing needs with AI, regional reporter models stretching across markets, and tools that automate curation and production while keeping reporters central.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ Robbie Daymond is best known as a prolific voice actor, the kind of performer whose work spans anime, video games, and animation without ever putting his face front and center. After slowly breaking into the industry in the late 2000s and early 2010s, he built a rare, multi-disciplinary voiceover career—one that includes everything from audiobooks to major gaming franchises. He also spends up to 30 weekends a year attending fan conventions where he engages directly with audiences in what has quietly become one of the most lucrative and meaningful parts of his business. That creator-first ethos has increasingly shaped his ambitions beyond acting. In recent years, Daymond co-founded Sassy Chap Games, an independent studio that turned a quirky concept into one of the fastest-selling dating sims ever, fueled largely by viral user-generated content rather than traditional marketing. The project offers a window into how modern creative careers are evolving by blending IP ownership with direct-to-consumer distribution models. In a recent interview, Robbie explained how fan conventions have quietly become a major revenue engine for creators, why you don't always need a huge social media presence to build a large audience, and how revenue-sharing models can unlock top-tier creative talent.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ For most of his career, Scott Brown has operated at the crossroads of Hollywood and the creator economy. After first breaking into digital media during the early days of web series, Scott went on to work across a wide swath of the modern media ecosystem. His résumé includes producing hundreds of hours of Larry King programming for streaming platforms, helping Dwayne Johnson launch a YouTube channel that quickly surpassed a million subscribers, and even producing large-scale stunts for MrBeast. Throughout that journey, Scott developed a front-row seat to how digital platforms were steadily reshaping the economics and creative possibilities of entertainment. Today Scott believes the next major shift is already underway: the rise of microdramas—short, vertically shot scripted series designed for smartphones and often monetized episode-by-episode inside dedicated apps. In our conversation, Scott explained how he stumbled upon the emerging format, why he believes it represents the first truly native form of scripted storytelling for phones, and how his own microdrama projects are helping push the medium toward higher production quality.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ Pat Walls didn't originally set out to build a media company. In 2017, he was simply interviewing founders as a side project while working a full-time job, hoping the conversations might spark his next startup idea. But those interviews—published as detailed case studies on a blog called Starter Story—slowly evolved into something much bigger. Over the next eight years, Pat bootstrapped the site into a media business built around thousands of founder stories, growing its audience through a series of distribution pivots that ranged from Reddit to SEO to YouTube. That journey culminated recently in a major milestone: the sale of Starter Story to HubSpot Media for what Pat describes as a "life-changing" amount. In a recent interview, Pat explained how Starter Story transformed from a scrappy side project into a profitable media brand, why video ultimately became the company's biggest growth engine, and his decision to shift away from advertising toward higher-priced products and boot camps.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ Founded during the pandemic, the The News Movement set out with a simple but radical premise: what if journalism were designed entirely for the platforms where younger audiences already consume information? Rather than trying to pull readers back to a website, the company built a newsroom that publishes directly to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, translating the conventions of traditional reporting into vertical video, carousels, and other native formats. In a recent interview, editor-in-chief Rebecca Hutson explained how the outlet approaches platform-first journalism, why its reporters function as "triple-threat" video journalists who can shoot, edit, and publish their own stories, and how the company tailors coverage differently for each social platform.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ In 2004, Eric Hochberger co-founded Mediavine, which would eventually become one of the most influential ad management companies on the open web. The company didn't start as an ad tech firm — it began as a scrappy collection of SEO-fueled fan sites, built by three founders chasing traffic in the early blogosphere. While selling $50 sidebar ads and offering SEO consulting services, Eric and his partners learned firsthand how fragile and inconsistent early digital advertising could be. That experience ultimately pushed Mediavine to build its own header bidding system in 2014, a move that quadrupled the company's ad revenue and transformed it from a publisher into an ad management platform. Today, Mediavine represents roughly 17,000 publishers and operates with a 140-person team, primarily serving independent creators rather than legacy media brands. In a recent interview, Eric pulled back the curtain on how programmatic advertising actually works, why "made-for-advertising" sites are siphoning off industry dollars, and how Google's AI Overviews are reshaping traffic patterns — sometimes wiping out entire businesses overnight.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ Michael Fritzell doesn't fit the typical profile of a newsletter writer. Before launching Asian Century Stocks, he spent 15 years inside the machinery of global finance — working in investment banking and eventually managing money for a wealthy family in Singapore. A Swedish native who studied Chinese at Peking University, Michael built a career analyzing overlooked equities across China and Southeast Asia. When he struck out on his own to launch the Asian Century Stocks newsletter in 2021, he wasn't experimenting with a side hustle — he was walking away from a traditional finance track to build a niche media business focused on Asian stocks that most Western investors ignore Launched on Substack and now operating independently, Asian Century Stocks sells in-depth, 40- to 60-page research reports to paying subscribers, many of whom are professional investors accustomed to paying banks tens of thousands of dollars a year for comparable research. Michael positioned himself as a bridge between local Asian markets and global capital — offering deeply reported, independent analysis without the conflicts that often accompany sell-side research. In an interview, he explained how he went from anonymous finance professional to six-figure recurring revenue newsletter operator, why he ultimately left Substack for Ghost, and what it takes to monetize serious financial research in a tightly regulated industry.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ Michael Fritzell doesn't fit the typical profile of a newsletter writer. Before launching Asian Century Stocks, he spent 15 years inside the machinery of global finance — working in investment banking, buy-side firms, and eventually managing money for a wealthy family in Singapore. A Swedish native who studied Chinese at Peking University, Michael built a career analyzing overlooked equities across China and Southeast Asia. When he struck out on his own to launch the Asian Century Stocks newsletter in 2021, he wasn't experimenting with a side hustle — he was walking away from a traditional finance track to build a niche media business focused on Asian stocks that most Western investors ignore Launched on Substack and now operating independently, Asian Century Stocks sells in-depth, 40- to 60-page research reports to paying subscribers, many of whom are professional investors accustomed to paying banks tens of thousands of dollars a year for comparable research. Michael positioned himself as a bridge between local Asian markets and global capital — offering deeply reported, independent analysis without the conflicts that often accompany sell-side research. In an interview, he explained how he went from anonymous finance professional to six-figure recurring revenue newsletter operator, why he ultimately left Substack for Ghost, and what it takes to monetize serious financial research in a tightly regulated industry.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ In 2011, as the golden era of glossy newsweeklies was fading, former Time correspondent Nathan Thornburgh made a bet that serious journalism didn't have to look the way it always had. Alongside food writer Matt Goulding, he launched Roads & Kingdoms as a scrappy Tumblr experiment, using food as a gateway into geopolitics, history, and culture Over the next decade, Roads & Kingdoms evolved from a bootstrapped digital publication into a creative hub for Anthony Bourdain—who invested in the company and used it as a base for ambitious editorial and branded projects. After Bourdain's death in 2018, the outlet was forced to reinvent itself. Nathan and Matt shrank the operation and rebuilt it around high-end culinary travel experiences. Now, they're relaunching the media arm with a membership-driven model and an annual print magazine In a recent interview, Nathan reflected on the collapse of legacy media, the perils and possibilities of brand-funded journalism, and why he believes independent, reader-supported publishing offers a more durable path forward.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ For decades, Diane Salvatore helped lead some of America's most recognizable magazine brands, including Consumer Reports, where rigorous product testing and consumer safety were core to the mission. Now, as executive director of the MedShadow Foundation, she's applying that same watchdog mentality to one of the most opaque corners of the marketplace: prescription and over-the-counter drugs. In a recent interview, Diane walked through how MedShadow operates as a nonprofit investigative newsroom, its expansion into social media video, and its plan to build a donor-supported model that funds independent health journalism.