The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Jane Friedman has spent almost the entirety of her professional career working in book publishing. In the mid-aughts, she began writing about the industry, both for professional outlets and her own blog. A few years ago, she launched a paid newsletter that now generates the majority of her income. I recently interviewed Friedman about her work. We discussed how she grew her newsletter into a sustainable business, and then we talked about the current state of book publishing. One aspect of this world that's long fascinated me is self-publishing, so I asked Friedman to fill me in on how this market is maturing and where self-published writers are seeing success.

If you listen to the podcast called Startup, then you've heard host Alex Blumberg go into exquisite detail about the trials and tribulations of launching a VC-funded podcast network. In earlier seasons, we got a firsthand look about what it was like to pitch venture capitalists, hire talent, and grow the business. In the final season of Startup, Blumberg walked us through Spotify's $230 million acquisition of Gimlet. But what about bootstrapped podcast networks that don't have access to millions of dollars of venture capital money? How do they get off the ground and scale? To answer these questions, I spoke to Jeff Umbro, the founder of the Podglomerate. We talked about his early mistakes in trying to partner with shows for his network and why it can be incredibly difficult to monetize a show with a small audience.

Advance Publications is one of the largest media companies in the world. It owns dozens of newspapers, the Conde Nast magazine empire, and even Reddit. A few years ago, it launched the Alpha Group, a tech incubator that would launch small startups and try to grow them into thriving, standalone businesses. One of those startups was called The Tylt, a platform that allows its users to participate in online opinion polls on a wide range of issues. The Tylt was successful enough that Alpha Group spun it off as its own company. Recently, The Tylt hired Selena Roberts, a seasoned journalist who's written for The New York Times and Sports Illustrated, to serve as its executive editor. I recently sat down with Roberts to learn about the site's editorial ambitions and whether online, unscientific polls have any journalistic value.

Agnes Kozera knows a thing or two about helping content creators monetize their content. In 2013, she and a co-founder launched Famebit, a platform that helped YouTubers match with brands that were willing to sponsor their videos. The company was so successful that it was eventually acquired by YouTube in 2016. This year, Kozera and that same co-founder are launching Podcorn, a platform designed to help podcasters monetize their shows. Like Famebit, it will serve as an online marketplace where brands can post RFPs for projects and be matched with participating podcasters. I interviewed Kozera about why such a platform is needed, how the current podcast advertising landscape is flawed, and why podcasters with small-to-mid-sized audiences currently have such a difficult time finding sponsors.

Clive Thompson has the kind of career that most writers would envy. He's written two books for major publishing houses. He has a monthly column at Wired magazine. And he writes regular features for The New York Times Magazine and other glossy magazines. But that kind of success didn't come to him overnight. In fact, Thompson spent years toiling away writing for small publications making very little money. I recently interviewed him to discuss how he made his big break, what it takes to write the perfect magazine pitch, and why book publishers are more likely to award contracts to established journalists.

These days, nearly every major news organization employs multiple reporters who aggressively cover the tech industry, but a decade ago tech coverage was dominated by blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, and VentureBeat. Back then, these blogs churned out scoop after scoop, competed for traffic, and sometimes even went to war with each other. Among the earliest of these blogs was ReadWriteWeb. Launched in 2003, it was founded by Richard MacManus, a New Zealander who was inspired to launch a site after reading the work of blog pioneer Dave Winer. Within a few years, MacManus began selling ads and was able to hire a global staff of reporters. I recently interviewed MacManus about the early days of tech blogging and why, for his latest writing project, he decided to eschew blogging entirely and launch a newsletter instead.

In 2005, a computer software engineer named Gabe Rivera launched the site that would eventually become Techmeme. Governed by algorithms, Techmeme aggregated the day's tech news, and it eventually became so influential that bloggers and journalists would vie to get their articles featured on the site. Flash forward to 2018, and Techmeme announced that it would expand its news curation into a daily podcast. I recently sat down with host Brian McCullough to talk about how he came up with the idea for a daily tech podcast and what he's doing to expand it into an entire podcast network.

The last decade hasn't been kind to local newspapers. According to one study, 1,800 newspapers have shut down since 2004, and many of those that survived are facing tighter margins, layoffs, and corporate consolidation. There are myriad reasons for this retrenchment. Part of the blame is on hedge funds that buy up local media companies and then squeeze them dry. Others point to major platforms like Facebook, Google, and Craigslist, all of which have siphoned away a large portion of the local advertising newspapers traditionally relied on. Despite these headwinds, we've seen a few digital-first upstarts thrive in the local news market. One such company is Village Media, which started out as a single news site in an Ontario city and has since grown to 11 sites spread out across Canada. I recently interviewed Jeff Elgie, Village Media's CEO, about the company's history and how it's succeeded where so many legacy newspapers have struggled or failed.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau recently estimated that podcast industry revenue grew by 53 percent last year and is projected to reach $1 billion by 2021. With so much year-over-year growth, it shouldn't be any surprise that many media companies are aggressively expanding their podcast operations. This is certainly true for Vox Media, which over the past few years has launched over 150 podcasts on topics that include technology, politics, and sports. The audio medium is now an eight-figure business for Vox. I recently sat down with Marty Moe, the head of Vox Media Studios, to talk about how the company is monetizing these podcasts, what he thinks about Spotify's entry into podcasting, and why he thinks he can grow Vox's podcast revenue from eight to nine figures.

Back in 2011, LinkedIn announced that it was hiring Dan Roth, who was then the editor of Fortune.com, to serve as its editor in chief. Given LinkedIn's then role as mostly a repository for online resumes, the move had many scratching their heads. Over the next few years, though, Roth's team would roll out a number of editorial products. It started by curating outside news sources, sending LinkedIn users to articles published by business publications like The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider. Then it rolled out a blogging platform that was only available to influential users like Richard Branson and Bill Gates. Eventually, it then opened up its blogging platform to all users. During all this time, LinkedIn was steadily hiring journalists from some of the world's top business publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fortune. Today, it has an editorial staff of 60, and these editors are responsible for everything from curating user content to producing their own original reporting.I recently sat down with Linkedin senior editor at large Isabelle Roughol. I asked her about how LinkedIn editors go about curating content, how they distribute this content on LinkedIn, and how they approach original reporting projects.