The Business of Content

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.

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Lucas Grindley knows something about building sustainable revenue streams for media companies. When he was hired to Here Media, a network of LGBT news outlets, it was losing money, but over a period of six years he nurtured it back to profitability.

Now he’s the executive director of Next City, a 20-year-old nonprofit magazine dedicated to urban policy and equitable cities. When he first joined, the publication was almost entirely reliant on large grants, but he’s since diversified its revenue by building up its ad sales and small-donor memberships. Recently, it crossed the threshold of 1,000 paying members.

In a recent interview, Lucas walked me through his successful tenure at Here Media and explained how he’s brought a similar playbook to Next City.

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 content for pro football teams to reporting for traditional radio stations to writing for sports news sites. He also launched Striking Gold, a 49ers-focused podcast that eventually accrued several thousand listeners.

But Kevin wasn’t content with simply being a podcast personality. Back in 2018, he began to notice that there were a lot of people like him -- podcasters with extremely passionate fan bases but no way to convert that fandom into actual revenue. So he began pitching them one by one on joining Blue Wire Podcasts, a network that would help them produce their shows and sell advertising in exchange for a cut of the revenue.

Flash forward two years, and Blue Wire has since taken on several million dollars in investment, is now producing narrative documentary podcasts, and recently signed a huge deal with one of Las Vegas’ biggest hotels.

I recently sat down with Kevin to discuss how he convinced podcasters to join his network, his approach to working with talent, and why he’s doubling down on longform narrative series.

Back in 2010, the world was still skeptical of Wikipedia. High school teachers and college professors warned students to never, ever use it for research. If you ever tried to cite it in an argument, your opponent would mock it as unreliable. Late night hosts like Stephen Colbert would enlist their audiences to flood a specific Wikipedia page and vandalize it. Celebrities and major companies would treat it as a vanity project, editing their own pages while making absolutely no effort to disclose their conflict of interest.

Flash forward to 2020, and Wikipedia certainly has more respect. The Wikimedia Foundation, which acts as its official steward, has tens of millions of dollars in the bank. While college professors don’t view it as a primary source for research, they’ll sometimes endorse it as a starting point for said research. And nearly everyone recognizes it as one of the most influential websites on the internet.

But though tens of millions of people use Wikipedia every day, most only have a passing understanding of how a core group of a few thousand volunteer editors perform the vast majority of contributions to its articles.

One of those editors is Bill Beutler. For the past decade, Bill has consulted with hundreds of brands, helping them to edit their Wikipedia pages without running afoul of the platform’s strict rules. I recently interviewed Bill about the problems that have plagued Wikipedia for the past decade and the issues its community will need to address in the decade to come.

Josh Spector was blogging before most people even knew what a blog was. Over the span of a decade, he started and abandoned several of them, often before they had a chance to amass much of an audience. But in 2011 he got more serious about audience growth for a blog he ran that focused on teaching standup comedians how to market themselves, and to help drive traffic to it he launched a newsletter.

Pretty quickly, he grew addicted to the newsletter medium, and a few years later he merged a couple of newsletters he was running into a single list and renamed it For the Interested. Since 2016, he’s been sending out new issues each week featuring ideas to help creators to produce, promote, and profit from their creations. For the Interested now has over 25,000 subscribers, and Josh recently launched a paid spinoff newsletter.

I recently interviewed Josh about how he grew his audience, the role his newsletter plays in his consulting business, and why he thinks so many writers are approaching paid newsletters the wrong way.