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Episodes from The Business of Content with Simon Owens
This corporate consultant grew to 260,000 TikTok and YouTube subscribers in only 8 months
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ For most of her career, Ashanti Bentil-Dhue didn't have a social media presence. But after spending a decade running a consulting business, she moved from the UK to New York and decided to start sharing her ideas publicly for the first time. Armed…
The playbook behind Spotify's audiobook expansion
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ For years, the audiobook industry was defined by a single dominant player and a purchasing model that asked listeners to commit to an entire book before they knew whether they would enjoy it. Spotify is betting that there's a better way. By folding…
Why an NPR reporter left his job to launch a media outlet in Ukraine
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ The war in Ukraine has given rise to an entirely new generation of independent media organizations, but few have a backstory as unusual as The Counteroffensive. Founded by veteran journalist Tim Mak after more than a decade covering politics, national…
This platform is powering over 180 local newsrooms
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ For more than a decade, Erin Millar has been trying to answer a question that has plagued the journalism industry: What should replace the local newspaper model after it collapses? Her first attempt came with The Discourse, a Canadian media company…
This print magazine is thriving by treating itself like a collector's item
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ When Mike Rogge purchased Mountain Gazette in early 2020, he wasn't acquiring a thriving media business. For $5,000 and the cost of a couple beers, he bought a dormant outdoor magazine brand whose main assets consisted of a URL, a trademark, decades…
The software company that's quietly building a media empire
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ For years, HubSpot was known as a pioneer of content marketing, building a huge library of articles that helped attract potential customers to its software products. But more recently, the company has expanded far beyond blog posts. It now owns…
How a coaching conference turned into a seven-figure media business
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ When Aaron Wilbur launched The Coaches Site in 2010, he simply wanted to solve a problem he kept seeing in hockey: the best coaches were constantly sharing ideas with each other, but that knowledge rarely made its way to coaches at lower levels of the…
How a niche newsletter about startups evolved into a data business
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ When Will Richards first started compiling news about startups, he wasn't trying to launch a media company. He was working at a family office and needed a better way to track what was happening across the Australian startup ecosystem. After realizing…
How a weekly PDF became one of Africa's most innovative news products
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ When Sipho Kings and his co-founder Simon Allison launched The Continent in 2020, they wanted to rethink how journalism is distributed online. Instead of chasing search traffic and social algorithms, they created a weekly PDF newspaper designed…
This former TV writer now produces prestige audio dramas for Audible, iHeart, and Spotify
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ For years, Hollywood writer Aaron Tracy built his career inside the traditional television system, writing for shows like Law & Order and navigating the endless cycle of pilots, canceled series, and development purgatory that defines much of the TV…
This independent magazine publisher doubled down on print
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ After spending several years helping launch food and travel magazines in London, Krista Faist returned to Toronto with a simple idea: replicate the free magazine model that was thriving across the UK transit system. In 2015, she launched Twenty Two…
Publishers are sitting on valuable audience data — many just aren't using it well
My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ James Capo has spent much of the last decade helping publishers solve one of the industry's biggest challenges: how to better understand and monetize their audiences. As CEO of Omeda, he oversees a platform that powers subscription management, email…