The Business of Content with Simon Owens

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

When Nicole Hunn launched the blog Gluten Free on a Shoestring in 2009, she wasn't a professional chef or an experienced media entrepreneur. She was a recently laid-off lawyer who had spent years experimenting with gluten-free recipes after her son was diagnosed with celiac disease. Frustrated by the high prices and poor quality of gluten-free products, she saw an opportu...

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When Ramin Beheshti co-founded The News Movement in 2021, he wanted to build a news organization that could reach younger audiences without relying on traffic to a traditional website. Instead of trying to lure readers away from platforms like TikTok and Instagram, the company would produce journalism specifically designed for those platforms and figure out how to monetiz...

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When the NBA teamed up with video game publisher Take-Two Interactive to launch an esports league in 2017, the idea was to replicate the traditional sports model within the world of competitive gaming. NBA teams would field their own esports franchises, recruiting elite gamers to compete in organized tournaments. But as the esports industry matured, it became clear that t...

Amy Suto spent years climbing the Hollywood ladder, eventually landing a writing credit on the TV series Condor. But by the time she achieved that milestone, she was already questioning whether she wanted to spend the rest of her career writing other people's stories. Meanwhile, she had built a lucrative side business ghostwriting memoirs for everyone from professional athletes to wealthy entrepreneurs. She eventually left Hollywoo...

Despite producing critically acclaimed shows like Severance, Slow Horses, and The Morning Show, Apple TV remains one of the smallest players in the streaming industry. It also reportedly loses billions of dollars a year, which raises an interesting question: Does Apple actually care whether its streaming service turns a profit? Or is the company perfectly happy to subsidize expensive Hollywood productions if they help ...

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After spending more than two decades touring with some of the biggest names in music — including the Jonas Brothers, John Legend, Eminem, and Selena Gomez — Benji Woerly decided it was time to build something of his own. He turned to an idea his father had dreamed up back in 1994: a fictional world populated by magical creatures called the Soovins. What began as a small pa...

For years, Facebook has steadily reduced the organic reach of businesses and publishers, forcing them to pay for advertising if they want to reach the audiences they've spent years building. Now Meta is taking things a step further by imposing what amounts to a link tax: Businesses that want to post more than two external links per month to their Facebook pages will have to pay at least $49.99 a month. News publishers ...

Condé Nast was once synonymous with the excesses of the magazine industry's golden age: chauffeured cars, lavish photo shoots, enormous expense accounts, and glossy titles that commanded both cultural influence and premium advertising dollars. That world is long gone, but Condé Nast itself has endured. With CEO Roger Lynch now leaving the company, it's a good moment to ask what remains of that old empire. Has Condé Nas...

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Startup CPG didn't begin as a media company. It started with Daniel Scharff inviting a few people from the consumer packaged goods industry to meet up at a bar in San Francisco. But those informal gatherings eventually grew into something much larger: a 40,000-member Slack community, dozens of in-person events, a podcast, webinars, newsletters, social channels, and an aw...

Sports betting has become one of the most important new revenue streams in sports media, but the relationship is quickly moving beyond simple advertising. News organizations and broadcasters are increasingly incorporating betting odds and prediction-market data directly into their coverage, blurring the line between journalism and gambling promotion. At the same time, legalized betting may be helping drive more attenti...

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When Adam Ryan launched Workweek in 2021, the thesis was that some of the most valuable voices in B2B weren't professional journalists or full-time creators, but practitioners who had spent years accumulating expertise inside their industries. Rather than asking those people to quit their jobs and become media entrepreneurs, Workweek would give them the infrastructure to...

The New York Times has become one of the few legacy media companies to successfully reinvent itself for the digital era, but that doesn't mean it's immune to disruption. One of its emerging problems is that some of the journalists it helps turn into stars can eventually make far more money by leaving and building independent businesses. The latest example is the team behind Hard Fork, whose hosts reportedly attracted multimillion-d...

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Design Anthology was founded in 2014 around a simple idea: some of the most interesting design work in Asia-Pacific wasn't getting the attention it deserved. The magazine set out to give those designers a global platform, wrapping its journalism in a premium print product designed to be kept rather than discarded. Over time, it has grown into a broader media business spa...

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In 2015, Reid Hailey started an anonymous Instagram meme page called Shithead Steve, mostly as a way to joke around with his friends. But once he began creating original memes, the account took off, eventually reaching a million followers and generating meaningful advertising revenue. Hailey soon teamed up with Derek Lucas, who was running his own fast-growing social acc...

The Wall Street Journal found itself at the center of an AI controversy after publishing an op-ed that billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller later acknowledged he had written with the help of AI. What made the episode especially notable wasn't the disclosure itself, but the Journal's reaction: Its opinion editor essentially shrugged, arguing that AI is now a fact of modern life and that what matters is whether the...

There was a time when HuffPost and BuzzFeed looked like the future of digital media. Both mastered the mechanics of internet distribution, attracted enormous audiences, and convinced investors that scale itself could become a durable competitive advantage. So how did two of the defining brands of the digital-media era end up shrinking so dramatically? Was the underlying business model always flawed, or did a series of ...

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Jomboy Media began as a Yankees podcast launched by Jimmy O'Brien and Jake Storiale with a small investment from a friend. Since then, it has evolved into a much larger sports media company, with dozens of channels, a roster of full-time creators, its own in-house sales operation, and even an original sports league called Warehouse Games. Much of that growth accelerated after Courtney...

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Over the past year, book publishers have repeatedly found themselves caught in controversies over authors' use of AI. Social media sleuths run books through AI-detection tools, accusations start flying, and in some cases publishers cancel a book's publication altogether. But how much should readers actually care if an author uses AI for research, editing, or polishing pr...

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For years, micropayments have been one of those ideas that repeatedly resurface in the publishing industry without ever seeming to gain much traction. The theory is simple: instead of forcing every reader into a recurring subscription, let them pay a few dollars for a single article or a short period of access. But previous experiments have often struggled with payment fr...