The Business of Content with Simon Owens

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

You’ve probably never heard of Schneps Media, but if you live in any of the five boroughs of New York, you’ve probably encountered its content. Started as a single Queens newspaper in 1985, the company gradually bought up community news outlets all across New York, and it’s since expanded into Philadelphia and even Palm Beach, Florida. It not only targets audiences by l...

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

Earlier this year, China crossed a major milestone when BYD, an electric car company based in its Shaanxi province, surpassed Tesla in total sales. What’s more, most experts believe the country is only at the beginning of its EV dominance. In a recent Washington Post article titled “How China pulled ahead to become the world leader in electric vehicles,” journalist Ch...

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

They walk among us, almost completely undetected. If you notice them at all, it’s because they’re pulling a discreet tin out of their pockets so they can replace the small, white pouch hidden above or beneath their molars.

Yes, I’m talking about Zyn enthusiasts. Though the nicotine pouch came to our shores over a decade ago, it’s only within the last fe...

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

Heading into 2025, we knew that MrBeast had a huge online following. After all, his main channel has grown to over 300 million subscribers and 74 billion views. He’s built out an entire studio in North Carolina and is mobbed by legions of fans wherever he goes.

But what we didn’t know was whether this online fame would translate into traditional Hollywo...

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

When JJ Hornblass got his first journalism job in the 1990s, his dad made a deal with him: he could spend a few years as a reporter, but he had to eventually make his way over to the revenue side of the media business. It only took JJ a few years to follow through on that deal.

While working as an editor at American Banker, he pitched his bosses on laun...

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

The Dispatch was launched in 2020 with a pretty straightforward thesis: that people would pay for quality, fact-based journalism. It certainly had a partisan lean – it was co-founded by conservative journalists Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes after all – but it steered clear of the wholesale rejection of reality that’s rampant in most pro-Trump media.

Fl...

My newsleter: https://thelongstory.substack.com/

When the Manchester Mill launched in 2020, it operated on a simple theory: that local audiences would pay for news as long as it was original and differentiated. It quickly proved that model out and was able to hire its first full-time employee within a matter of months. From there, founder Joshi Herrmann decided to replicate this model across other cities in the UK, and...

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When Matthew Schniper launched his Colorado Springs food newsletter in 2023, he ran into a problem many local news entrepreneurs face: he didn’t have enough time to do his reporting and chase down advertisers.

Luckily, by that point he already had strong relationships in the Colorado Springs food scene, and so he approached 12 of his favorite restaurants ...

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

What’s the true monetary value of a newsletter subscriber? Tim Huelskamp knows the answer to that question. As the co-founder of the 1440 newsletter, he knows how many emails the average subscriber will open, how much money they’ll generate in ad revenue, and what it costs to acquire them.

It’s this ruthless approach to unit economics that allowed 1440 to gro...

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

2024 was a big year for the podcast industry. Not only were there several huge deals signed, but podcasts wielded significant influence in the US presidential election. These days it’s impossible to open YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram without coming across podcast clips, and the market is still poised for significant growth in the coming years.

But if you ...

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

David Stein had an innovative marketing hack for growing his investing podcast called Money for the Rest of Us. He put the names of other popular finance podcasts in his metadata, and Apple’s unsophisticated search algorithm would surface his show whenever people were searching for his competitors.

By the time Apple eventually eliminated that functionalit...

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

In 2017, Ben Cohen was living the dream. His politics news site The Daily Banter was generating over 6 million visits a month and enough advertising revenue to support him and a small stable of writers. But then the floor fell out from under him virtually overnight; Facebook pivoted away from news and sent his traffic plummeting. Without traffic, his advertising revenue...

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

Like a lot of journalists=turned-media–entrepreneurs, Eric Newcomer decided to launch a paid newsletter after leaving his job at Bloomberg in 2020. That model yielded 2,500 subscribers who collectively pay over $400,000 a year to access his newsletter about startups, but that’s no longer the biggest part of his business.

Today, Eric generates over $1.5 mi...

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

The last few years have been pretty good to the Kansas City Chiefs, what with its multiple Super Bowl championships and a close association with the biggest pop star in the world, but BJ Kissel remembers what it was like to be a fan of the team long before it started regularly winning games. Back in the early 2010s, he began blogging for SB Nation, and he used his succe...

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Lon Seidman doesn’t operate the largest gadget YouTube channel in the world, but he doesn’t need to in order to run a successful media business. That’s because he remains hyper focused on reviewing non-sexy products that sell in extremely high volumes. This has allowed him to build a highly lucrative affiliate business, not only on YouTube, but also on Amazon Video.

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

Book publicity is a mixed bag these days. On the one hand, it’s never been easier for an author to form a direct relationship with their audience with tools like Substack and TikTok. On the other hand, more books are published each year than ever before, which means competition is fierce. Most newspapers have laid off most of their book critics, but at the same time the...

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

When people sign up for the Alts.co newsletter, they’re looking to read its deep dives into alternative investments like art, baseball cards, and rare books. But the most serious investors in its audience want access to actual deal flow, and to gain that access they sign up for Altea, a high-priced membership community that actually vets potential deals and allows them ...

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

Eric Siu has a pretty massive audience; his YouTube channel boasts 161,000 subscribers and his two podcasts – Marketing School and Leveling Up – have generated tens of millions of downloads. 

But Eric doesn’t bother with traditional media monetization models like advertising or subscriptions. Instead, he leverages his influence to drive clients to Single ...

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

When Keith Pepper bought a chain of print newspapers back in 2020, he received an email from a columnist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution that basically asked if he was crazy. But Keith had a plan for taking a company that generated 98% of its revenue from print advertising and converting it into a digital-first media company.

And he’s done just that. ...