Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

Let’s jump into it…

My latest: Meet the guy who’s shaping HubSpot’s media strategy

In 2021, HubSpot bought the daily business newsletter The Hustle. At the time, it had over a million subscribers.

Why was a SaaS company — operating in an industry sector that typically trades at many multiples of revenue — interested in a media outlet that was generating a tiny fraction of its yearly earnings?

To answer that question, I turned to Brad Wolverton, the company’s senior director of content. Wolverton came in through the Hustle acquisition and was recently given dominion over the parent company’s entire content slate. In a recent interview he told me about his circuitous journey to The Hustle, his buildout of a paid subscription service, the synergies between the two companies, and HubSpot’s recent forays into the Creator Economy.

Struggling to get views for your company’s TikTok videos?

[Sponsored]

Wish your business was on TikTok but are intimidated by the video format? I'll help you scale your TikTok account to 100K organic views and 10,000+ followers in 8 weeks (or work for free until I do). Grab your free consult now!

Quick hits

Reddit has a huge audience and is incredibly influential, and yet it's always struggled to get major advertisers to take it seriously. [Digiday]

"My wife was like, 'You need to do TikTok. TikTok is what the kids like these days.' I tried it, and I had some fun with it, but, uh, quite frankly, their monetization is absolute garbage" [Passionfruit]

Man-on-the-street videos have gotten huge on TikTok, and they're leading to all sorts of ethically-dubious decisions from the people who make them. [Gawker]

A great profile of Netflix's global head of television. [New Yorker]

Cheddar touted itself as a digitally native version of CNBC, but its senior leaders pivoted the company to focus on viral online trends. The move did not go well. [Insider]

Come chat with me!

I'm hosting a live Zoom call on Thursday where you can ask me questions and I'll do my best to answer them. You should come! Login details can be found over here.

ICYMI: How Starter Story grew to 1.4 million monthly visitors and $500,000 in annual revenue

Founder Pat Walls discussed how he automated his process so that the site now operates as a sort of flywheel.