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.

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Let’s jump into it…

My latest: The products that Emanuel Cinca, founder of the Stacked Marketer newsletter, can’t do without

In 2018, Emanuel Cinca launched the Stacked Marketer newsletter, which produces a mix of news, trends, insights, and actionable advice geared toward marketers. Without any outside investment, he grew his list to over 55,000 subscribers, and this year it’s projects to generate over $1 million through a combination of sponsorships (90% of revenue) and memberships (10%). He also recently acquired the Psychology of Marketing newsletter, which has 25,000+ active subscribers.

In the latest edition of The Entrepreneur’s Tech Stack, Emanuel walked us through the products that are absolutely essential to his business. You can find the interview over here.

BTW, I’m still looking for creators and media entrepreneurs to feature in this series. Go here if you’re interested.

14,039

That’s the number of subscribers this newsletter currently has. Its open rate is 45%. About 86% of its audience works in media, marketing, or tech. If you want to reach these people, go here.

Quick hits

"There are now 213 million subscriptions to newsletters on Linkedin, up four times from January 2022 to 2023. Linkedin said 53 million individuals subscribe to a newsletter on the platform, up three times in the same time period." Holy cow. [Press Gazette]

Ben Smith on the closing of BuzzFeed News: "My own regret is not aligning a strong business with our news operation from the start, something I knew little about and wasn’t particularly good at." [Semafor]

"If data really is the oil of the 21st century, then Michael Bloomberg is today’s John D Rockefeller." Now that Succession is ending, I think HBO should greenlight a new drama series loosely based on the career of Michael Bloomberg. [Financial Times]

"Not many people read literary magazines—of any genre—compared to decades past. When writers talk about the good old days of living on short fiction, well, those probably aren’t ever coming back." [Counter Craft]

Lionsgate has done an exceptional job at adapting its huge film library for TikTok. [Link in Bio]

The floodgates are slowly opening. More and more platforms are being forced to share revenue with creators in order to compete with each other for their content. [Insider]

Can publishers actually go cold turkey on open programmatic ads?

Earlier this week I published a piece arguing that the biggest mistake the publishing industry made over the past 20 years was its embrace of open programmatic advertising. Not only did these ads devalue their inventory, but it gave rise to all sorts of malicious actors who leverage outrage and fake news to drive clicks.

I ended the essay with suggestions for how publishers could ween themselves off of programmatic ads. Not all of you were convinced by my arguments.

Media analyst Brian Morrissey thinks publishers had little choice but to incorporate these ads into their offerings:

For my money, the original sin of internet publishing was the separation of the audience data from the media impression … One quibble [with Simon’s piece] is the shift to programmatic was driven by the buy side, so publishers didn’t have much leverage to dictate how its customers wanted to transact.

Max Kraynov argues that the efficiencies of programmatic are too great to ignore:

In my previous job we sold ads to the tune of $3-5m/year. 50% were programmatic, 50% were direct sales. Can't comment on their numbers now but I do know that taking into account all overheads direct sales were barely breakeven, so the company had to scale down that part of the ad sales department … ad sales were less than 10% of our revenue base, so this wasn't a major blow to our P&L.

Mark Alker likes to use the annoyance of programmatic ads to drive readers to his ad-free subscription tier:

The biggest complaint source from our users has always been the programmatic ads. We offer ad free site as one of our many perks of paid membership and when surveyed a significant percentage of our readers consistently rank that perk as one of the biggest reasons for subscribing. NOT the content behind the paywall but the fact they can avoid the programmatic ads. Our direct sold ads are actually quite popular - so much so we are working on a subscriber control that will allow some of the direct sold ads to display. I see a future where we change our ‘Ad free’ members perk to ‘Programmatic ad free’.

And finally, Bo Brustkern, a co-founder of one of the leading fintech media companies, explains why he’ll never embrace programmatic ads:

Ah Simon, it felt like you were writing this post just to please me. I am not a long-timer in media, as you know, but programmatic ads are anathema. Insanity. The *whole idea* of digital media is to allow a million little niches to flourish. How do they get support? By aggregating a small but passionate audience, building trust, and then gating access to that audience through well-placed sponsorships. Perhaps I'm naive -- your other readers can tell me what a n00b I am -- but I'm thrilled to be playing a sales game against machines. Very, very dumb machines.

How Taegan Goddard and Steve Hayes built thriving political news outlets

When it comes to building a politics media brand, there are probably no greater authorities than Stephen Hayes and Taegan Goddard.

Stephen is the former editor of The Weekly Standard. In 2019, he and several other prominent journalists launched The Dispatch, a center-right magazine that caters to never-Trump Republicans. Despite very little outside investment, they managed to grow it to over 40,000 paid subscriptions in just a few years.

Taegan is the founder of Political Wire, one of the OG political blogs that built up a monthly audience in the millions. After over a decade spent monetizing the site almost solely through advertising, he launched a paid membership model that was quickly embraced by his most loyal readers.

This week I conducted a Zoom interview with Taegan and Stephen. We talked about how they optimized their subscription models, their approach to attracting advertisers, and how they’ve navigated the hyper polarization of political media.

You can watch our interview in the video embedded below:...