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…

Quick hits

Gee, I wonder why Business Insider has had trouble growing its paid subscriber numbers. [Simon Owens]

I remember when Cheddar News was billing itself as "CNBC for young people," but that vision seems to have gotten a bit muddled over the years. [Insider]

My guess is that Vice employees don't have a fun year ahead of them, since its new owner is likely to do a lot of cutting to make it profitable. [NYT]

A lot of the biggest YouTube channels have become homogenous in recent years, ditching narrative storytelling and instead focusing on gimmicks and spectacles, a la MrBeast. There's a growing movement of YouTubers who are trying to push back against this trend. [Publish Press]

I think it's a little much to say that Spotify's podcast strategy has "gone off the rails." [The Verge] I think a better way of putting it is that the company is in the process of a course correction. A lot of its podcast investments have been good for the business (Joe Rogan, The Ringer, Megaphone, Anchor) whereas others failed to bear fruit (Gimlet, the royals, the Obamas, etc...). I think the main lesson Spotify learned is that it needs to stop paying top dollar for celebrities who haven't proven themselves in the podcast space. A lot of its efforts going forward will be centered around improving its ecosystem for smaller podcasters.

The products that Lindy Alexander, founder of The Freelancer’s Year, can’t do without

Lindy started The Freelancer’s Year in 2017 as a way of documenting her ‘journey’ of becoming a full time freelancer. She set herself a goal of hitting $100K in revenue in her first year of full time freelancing and blogged about it. One of the most popular aspects were her monthly reports where she shared her income.

Today, The Freelancer’s Year is a major business that offers self-paced courses for aspiring and established freelance writers. In the courses, she teaches how to get your articles published in magazines and newspapers; how to break into travel writing; and how to hit $100K from your writing by landing lucrative content clients. 

Lindy newsletter now has over 6,000 subscribers and she sells courses ranging in price from $9 to $2,000. “For me the marker of success is the success my students are having,” she told me. “Multiple students have hit their annual income goals (goals they never dreamed were possible) like hitting $100k from their freelance writing, or $80K in their first year of freelancing (part time!). I also have students who are regularly being published in fantastic publications (like The Guardian, Marie Claire, Nat Geo Traveler) and it’s always a thrill to know that I’ve played a tiny part in their success.”

Lindy walked us through the products that are absolutely essential to her business over here:

Click here to read the interview

BTW, I’m still looking for creators and media entrepreneurs to feature in this series. Each interview is heavily featured in front of my 14,538 newsletter subscribers, and I share it out to my 70,472 social media subscribers. Go here if you’re interested.

How to grow your sponsorship revenue

Let’s face it: ad sales are hard right now. Most industry executives agree we’re in an advertising recession, and brands are more focused than ever on delivering ROI. So how do you communicate the value of your audience to skeptical ad buyers?

That’s the question we tackled in a recent Zoom call with several featured experts. They included:

• Kelly Dorogy - business development and operations manager for Paved, a newsletter sponsorship marketplace

• Jesse Watkins - co-founder of Who Sponsors Stuff, a database of newsletter sponsors

• Dave Hanley - chief revenue officer at Advertisecast, the advertising division of podcast host Libsyn

During the session, we went pretty deep on the latest best practices for finding sponsors for your newsletter, podcast, and other content mediums. Everyone came away from it with actionable advice.

Watch the recording of the session in the video embedded below:...