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

Micropayments still don't work. [Nieman Lab]

A lot of Forbes's success over the last decade is due to it blurring the lines between sponsored and editorial content. [CJR]

The solo creators who are replacing women's magazines [NYT]

Several months ago, Substack launched a feature that allows readers to make a "pledge" to pay for a newsletter if the writer ever turns on paid subscriptions. This allows writers to see that there's pent-up demand for their work. According to Axios, "writers who have chosen to convert their pledges into paid subscriptions have ... gone on to earn $8.5 million collectively." [Axios]

This company claims it's able to get up to 800,000 people to show up to a live stream where pro athletes sit and take questions from the audience. If true, that's impressive. [Digiday]

It's getting much more rare for a scripted TV series to last for 100+ episodes, and this is posing a problem for streamers. Flashy new series get people to sign up for a service, but it's the multi-season shows that get subscribers to stick around. [Vulture]

I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature on my newsletter and podcast

One of the things I really pride myself on is that I don’t just focus this newsletter on covering the handful of mainstream media companies that every other industry outlet features. Instead, I go the extra mile to find and interview media entrepreneurs who have been quietly killing it behind the scenes. In most cases, the operators I feature have completely bootstrapped their outlets.

In that vein, I’m looking for even more entrepreneurs to feature. Specifically, I’m looking for people succeeding in these areas:

• Niche news sites

• Video channels like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels

• Podcasts

• Newsletters

• Affiliate/ecommerce

Interested in speaking to me? You can find my contact info over here. (please don’t simply hit reply to this newsletter because that’ll go to a different email address. )

More quick hits

"More than 96% of programmatic ad spending growth will stem from video this year" [Marketing Brew]

The "pivot to video" often gets mocked, but it wasn't catastrophic for all media outlets: "While many publishers have failed to adapt to new forms of media, MotorTrend has gone from a collection of car enthusiast titles like Motor Trend, Hot Rod, and Automobile, to a profitable, diversified media company." [Insider]

A lot of media companies consider their content archives as assets that can deliver value long after initial publication. But if you're operating an SEO-dependent business, sometimes those archives can become a liability. [The Verge]

Publishers have always had the option of opting out of Google's bot crawling, but most refrained from doing so because they couldn't afford to turn away all that free traffic. But I can't help but wonder if there will ever be a tipping point where AI chatbots siphon off so much traffic that publishers decide that Google's value to them is no longer worth it. [The Guardian]

"Publishers can turn off the ability for bots to crawl their content, but it’s difficult to distinguish AI bots from the ones coming from search engines like Google that allow pages to get indexed and appear in search results." [Digiday]

Digital media companies are acting more and more like talent agencies — finding up-and-coming creators and helping them with distribution and monetization. [The Rebooting]

Do you sell a product targeted toward marketers or media executives?

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ICYMI: How Matt Brown built a thriving newsletter around the business of college sports