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

Several social media accounts that built massive followings for their pop culture coverage have started to drip out more and more political news. As a result, their content may be reaching consumers who don't typically follow the news. [Vox]

BuzzFeed claims its "AI-powered" content gets more engagement than pieces created solely by human beings. [Press Gazette]

While I usually applaud when social platforms commit to sharing revenue with creators, I haven't seen any evidence yet that Elon Musk isn't completely full of shit when it comes to Twitter sharing ad revenue. So far, the payouts have been highly concentrated to his rightwing fans. [Digiday]

The New York Times used to offer a buffet option of allowing readers to purchase subscriptions to individual products like news, recipes, games, and sports. But now it's becoming increasingly aggressive at pushing those readers to a bundled subscription, to the point where they no longer even have the option of a news-only subscription. [Press Gazette]

One of the chief complaints about Substack Notes was that you couldn't follow someone on there without also subscribing to their newsletter. Substack has now launched a separate "follow" button. [Substack]

Is it ethical for a journalism outlet to delete articles from its archive just to please the Google gods? [Tedium]

Here's more confirmation that creators are seeing larger payouts from TikTok's revenue sharing programs than before. [Insider]

Made-for-advertising sites are siphoning money away from legitimate publishers. They're basically the parasites of the programmatic advertising world — they're just one of the many reasons that I think the rise of programmatic has been bad for the media industry. [Digiday]

It's always cool to see laid-off journalists team up to launch their own media outlet. [Digiday]

Anyone going to FinCon in New Orleans this year? I'll be one of the featured speakers. [FinCon]

Why Starter Story ditched advertising to focus on selling its products

On Thursday, I’m hosting a live Zoom call with two amazing media entrepreneurs:

• Patrick Walls is the founder of Starter Story, an outlet that’s published thousands of case studies on how entrepreneurs built successful businesses. At one point, he was selling upward of $50k a month in sponsorships, but then he ditched that business all together to focus on paid products. He’s going to answer audience questions about why he made this move and how he’s generating $1.5 million a year through subscriptions and other information products.

• Bradley Hope is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Billion Dollar Whale. In 2021, he co-founded Project Brazen, a production studio that creates narrative nonfiction across podcasts, books, newsletters, TV, and film. He’s going to answer audience question about how you adapt a single piece of IP into multiple formats.

This is an interactive session where you’ll be given the opportunity to ask questions and contribute, and it’ll be jam-packed with actionable tips that you can steal and use in your own monetization efforts.

Date and Time: Thursday, August 17th at 4 p.m. ET

Zoom link:...