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

Substack announces it's surpassed 3 million paid subscriptions on its platform. That means its writers may be generating upwards of $360 million a year through subscriptions alone. [Substack]

It's always cool to see journalists collaborating in this way. The future of media will involve more content cooperatives that allow groups of creators to share their audiences. [Embedded]

A deep dive into the creative "retooling" at Marvel as the studio grapples with its several missteps in recent years. [Hollywood Reporter]

It sucks that Complex was likely hurt by the BuzzFeed acquisition. It really was an extremely innovative company. Hopefully there’s better synergy with its new parent company. [CNN]

Believers in micropayment models can rejoice: Google is testing out a new tool for publishers that will allow them to sell access to individual articles. This could be the biggest test yet of the micropayments model. [Toolkits]

"Peacock, long maligned as Comcast’s half-hearted entrant into the late-stage streaming wars, appears to be turning a corner. Last month, the service reported a 57 percent increase in year-over-year revenue in Q4, topping $1 billion in revenue for the first time. Peacock also added 3 million subscribers last quarter, for a total of 31 million." [Puck]

Pretty amazing how effectively Reddit outperformed Quora at its own game and became the de-facto landing spot for many of the web's most popular search queries. I find myself combing through its threads consistently when conducting research for problems I need to solve in my own life. [Search Engine Land]

The state of newsletter advertising in 2024

Ask just about any media executive, and they’ll tell you that the year 2023 was not a good one for the advertising business. A combination of high interest rates and an uncertain economy made companies extremely skittish, and that caused them to pull back on their marketing spend.

There are some recent signs that advertising spending is picking up in 2024, but it’s still too early to know how it will shake out.

But what about newsletter advertising? It’s seen some strong growth in recent years, and brands have reported higher than average marketing ROI due to the high engagement. Has it suffered from the same macro economic forces that battered the larger ad industry?

To answer that question, I turned to Ryan Sager, the co-founder of Who Sponsors Stuff, a data platform that tracks sponsorships across hundreds of newsletters. Ryan dove deep into his own data to determine which sectors are investing big in newsletter ads and whether they’ve seen any slowdown in growth.

Check out our discussion in the video embedded below:

If video embeds don’t work in your inbox, then go here to view it.

If you want to listen to an audio version of this interview, subscribe to The Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify] [Amazon Music]

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.)

Traditional media outlets are under-monetizing their YouTube channels

Earlier this week, John Oliver published a tweet that angered a significant portion of his online fans. “I know I usually share a link to our main story here on Mondays, but HBO has decided they’re going to wait until Thursday to post them to YouTube from now on,” he wrote. “I hope they change their mind, but until then, you can see our piece about the Supreme Court on HBO, on MAX, and on YouTube in a few days.”

A bit of follow up reporting in the Hollywood Reporter revealed that HBO did this to drive more subscriptions to the Max app. “When Last Week Tonight With John Oliver premiered on HBO, the convenience of watching on Max did not exist, so YouTube allowed flexible viewing for the main story as well as promotional exposure,” a spokesperson told THR. “We are now delaying that availability and hope those fans choose to watch the entire show on Max.”

Out of curiosity, I checked out the YouTube channel for Last Week Tonight and was pretty astonished by what I saw.

First, some context: Last Week Tonight has been running for around 26 Sundays a year for roughly a decade. While it begins with a few short segments, the vast majority of each episode is devoted to a single topic delivered in monologue form. The topic is often serious in nature — focusing on some sort of predatory institution or industry — and Oliver makes it intensely watchable by sprinkling in enough jokes and funny images to keep you entertained. His most famous monologues have eviscerated everyone from televangelists to MLMs to the Miss America Pageant. 

Now, most late night comedy shows package segments from the previous night’s episode and post them to YouTube. The Tonight Show, for instance, has published 21 videos in just the last seven days alone. John Oliver’s show, on the other hand, only publishes the 30-minute monologues, which means it uploads a mere 26 videos a year, give or take.

Despite this relative lack of posting consistency, Last Week Tonight racks up some monster engagement. Over the course of 431 videos, it’s generated 9.36 million subscribers and 3.8 billion channel views.

Now compare that to the YouTube channel of The Daily Show, Oliver’s previous employer. It has 10,8 million subscribers and 5.5 billion channel views, but that’s spread out over 5,632 videos. In fact, if you compare Last Week Tonight’s per-video average to every other late night show, it has far and away the highest engagement:

Last Week Tonight: 8.7 million views per video

The Daily Show: 984,000 views per video

The Tonight Show: 1.7 million views per video

The Late Show: 888,000 views per video

Jimmy Kimmel Live: 2 million views per video

But want to know the craziest part? HBO is doing absolutely nothing to directly monetize John Oliver’s show...