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

I'm sorry to see that The Juggernaut is struggling. I was really rooting for it to succeed. [Business Insider]

"Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That's more than $21 per word in today's dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word." [Defector]

CNBC didn't expand into personal finance content until 2016, but it's now the most-trafficked vertical on its website. [Hollywood Reporter]

This is a great interview with The Verge's editor in chief where he talks about what it's like to operate a profitable, free website that isn't overly dependent on the tech platforms. [The Verge]

This looks like it'll be an ambitious merging of both media and commerce. It'll be an interesting experiment to watch. [Axios]

How CJ Gustafson built Mostly Metrics, a newsletter for CFOs

Everyone likes to think of themselves as being financially savvy, especially if, like me, you write about business topics, but how many of us truly understand finance terms that are bandied about like “gross profit” and “lifetime value”? Like we may know that the term EBITDA stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization,” but how many people actually know how to calculate it?

CJ Gustafson knows. After a decade in finance, he’s mastered all the accounting jargon, and a few years ago he realized that there was a market need for someone who could explain these terms in a way that’s both entertaining and informative. So he launched Mostly Metrics, a Substack newsletter about finance, strategy, and operations at startups. 

CJ’s since grown the newsletter to over 42,000 subscribers, all while holding down his day job as a CFO at a tech startup. In my interview with him, we talked about why he launched the newsletter, how he balances his day job work and writing, and what his longterm plans are for the newsletter.

Watch our discussion in the video embedded below:

If video embeds don’t work in your inbox, go here.

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. )

Why newsletter signups should always be your north star

I don’t think there’s a media operator working today who isn’t at least somewhat aware that the tech platforms we rely on for distribution have the ability to completely upend our livelihoods, but it’s still pretty jarring when it actually happens. I certainly felt intense unease when reading this report in Podnews about an award-winning podcaster named Kaigan Carrie who suddenly had her show completely wiped from existence by Spotify. As Carrie told Podnews:

I’ve lost every single person that was 'following’ my podcast. I’ve lost all of my paid subscribers — when they deleted my podcast, the system then refunded each of my subscribers — and I had money sitting in my account from the last 4 months that I hadn’t withdrawn. All my stats are gone, too.

Nobody at Spotify denies that the podcast was removed by mistake, but that doesn’t make the incident any less devastating; even though Carrie’s show was reinstated, her entire audience was wiped out, which means she’d have to rebuild it from scratch.

This case is particularly horrific, but it’s becoming less and less rare. Over the last few years, the tech platforms have been subjected to increased pressure to crack down on instances of abuse, hate speech, and even misinformation. While this may or may not have improved the information ecosystem as a whole — that’s a debate I don’t want to delve into here — it’s also impacted the careers of many hard working content creators who have been unfairly punished by these policy changes.

Any moderation policy meant to scale across literally billions of posts will inevitably create plenty of false positives. Not only do the platforms need to install algorithmic shortcuts to flag content within moments after publication, but even the human moderation is often outsourced and overextended. And because these services are free and offer very little customer service recourse, the platforms can be slow to correct a mistaken deplatforming.

I talk to a lot of media entrepreneurs, and most of the ones who cover hard news can recount multiple instances of mistaken account suspensions due to some overly sensitive algorithmic tripwire that fails to understand the distinction between extremist content and journalism that reports on extremism. In most cases, the media outlet is able to reverse the decision, but by that point the piece of content that triggered the suspension has very little hope of reaching a wide audience...