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.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

Let’s jump into it…

How Tom Arbuthnot built Empowering Cloud, a media company focused on Microsoft cloud products

The rise of cloud computing introduced all sorts of benefits for the enterprise software space. Not only could license holders access their accounts from virtually anywhere, but it also allowed the software companies to issue updates on a more regular basis. But this also made the sector a lot more complicated and created a need for more experts who could educate cloud software customers about the intricacies of the tools.

Tom Arbuthnot is one of those experts. For over a decade, he’s been a Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master, and he spent a significant amount of time in the early 2010s educating the public about these products through blogging and conference talks. But then in early 2022 he realized that there was a market opportunity for a media company to cover these products. That year, he launched Empowering Cloud, an online community that produces a mixture of videos, live calls, and other educational materials centered around Microsoft’s cloud technology.

In my interview with Tom, we talked about the site’s launch, how he finds sponsors, and why he decided to lock most of the company’s content inside a community platform that requires a login.

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. )

Quick hits

This election year has definitely been an anomaly for the news publishers that usually see an audience bump but didn't because there was so little competition in the primaries. My guess is the audience jump will come eventually — probably in time for the party conventions — but that means publishers will have much less opportunity to capitalize on intensified news interest. [Digiday]

Have you vented on social media recently about Wordle's word choice? There's a good chance a New York Times staffer saw that post and relayed it to the Wordle team during a weekly meeting focused on audience feedback. [CNN]

"The Information reported in January that OpenAI was offering publishers between $1 million and $5 million a year to access archives to train its GenAI models ... Assuming The Information’s reporting is accurate and those figures haven’t changed since then — OpenAI’s shelling out between $4 million and $20 million a year for news." [Techcrunch]

Even legitimate content creators fall victim to audience inflation fraud because the fraudsters try to hide their activity by inflating the streams of lots of different artists. This means that a fraud detection algorithm can deplatform artists that weren't actually engaged in fraud. [Bloomberg]

I'm consistently amazed by the Creator Economy's ability to mint celebrities who invent their own genres of content. [NYT]

People like to crap on Taboola because of its clickbait toenail fungus posts, but I actually think the entire media industry should have leaned more into native advertising widgets like it. Unlike with useless display ads, consumers actually click on these widgets. [Axios]

Apparently there's very little known about the company that just bought Deadspin, but it may be affiliated with online gambling in some way. [Tedium]

The Economist operates an inexpensive mobile app that costs far less than a full subscription to the magazine and only shares a handful of its stories a day. It now has 21,000 paying subscribers. [Press Gazette]

The Daily Mail launched a podcast to cover a famous trial in the UK, and it generated over 23 million downloads. Now it has 19 new shows in pre-production. [Press Gazette]

Overtime is a fascinating company operating in a crowded sports media space. It realized early on that the key to creating original content was launching its own sports leagues. That way it doesn't need to compete with the ESPNs of the world for broadcast rights. [Adweek]

"The stereotype that TikTok is for dancing, lip-synching teens is long out of date. The TikTok of today is more like a cable-TV giant or a streaming service crushed into an endlessly scrolling feed." [The Atlantic]

Want to pick my brain on your content strategy?

Are you contemplating a new content strategy and want someone to give you feedback? I’ve had more and more of my readers reach out and request consulting calls so they can pick my brain on a variety of issues, including platform optimization, content strategy, and monetization.

You can now book a call with me directly through Substack. Use the link below to grab a time on my calendar:

Book a meeting with Simon Owens Schedule a meeting

Book meeting

Want a daily dose of media industry news?

I only send this newsletter out twice a week, but I curate industry news on a daily basis. Follow me on one of these social platforms if you want your daily fix:

1. Substack Notes

2. Threads

3. My private Facebook group

4. LinkedIn

5. Bluesky