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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A quick programming note

One of the perks of writing this newsletter is that I sometimes get invited to travel to cool places to deliver talks. Next week I’ll be flying to Portugal to speak at the FIPP World Media Congress.

Why am I telling you this? Well, the first reason is to just give you a heads up that I probably won’t be posting much over the next two weeks. I plan to stick around after the conference ends and travel all over the country. I’ve never been to Portugal before, so I’m super excited.

The second reason has to do with the timing of the trip. I turn 40 on June 9th. It’s a big birthday for me, and naturally it has me reflecting on my life thus far and what I want to do with it over the next 40 years.

I started my first blog in 2003 when I was a freshmen in college, and by 2005 I was openly fantasizing about a career as a full-time creator. Of course, the term “creator” wasn’t in common usage at that point, and it wasn’t really a viable career path. There were a handful of bloggers who managed to achieve full-time status, but we were still at least a decade away from the worldwide explosion in creator-led businesses.

So with no other options available, I entered the traditional workforce after college. I started out as a newspaper journalist and later transitioned to digital marketing. While there were certain aspects of these jobs that I enjoyed, I never managed to achieve true career fulfillment in any of them, hence why I often moved on to a new job after only a year.

During all this time, I never wavered from my true calling: operating my own solo media business. On my nights and weekends I’d work on longform articles and podcast episodes. Every now and then one of my articles would go super viral, and it gave me just enough validation to keep going.

Flash forward to 2020, and the pandemic triggered a sudden slowdown in my client work. With a lot of extra time on my hands, I decided to take the plunge and launch a paid version of my newsletter. By the time those clients came crawling back, I was too invested in my new business venture. I turned them all down.

It’s been about four years since I made that decision, and I can say that they’ve been the most rewarding years of my life. I’m building the career I had fantasized about all the way back in 2005, and it’s just as fulfilling as I imagined it would be.

But from a financial perspective, it’s been grueling. During that first year, I don’t think I generated more than $10,000 in revenue. The situation has improved since then, but I still haven’t been able to replace my previous income.

Which brings me back to my 40th birthday. I absolutely love what I do now, and if my inbox is any indication, a lot of you love it too. I receive so many emails and comments each week from people who profess to be huge fans of my work. It continues to be great validation that I’m on the right path.

But validation alone isn’t enough anymore. In order to stay on this path, I need this newsletter to pay for my rent and my food and my healthcare and all my other miscellaneous needs. I need it to be a viable business that can support me in the coming decades.

So here’s my birthday wish: if you’re someone who opens every newsletter of mine, who utilizes the insights I provide here in their own careers, who roots for me to succeed and would be sad if I were to shut this newsletter down, then consider becoming a paid subscriber. I know you’re probably inundated with subscription requests all the time and it’s easy to become desensitized to them, but you’d really be making a huge difference in my life and your subscription would vastly increase the chances that my newsletter and podcast remain ongoing concerns.

For those interested, the button below will get you 20% off for your first year. Regardless of your decision, thanks so much for remaining a loyal reader, and I’ll see you again in two weeks!

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Were publishers overestimating the threat of Google’s AI?

The "Top Stories" box in Google search results is coveted by publishers because it sends a lot of traffic. Early tests indicate that when a user is searching about a current event, Google will display the "Top Stories" widget instead of a generative AI answer. That's at least good news for the publishers that are actually indexed by Google News:

Adams said that in his testing of several hundred queries he has never seen an AI Overviews response in a search result that generates a Top Stories box – the section at the top that is most coveted by news publishers.

His theory is that AI Overviews is “mutually exclusive” from the Query Deserves Freshness ranking function – meaning search results where Google deems the user wants up-to-date, new information, often triggering the Top Stories box.

TikTok continues to be a powerhouse for book sales

A book went viral on TikTok and not only sold over a million copies, but also drove hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions to the influencers who hyped it in their own videos:

The real creator of “The Shadow Work Journal” is Keila Shaheen, a 25-year-old writer from Texas with a background in marketing who self-published the book in 2021, and has since been crowned “the self-help queen of TikTok.”

After the journal blew up on TikTok, Shaheen went on to sell more than a million copies. Most of those — nearly 700,000 copies — were sold through the TikTok shop, and were marketed relentlessly by passionate influencers like Glay, who earn a 15 percent commission on each sale from Zenfulnote, Shaheen’s company.

The perils of unintended user journeys

I genuinely think Substack is a great platform. The one thing that sometimes frustrates me is that it’ll introduce user flows that I’m not even aware of until one of my readers alerts me.

For instance, one of my paid perks for subscribers is they get to book a half-hour introductory phone call with me. After they subscribe, they receive an automated email with a Calendly link they can use to book the call. At the same time, I also utilize Substack’s Meetings feature to sell one-off one-hour phone calls for $250 a pop (or $200 if you’re a paid subscriber).

Recently, one of my readers converted into a paid subscriber, and it then automatically took them to the Meetings page where it encouraged them to book a one-hour phone call with me. He thought I was doing a bait-and-switch where I offered a 30-minute phone call but then it turned out that all he got was a $50 discount for the hour-long phone call. And I wouldn’t have even known about it unless he had told me.

Anyway, I get that it’s hard for Substack to anticipate these sorts of problems and it’s trying to optimize the platform to maximize revenue for its creators. Still, I think there’s a lesson to be drawn here that every single creator builds their business in a unique way, and opaque design tweaks can have pretty big consequences when they clash with a carefully thought-out business strategy.

Facebook’s Tiktokification is working?

I absolutely hate Facebook's recommended posts from pages I don't follow — so much so that I actually installed a Chrome app that removes all of them — but apparently its introduction of non-friend content caused young people to start using the platform again:

Today, an average of 30% of the posts that people see in their Facebook Feed are suggestions from outside of their network, more than double the number from two years ago. Advertising revenue, meanwhile, was up 15% in 2023 compared with 2021.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Facebook is having a notable resurgence in user growth. Its audience in the US and Canada grew by 10 million people over 2022 and 2023. It didn’t add any net new users in 2021.

How The Guardian generated a massive amount of reader revenue without a paywall

Nieman Lab interviewed The Guardian’s managing director for its US vertical about how the newspaper generates so much reader revenue without a paywall:

Globally, reader revenue now generates more than a third of our revenue, and non-U.K. revenue is about 35% of our revenue. That has fundamentally changed the financial picture of The Guardian globally. Total U.S. reader revenue is approximately 18% of all global revenue, and U.S. reader revenue is about 30% of global digital reader revenue.

The power of news app push notifications

The most powerful and most influential journalists at the BBC used to be those that worked on its nightly news shows. Now it’s the person who sends out its mobile push notifications:

The BBC does not publish user numbers, but external research suggests about 12.6 million Britons have its news app installed. BBC newsroom sources say the actual number is higher and the assumption is that about 60% of users have notifications enabled. This means that on a conservative estimate, a typical push alert is reaching the phones of 7 million Britons – more than any other broadcast news bulletin in the UK.

Media curation is more popular than ever

The more we’re inundated with online content, the more we’re reliant on human curators to find the signal in the noise and pluck out the most important pop culture elements for us to consume. As someone who spends a significant portion of his week curating industry news, I can endorse this sentiment:

The archetypal influencer produces life-style porn of one form or another, playing up the aspirational glamour of their own home or meals or vacations. The new wave of curators is more outward-looking, borrowing from the influencer’s playbook and piggybacking on social media’s intimate interaction with followers in order to address a body of culture beyond themselves.

Complex Media gets back to what it’s good at

Complex just acquired a food festival and is launching an entire content vertical around it. It's good to see the company in expansion mode again now that it's been decoupled from BuzzFeed:

In addition to its events footprint, Family Style will serve as the foundation for Complex to rebuild its food vertical following the loss of Hot Ones and First We Feast.

One area of emphasis will be video, which will be a key focus for Complex more broadly. Family Style has history in the medium, having created and sold a show, Big Appetite, to Tastemade. By the end of the year, Complex hopes to launch 6-to-10 new video series, several of which will be Family Style branded.

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. )

Want a daily dose of media industry news?

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