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…

Enjoy my newsletter and/or podcast?

By becoming a paid subscriber, you’ll help put food on my table:

Get 20% off for 1 year

Quick hits

Apparently giving off a stench of desperation in your fundraising emails can work at getting readers to pay for news. [Nieman Lab]

Back in the 2000s, there was this big effort to get the average internet user to start using RSS readers to consume content, but mainstream adoption of those tools never caught on. I kind of think the same rule will apply to the Fediverse: it's cool in concept but how many internet users will get on board? I mean, Mastodon still has a tiny user base despite tons of free press. [Digiday]

Some famous creators are resisting the "Beastification" of YouTube — refusing to leverage flashy edits or melodramatic thumbnails and just trusting audiences will show up anyway. [NYT]

Ben Thompson, one of the earliest paid newsletter pioneers and a key inspiration for the invention of Substack, just celebrated his 10th anniversary of launching Stratechery. [Substack]

The Washington Post is launching a pay-as-you-go system that behaves a lot like micropayments. "His offering isn’t about netting a few quarters and dimes from passersby, of course; it’s about getting their email addresses and credit cards and putting them in the marketing funnel, with the hope that they’ll subscribe down the line." [Puck]

Reese Witherspoon has become one of the most powerful forces in book publishing —not only able to catapult a title to the NYT bestseller list, but also to the big screen as well. [NYT]

An interview with Hasan Piker, who considers himself a Rush Limbaugh of the Left and streams eight hours a day for his 2 million Twitch subscribers. [Wired]

ICYMI: How the Geekout newsletter grew to 30,000 subscribers

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?

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