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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As someone who writes for a living about the media industry, I’m constantly astonished by how much discussion of the various media sectors is siloed. For instance, it’s still common to read articles about the late night talk show wars that focus entirely on TV Nielsen ratings and don’t mention once that these shows have massive distribution on YouTube and other platforms. 

The same can be said for the Creator Economy, which is almost always treated as something completely separate from traditional media. Never mind that creators are competing with media companies on everything from advertising spend to subscriptions, they’re still treated as these strange curiosities, as if hundreds of millions — if not billions — of consumers aren’t relying on them heavily for their entertainment and news. Publishers love to point to Meta and Google as the villains that took away their ad dollars, but creators are collectively pulling down tens of billions of dollars in sponsorships and advertising — money that in the pre-internet age would have gone to newspapers, magazines, and TV networks.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I was recently invited to Portugal to speak at the FIPP World Media Congress, an annual conference organized by a consortium of magazine publishers. The title of my talk was “Creators: A threat or opportunity to big media?” and it ended up being a discussion between me and a journalist named Charlotte Ricca.

Charlotte was gracious enough to provide me with her questions in advance, and to prepare for the discussion I typed up all my answers — not because I planned to read them out, but because I thought the act of doing so would help me commit my talking points to memory.

I thought the talk went extremely well, and while I don’t have the video to share with you, I do have the answers I typed out. And given how much they align with a lot of the themes I write about in this very newsletter, I’ve decided to publish them here.

Below are Charlotte’s questions followed by my answers:

The general narrative around the Creator Economy is that it’s a threat to legacy media. Is this justified?

I don’t think it’s a threat, but I do think the traditional media underestimates the Creator Economy. You hear publishers talk about platforms like Facebook and Google as if they’re these bogeymen that are siphoning away ad dollars, but there are tens of billions of dollars in sponsorships going to creators. YouTube alone is paying out over $20 billion in revenue share to its creators, and they’re likely selling billions of dollars of sponsorships on top of that. Indie newsletters and podcasts are getting better and better at selling ads. There are lots of bootstrapped media companies that are getting great at ecommerce.

On the subscription side, Substack alone is now overseeing 3 million paid subscribers. Patreon is paying $1 billion a year in subscription revenue to creators. The Creator Economy is competing with the media for both attention and revenue. It’s time to stop thinking of it as a separate industry.

As an independent creator yourself, what do you think are the main drivers behind the Creator Economy?

I think the two biggest drivers are creative independence and unlimited financial upside. There are a lot of entrepreneurial journalists out there who have built their own personal brands and recognize that they’re undervalued in their traditional media jobs and that they can take home 100% of the revenue they generate if they either go it alone or partner up with other like-minded journalists.

You have been creating your own content since you wrote your first blog post in 2003 at college. But it wasn’t until 2020 that you decided to monetize your content. Why did you wait that long?

When I started out, the monetization tools just weren’t there. Back in 2005, there wasn’t a great way to take in recurring subscriptions, and the ad market was still small. The only bloggers that were able to make a full time living achieved massive scale — sites like BoingBoing and Talking Points Memo and Gawker. If you were a blogger with a small but devoted audience, you could only really generate side income. Since then, we’ve seen the rise of influencer marketing on the ad side and then tools like Substack and Patreon, so it’s a lot easier to monetize a small, devoted audience...