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Quick hits

You may have already noticed this, but I’ve been upping my game on YouTube and recently hit 1,000 subscribers there. If you’re interested in watching interviews with the world’s most successful media entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses — and I suspect you are — then you should definitely subscribe: [Simon Owens]

Daily Kos was one of the OG netroots blogs that helped usher Obama into the White House. For years, it's run a vertical that tracks the down ballot races that are often ignored by national media, and now it's spinning that vertical off into its own subscription publication. To start with, it's keeping all of its content free and hopes to reach 5,000 subscribers at $60 a year. [Daily Kos]

Sports broadcasting rights are extremely expensive and unlikely to be profitable for streaming companies in the short term, but those platforms hope that live sports will get subscribers through the door and then "they’ll stick around and watch other content once they’ve made the commitment to spending money." [CNBC]

Why do legacy media outlets keep relaunching their print publications? Not because it'll drive direct revenue, but instead to elevate the brand in a crowded media market. This has become especially important as these outlets focus more and more on generating reader revenue. [NYT]

Ryan Kaji started out his YouTube career as a 4-year-old unboxing toys. Now his family runs a veritable media empire that includes a $1 billion toy line and a theatrically-released movie. [Hollywood Reporter]

How did Chris Cillizza reach 3,000 paid subscribers on Substack after being laid off from CNN? "Want to take a guess on which sorts of pieces drive the most paid subscribers to this newsletter? It’s NOT the political ones. It’s the ones where I write about more personal things — from my quest to find faith to the challenges of male friendship to why I love independent bookstores." [Chris Cillizza]

A fun profile of a professional dancer who paired TikTok viral memes with creative dance routines. [NYT]

The New York Times gets plenty of praise for its subscriptions success, but another amazing feat is that millions of people — including me — specifically go to Wirecutter whenever they're preparing to make any large purchase. That kind of brand affinity is incredibly valuable, especially in a media ecosystem where every publisher is trying to branch into ecommerce. [Axios]

How the Daily Upside grew to over 1 million subscribers

One of the best insights Patrick Trousdale had when growing his finance newsletter The Daily Upside was that he didn’t need to go it alone. With his deep background in the finance industry, he knew he could create a high quality editorial product, and he also knew he’d have a much easier time growing it if he teamed up with an outlet that had an already-existing audience.

That’s how he ended up partnering with The Motley Fool, a venerable media brand that was looking to diversify its portfolio. After the Motley Fool started promoting The Daily Upside to its email list, the latter was able to quickly scale up its operations and revenue. Today, it has over 1 million email subscribers and employs an entire editorial team.

In a recent interview, Patrick walked through all his growth strategies, including how he convinced The Motley Fool to partner with him, how he works with finance influencers to drive signups, where he invests in paid acquisition, and how he collects first party data to measure the value of his audience:

So with certain other scaled newsletters, we definitely find really high quality subscribers who fit our target demographic, which has evolved significantly over time and become more precise. I'd say in the early days, the Motley Fool was the elephant in the room. For us, it was how we grew our audience from, you know, 10,000 to 80,000 subscribers. And then we parlayed that audience into revenue, right? We had an investing focus, higher net worth readership, these are more senior business decision maker types. And it was fairly easy back in 2020 and 2021 to sell newsletter ads. And we quickly parlayed that revenue into marketing to grow the audience further. I'd say in the beginning, we stuck to the channels that we were familiar with. So influencers who were talking about business and finance and economics on YouTube, on Instagram, and other newsletters.

More quick hits

The science fiction author John Scalzi published a fascinating breakdown of his book sales. The biggest takeaway is that it's hugely beneficial for a novelist to have a large back catalogue of books still in print so that every new fan can be monetized more effectively. [Whatever]

Steamy romance used to be looked down upon in the publishing industry, relegated to $3 mass market paperbacks. But now the category is considered mainstream, with some of the top authors boasting huge fandoms. [The Cut]

Here’s another example of a star journalist unlocking their pent-up value after leaving mainstream media and launching an independent outlet: Nate Silver has over 10,000 paying subscribers and is "making more money than he ever has in his career." [New York]

Social media has entered a "lean back" era where the average user is less focused on interacting with friends and is instead opening the app to be entertained. Most of the content we see now comes from either full time content creators or people who aspire to be full time content creators. [Posting Nexus]

Congress built its own secret recording studios inside the Capitol building, and right wing lawmakers are increasingly using them to create their own content, often in an effort to bypass the mainstream media. [CJR]

Back when we all subscribed to cable, we spent much of our TV time watching old syndicated reruns of shows. Tubi has basically filled that void for cord cutters, many of whom are attracted to the platform because it's free and doesn't require a login. [NYT]

"The number of Substack journalists in news and politics making more than $1 million has doubled over the past year — and is now in 'double digits,' the company says." [Axios] If you look back to a decade ago, how many political columnists/journalists were making north of $1 million per year? The Creator Economy is unlocking the pent-up value that many star journalists created for the media outlets they previously worked for.

Don’t take my newsletter and podcast for granted

Yes, this newsletter does occasionally have sponsors, but currently they make up a tiny fraction of my revenue. Without robust support from paid subscribers, my newsletter and podcast won’t be sustainable.

So far, I’ve been able to say no to all the recruiters who have approached me about full-time roles, but there may come a day when I can’t justify turning them away. When that happens, I may have to shut my newsletter and podcast down, or at least significantly dial back their publication schedule.

There’s only one way to prevent this: become a paid subscriber. Seriously, it’s only $100 for a full year, and if you’re using insights from my content to improve your own business, then that $100 pays for itself. And if you use the link below, you get 20% off for the first year:

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