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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Quick hits

With social media and Google sending less and less traffic, news outlets are increasingly relying on their homepages to build habits for with audiences. The Washington Post has revamped its homepage so that editors can feature more stories at the top. [CNN]

Why do you suddenly see so much standup comedian "crowd work" videos in your social media feed? These comedians need to pump out content to build up their following, but they don't want to give away their best jokes that will eventually show up in an hour-long special. [GQ]

"Young people, some not even old enough to vote, are raking in thousands of dollars a month through [political livestream battles]. They debate who people should vote for and fight about the candidates’ policies and views on social issues." [Taylor Lorenz]

Amazon single handedly popularized self-published ebooks with the launch of the Kindle. Now it's trying to do the same with audiobooks, which historically had a higher barrier to entry: "96% of self-published, written titles on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service still do not have audiobook companions." [Bloomberg] The jury's still out, however, on whether consumers will embrace AI-generated voice recordings.

RealSelf is a marketplace for finding cosmetic surgeons, but it also has an incredibly robust media arm with 3 million newsletter subscribers and hundreds of thousands of social media followers. I love it when I come across companies that merge product and media so seamlessly. [Adweek]

How Colossus built one of the largest investing-focused podcast networks

When Patrick O’Shaughnessy launched his podcast Invest Like the Best in 2016, he had no intention of building it into a media company. He just wanted to use it to interview the world’s best investing minds so that he could deepen his own understanding of the industry. But the show proved to be a huge hit, attracting some of the biggest names in finance. By 2020, he and a few co-founders launched Colossus, an investing-focused podcast network that now produces more than a half dozen shows across various finance niches.

In a recent interview, Colossus CEO Matt Reustle explained the vision behind the network, how it develops and promotes new shows, and why the company hasn’t yet launched video versions of its podcasts:

We are the last podcasters in the world that don’t do video, which is... uh, partially there's a variety of different reasons for that. One, I mentioned the cost, which again, it is not something that's too difficult to do. As you have this set up right now, we record on Riverside. It would be very simple to record the videos. We have done some clips that we posted on social media. We didn't really see a tie to whether it was increasing the audience size. It certainly increased engagement on Twitter. But it was, again, more of a spray and pray approach. We couldn't put our finger on what was going to work versus what wasn't. And it just seemed like a repetition thing that took up quite a bit of time. And we ultimately decided if we're going to do video, we're going to think about doing it in a very specific way. And when we have the time and the investment that we want to put into it to do it. But all of that is not to say that video is not a successful way to build a business or anything else.

More quick hits

This is a detailed breakdown of how the Evening Standard worked with a travel company to produce a branded podcast it then ran in its main podcast feed. What's particularly notable is how the newspaper integrated the podcast into its website and social media accounts to aid in its discovery. [Media Voices] FROM THE ARTICLE: "The multi-channel campaign paid off in terms of listener numbers for the podcast, which were up nearly 20% on the Standard’s daily figures ... By the end of the campaign, all six episodes had become the most downloaded of all time."

Many of the biggest YouTube stars are investing heavily in their paid streaming services as a way to diversify away from YouTube: “Our company was operating at a loss for essentially two years. We got to a point where it cost more money for us to make the shows our audience loved than we got in from YouTube." [CNBC]

Record labels regularly put pressure on Billboard and other data charting companies to change their rankings for music sales: "Chart position is irrelevant, financially speaking. If you sell 300,000 units of an album, it doesn’t matter if you open second or first. But it matters a lot to label executives (and some artists) who see this as a sign of their stature." [Bloomberg]

The New York Times went extremely deep on the rise and fall of Bob Chapek as Disney's CEO. One of my biggest takeaways from the piece is that a single column from Ben Smith — who was then the NYT's media columnist — drove a wedge so large between Chapek and Bob Iger that their relationship never recovered. If Chapek had simply ignored the Smith column, he might still be Disney's CEO today. [NYT]

THIS IS INTERESTING: A new sports news site launched with a homepage that almost always links out to other sources. It's as if the Drudge Report had modern web design. [Semafor]

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. )

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