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

If you’re not subscribed to my YouTube channel, then you’re missing out on my interviews with the world’s most successful media entrepreneurs: [Simon Owens]

Tucker Carlson's video streaming network claims to have 400,000 paid subscribers; that means it's generating upwards of $28 million in subscription revenue. [NYT]

The genius of US News & World Report's rankings is that it ranks institutions across dozens of categories so that virtually every organization is guaranteed to rank highly in at least one category. It then sells that institution a license to include the US News logo in its marketing materials. Multiply this across hundreds of colleges, hospitals, law schools, and other industries, and you end up with an extremely robust brand licensing business. [NYT]

More and more publishers are finally moving into the paid podcast space. I was always surprised that they held off from moving their shows behind a paywall considering how focused they all were on growing subscription revenue. [Axios]

"Social’s share of traffic to the 700 U.S. news sites that are Chartbeat clients has dropped by a third since January 2023, from 6% then of all traffic then to 4% of all traffic now." [Nieman Lab] It wasn't that long ago when publishers were regularly bragging that social media — mostly Facebook — accounted for up to 40% of their traffic. What an incredible paradigm shift.

Business Insider launched a smart paywall that "determines the content that individual users are most likely to pay to access based on their previous reading habits, which platform they come to the website from and the propensity that each genre of content has for converting readers." This resulted in 60% of paid conversions occurring on articles that, under the previous system, wouldn't have been placed behind a paywall. [Digiday]

Forbes Marketplace monetizes with affiliate links and is incredibly profitable due to its high rankings within Google search, but Forbes itself only owns 40% of it. "The rest of the business was divided between executives who helped build it (50%), as well as members of Forbes' management team (10%)." [Axios]

Hollywood executives are increasingly placing big bets on online creators, but there’s no magic formula for picking which social media stars will translate well to traditional TV: “The fixation on numbers is probably the thing that is hindering growth. It is so easy to look at a TikTok account with 30 million, 40 million, 100 million followers, and assume that means a success, which it does not. There are so many variables that come into play. You have to really understand what the audience wants and what the conversation in culture is at that moment to understand what is gonna translate into a longer-form series.” [The Information]

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