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

The Menopause Queen’s Gambit

A Texas-based doctor has grown to millions of followers on social media by creating content geared toward women going through menopause. She's published bestselling books and launched her own supplements company. — NYT

How Much Did A Creator With 55,000 Followers Make In A Week On TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program

What does the revenue share look like for videos that meet the requirements for TikTok's Creator Rewards Program? "Right now, my revenue per 1,000 qualified views (RPM) is $1.20." An RPM of $1.20 is nowhere close to great, but it's also a lot better than the rate TikTok paid out during its Creator Fund era, when creators would receive payouts of a few dollars for videos that generated millions of views. — Passionfruit

Why isn’t anyone covering this?

One of the consequences of having such a fragmented media landscape is that people are constantly claiming that important stories aren't receiving coverage when they actually are. Sometimes they even make this claim while linking to a mainstream media article about the issue. — Embedded

The food creator who has sold 1 million jars of salt

A YouTuber who catapulted into fame after appearing on Top Chef launched his own kitchen product line and has since sold over 1 million jars of fancy cooking salts. His "success here shows how creators are honing their niches and expertise to build a new generation of upstart consumer brands, extending their influence and income offline." — The Information

Dude Perfect's new Texas headquarters will also serve as a studio for YouTube creators

Dude Perfect, in its efforts to expand from a YouTube channel into a media empire, is building out an 88,000 sq ft production studio in Texas that it'll not only use to film its videos, but also rent out to other production companies. — Business Insider

How the Wonder Tools newsletter grew to 39,000 subscribers

There’s this saying that “those who can’t do, teach,” but Jeremy Caplan actually practices what he preaches. By day, he instructs on entrepreneurial journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and on his nights and weekends he writes Wonder Tools, a newsletter about the internet’s most useful websites and apps.

Jeremy launched Wonder Tools in 2020 and has since grown it to 39,000 subscribers, which is pretty remarkable considering he’s still running it as just a side hustle.

In a recent interview, he walked through all the strategies he uses to grow his audience, including how he partnered with Poynter to grow his initial subscriber base, how he collaborates and swaps recommendations with other newsletter writers, how he buys ads on other newsletters, and how speaking gigs at online and in-person events drive signups.

You can watch, listen to, or read the interview over here.

More quick hits

The Substack app is now the most powerful growth machine for creators

Substack's mobile app is "now the number one source of all subscriptions on the platform." It's outpaced the platform’s Recommendations tool for driving subscriptions.

"In the past month, recommendations drove 2 million subscriptions across the platform. The app drove 3 million. While other social media platforms penalize external links, discovery in the Substack app is now generating about the same number of subscriptions as all social media sources combined."

Anecdotally, I've noticed Substack Notes getting a ton of engagement. There are now millions of users opening the app to casually browse both shortform and longform content. The platform is driving all sorts of synergistic effects for its creators. — On Substack

The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture

Have you noticed there are more media outlets than ever that make recommendations for what to do or buy? "This recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations, which in the course of the past decade have taken over our digital platforms." — New Yorker

Democratising publishing

Ghost, an open source platform that's often touted as an alternative to Substack is generating $7.5 million per year and profitable. It got its initial funding from a 2013 Kickstarter campaign that raised $350,000. It has a full-time team of 30. — John O'Nolan

For Reach plc, Google Discover has offset search-driven traffic declines

For some publishers, traffic referrals from Google Discover — a personalized content feed that appears on the Chrome mobile homepage — is helping to offset declines in referrals from traditional search results. — Digiday

Snap, YouTube highlight strength in subscriptions

"Google reported that YouTube’s revenue from ads and subscriptions over the past four quarters crossed $50 billion for the first time, making YouTube bigger than Netflix by revenue."

That means YouTube paid out something to the tune of $25 billion to content creators in the last year. That's enough to pay $100,000 to 250,000 creators. And that's just YouTube's own revenue share; most professional creators on the platform diversify their revenue in multiple ways. The Creator Economy is huge and getting bigger. — The Information

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