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

Everything Is Bravo

Bravo has emerged as an entertainment powerhouse in the streaming era. It's one of the few cable networks Comcast isn't trying to unload, mostly because its reality programming drives extensive viewership on the Peacock app. To dismiss it as lowbrow reality TV is to ignore the massive fan base and brand loyalty it's amassed over the last two decades. [Ssense]

Ringtones have proved to be an immortal business. But who makes money off them is a mystery.

At their peak in 2007, ringtones generated $1.6 billion for the music industry. Now they're seeing a bit of resurgence — driven by downloads in developing countries — but it's unclear how much of the $20 million a year they generate are being paid out to the relevant rights holders. [Sherwood]

News outlets push vertical video to the homepage

It's becoming increasingly common for publishers to embed short, vertical videos within their articles. The idea is that these videos will keep audiences on the website longer while also driving greater reach on the publishers' TikTok and Instagram accounts. [Nieman Lab]

Taylor Swift Is a Perfect Example of How Publishing Is Changing

For the largest creators and celebrities, it's making less and less sense to publish their books through traditional publishing houses given that royalties are typically calculated at 10% of cover price. By cutting out the middleman and going the self-publishing route, they can take in at least 50% of the revenue generated by sales. [The Atlantic]

Streamer Kai Cenat earns millions, breaks Twitch subscriber record during 30-day livestream

Kai Cenat reached 727,000 paid subscribers last month on Twitch. Assuming that each subscriber pays an average of $4.99 per month, that's $3.6 million in monthly revenue and $43 million in annual revenue, at least before Twitch takes its cut. That's more than what most A-list celebrities make in a year, and it's not even counting his other income streams.

There are only a handful of digital media outlets that generate that much digital subscription revenue, so it's pretty amazing that this was accomplished by a solo creator. [CNBC]

Here we go: The Verge now has a subscription

A few years ago, The Verge launched a revamped home page that allowed its journalists to publish quick, social-media-like posts that linked out to other websites. The results: "The Verge’s homepage has always been the most popular single page at all of Vox Media, and now the average time spent on our homepage is more than six minutes."

Now, it's launching a subscription model that aims to keep most of its content still free to read. "Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay." Subscribers will also see a reduced advertising load. [The Verge]

Google search change hits publisher Black Friday e-commerce revenue

Several publishers that had hoped for significant Black Friday revenue via their affiliate content were up for a rude awakening. Google has been specifically punishing sites that license third-party product recommendation content. [Press Gazette]

How Living Cozy leveraged product reviews to build a successful ecommerce business

Ash Read remembers the first commission he ever earned on his product review blog: £9.37.

By that point, Read had been running LivingCozy.com — a website dedicated to household products — for about six weeks and didn’t have much to show for it. “There were multiple weekends where I sat writing about chairs and bar stools on a Saturday morning and wondered what I was doing,” he told me. He earned the commission when a reader clicked on a link to a bedding brand and made a purchase. “If you break that £9.37 down over an hourly rate for how much I'd put into the site, it really wasn't worth it,” he said. “But it gave me this belief that there was something here and that it could make money. That £9.37 felt way more amazing than receiving my paycheck at the end of the month, and even though it definitely wouldn't pay my mortgage or bills, it really spurred me on to keep going.”

This was back in mid-2020, a period when Read was still pulling information from other websites to populate his product pages. But as his traffic grew — mostly via Google searches — he started receiving inquiries from direct-to-consumer brands to see if they could send him products to review. This not only allowed him to produce his own original content — which supercharged his ranking in Google search results — but it also gained him access to special affiliate links that paid out much higher commissions than he was used to.

From there, Living Cozy saw explosive growth, eventually reaching 350,000 monthly pageviews and $15,000 in monthly revenue. By 2023, he employed an entire team of freelance reviewers and had direct relationships with the world’s largest home product brands. In August of this year, he sold Living Cozy to an undisclosed buyer.

How did Read manage to break into such a saturated market category that was already dominated by much larger websites? In a recent interview, we talked about his introduction to direct-to-consumer products, his clever use of search keywords, and how he coordinated the shipment of large pieces of furniture to reviewers all over the world.

You can check out the interview over here.

More quick hits

Ben Mezrich’s Foolproof Formula for Hollywood Success

If a movie you're watching is "based on a true story," there's a decent chance it was adapted from a book written by Ben Mezrich. He specializes in pumping out books that are ripped from the headlines and selling their IP to Hollywood studios.

“My dream was never to win the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award. It was to have the paperback come out with the little thing that says NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE.” [Vulture]

Tastemade Cooks Up a Recipe App to Engage Its 100,000 Subscribers

More and more publishers are launching mobile apps for the same reason they're resurrecting their print editions. It's a way to forge a more direct relationship with the most engaged subscribers. Someone is less likely to cancel a subscription if they're regularly opening up your app or print magazine than if they were simply perusing content on your website. [Adweek]

Here’s what Bloomberg, Yahoo and Reach are doing on WhatsApp Channels

Most publishers haven't incorporated Whatsapp into their audience development strategies — probably because it's still thought of as a one-to-one messaging platform — but its Channels feature is driving millions of pageviews for some large outlets. Of course, Meta has a well-documented history of turning on the traffic firehose whenever it's debuting a new tool only for it to pull back once publishers have become reliant on it. [DCN]

Journalists flock to Bluesky as X becomes increasingly 'toxic'

I think there's an argument to be made that journalists served as the life blood of Twitter; their presence made the platform feel like it was serving up a real-time feed of nearly all global events. Many journalists were reluctant to invest in growing their following on Threads due to Meta's avoidance of hard news, hence why Twitter/X remained relevant even as millions of liberal users abandoned it.

But now that Bluesky has attracted a critical mass of journalists onto its platform, I could see it becoming the defacto water cooler that Twitter once was. If that's the case, then it'll be interesting to see whether Twitter can maintain the cultural relevance that once made it so influential. [NBC]

Showtime’s Star-Studded Push to Be Cool Again

Showtime has lost some of its luster in recent years as other streamers muscled their way into the prestige TV market. Now it's trying to make a big splash with an English-language adaptation of a beloved French espionage series. [WSJ]

Ms. Rachel’s Improbable Journey From Toddler Whisperer to Holiday Toy Story

The YouTuber known as Ms. Rachel is the "Taylor Swift for toddlers." Or perhaps the more appropriate analogy would be that she's the new Mr. Rogers. Her videos regularly amass over 100 million views. Now she's partnering with a company to launch her own line of Mss Rachel toys. "Amazon and Target report that the toy has been flying off their virtual and physical shelves, and Walmart says it is the most successful presale for any toy line in company history." [NYT]

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.)

Want a daily dose of media industry news?

I only send this newsletter out twice a week, but I curate industry news on a daily basis. Follow me on one of these social platforms if you want your daily fix:

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