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

Which Hot Girl on TikTok Will Be Gen Z's Martha Stewart?

The holy grail for influencers is to sit at the intersection of cooking, fashion, and home decor. Not only does this make their channels extremely sponsor-friendly, but there's also ample opportunity to launch any number of consumer products that they can sell to their followers. Cookbooks, home accessories, makeup — the possibilities are endless. [The New Garde]

The Daily Wire eyes growth investment in 2025

The Daily Wire is now generating $200 million a year in revenue. "The company made more than $22 million on commerce sales in 2023. This year, it will make more than $20 million on its Jeremy's Razors business alone ... Mayflower Cigars, its cigar startup, has grossed $4.2 million in sales since it launched last November."

It's not surprising that it's launching more and more of its own products given advertisers' reluctance to appear next to highly-partisan content. [Axios]

“Sally’s baking addiction is MY addiction!!!!!!”

A hobbyist baker started blogging in 2011 about her ongoing attempts to make the perfect versions of her favorite baked goods. Today, the website is often the top search result on Google for hundreds of recipes. She's published three cookbooks and has over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. [Embedded]

How The Telegraph turns community into content

The Telegraph regularly dives into its own comments section and mines it for stories. This not only results in engaging content, but also creates a feedback loop where readers convert into paid subscribers so they can participate in the group discussions. [Journalism.co.uk]

Why Disney Is Plowing Cash Into a Cruise Line Expansion

Disney thinks there's a lot more revenue to be generated through its cruises line. Cruises provide a great way to exploit the company's IP since they offer a wider variety of destinations to families who might not want to return to Florida every single year. [WSJ]

How the Sunday Long Read newsletter built a thriving membership by curating longform journalism

The entire genesis of the Sunday Long Read newsletter can be traced back to a single tweet Don Van Natta Jr. sent out on November 23rd, 2014. By that point Van Natta, an investigative journalist at ESPN, had been tweeting out his favorite longform articles every Sunday for over a year, and a user named Francis Underwood responded by asking him whether he would ever consider launching a newsletter that rounded up his recommendations.

This wasn’t the first time Van Natta had received such a request. “Will likely begin a free email newsletter in January 2015,” he replied. “Stay tuned.” As it so happened, a Harvard senior named Jacob Feldman saw the exchange and jumped into the conversation. “DM me if you are looking for someone to help put it together for free... Your weekly suggestions have been my journalism education.”

A little over a month after that exchange, Van Natta and Feldman launched the first issue of the Sunday Long Read, a weekly newsletter that curates the best longform journalism published to the web. From the very beginning, the newsletter attracted a loyal fanbase, and over the next several years it expanded its purview to include a membership program, a rotating list of star guest editors, a podcast, and even its own original longform journalism.

In a recent interview, Van Natta and Feldman discussed how they make their article selections each week, what paying members get for their contributions, and why star reporters like Maggie Haberman agree to guest edit for the newsletter.

You can find the interview over here.

More quick hits

Jim Bankoff dishes on Vox Media's digital strategy and reveals 2024's toughest challenge and most pleasant surprise

Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff admits he was wrong in his long-held belief that premium journalism could remain free and entirely ad-supported. "I’m not sure throughout history it was ever possible, in the long term, for news publishers (beyond entertainment and lifestyle categories) to sustain strong newsrooms without a subscription component." [Status]

He Mocked the Rich on TikTok for Fun. Now He Can Get $30,000 Per Post.

This guy started going viral on TikTok by satirizing rich European 20-somethings, and now luxury brand advertisers want in on the act. [NYT]

Why Disney Decided to Tear Down the Walls Between Its Streaming Apps

I've always found it to be extremely strange that Disney chose to split its customer base into three separate apps instead of consolidating its IP into one mega app that offers everything spanning from live sports to family programming to prestige TV. Under its current configuration, it's practically begging customers to cancel their subscriptions when their favorite sport is off season or in between big franchise TV shows. [Vulture]

In news deserts, Trump won in a landslide

This is a bit reductive, but you could probably fix a lot of what's broken in this country by simply ensuring that we have at least one full-time local news journalist in every single county.

And there are only 3,143 counties in the US, so this is a problem that could be solved with about $300 million a year in funding. Not a bad price to pay for fixing a lot of society's ills. [Local News Initiative]

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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