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.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

Let’s jump into it…

Why a successful food creator quit her popular YouTube channel

From the outside, Carla Lalli Music’s YouTube channel seemed like a big success. She’d launched it in 2021 with the goal of promoting her new cookbook, and it eventually grew to over 200,000 subscribers and 17 million channel views. Not only did her cookbook make it to the New York Times bestseller list, but she was also able to find sponsors for most of her videos.

But behind the scenes, she kept struggling to justify all the time and resources she put into the YouTube channel. As she detailed in a recent essay, the videos barely broke even, and they prevented her from spending more time on other projects. Eventually, she hit a breaking point and decided to quit the YouTube channel cold turkey. Now, she spends most of the workweek focused on writing her newsletter and latest cookbook.

In a recent interview, we talked about her entry into food media, how she became a Bon Appétit YouTube star, and what it’s like to work as an independent creator.

You can watch our interview in the video below:

Want to be featured in an interview like this? Shoot me an email and tell me about your own media outlet.

Please don’t take my newsletter for granted

I rely on paid subscriptions for the vast majority of my revenue. Without enough paid subscribers, I can’t continue justifying spending 40+ hours a week on my newsletter and podcast, and I’ll need to shut them down so I can seek out other work.

Let me put this another way: if you’d be disappointed if I suddenly announced that I’m shutting down my newsletter — a very real possibility — then you should probably subscribe.

Seriously, it’s only $50 for a full year, and if you’re using insights from my content to improve your own business, then that $50 pays for itself. And if you use the link below, you get 20% off for the first year:

Get 20% off for 1 year

How a behind-the-scenes operator can scale a media business

Colin & Samir interviewed Johnny and Iz Harris about their journey building a media empire on YouTube.

Johnny Harris is rightly praised for being a brilliant creator, but an underrated key to his success was his wife Iz's decision to stop posting videos to her own YouTube channel and focus full-time on building the behind-the-scenes operations that allowed Johnny's journalism to scale. Their company now has a team of 25 that includes animators, researchers, editors, and even a full-time composer.

This just shows how having the right operator behind the scenes can significantly enhance a creator's reach and business. Johnny was able to bring one on much earlier than most simply because that operator was his wife — a dynamic that made it much easier for them to align their incentives, which included everything from finances to achieving work-life balance.

Why I abandoned Medium to focus on Substack

I recently sat down for a wide-ranging interview that covered topics like why I'm bullish on Substack Notes as a Twitter competitor, why I stopped publishing to Medium despite some early success there, and why a paid subscription strategy incentivizes a creator to super serve their audience.

Why media entrepreneurs keep “building in public”

Growth in Reverse published a good breakdown of how a self-help newsletter built a solid six figure business through a mixture of subscriptions and sponsorships.

One of her key strategies for growing an audience involved sharing radically transparent updates about her progress in building the business:

There are a few reasons Anne-Laure enjoys the concept of building in public:

1. You get early feedback from your audience about whether the thing you’re considering making is something they’ll need, like, or even want.

2. You’ll build a base of raving fans who will be more likely to share the final product because they’re invested in your work.

3. Building in public allows you to think through your work and better plan your next steps.

It’s all about feedback loops, and building in public is one of the better ways to do this.

I've seen more and more media entrepreneurs embrace the "build in public" ethos. To sum up what it is: basically the entrepreneur is radically transparent about what's going on behind the scenes as they build their media outlet. That not only involves talking about the successes and failures of various strategies, but also revealing actual revenue numbers.

Bloggers have been doing this stretching back to the mid-2000s — I remember interviewing several that published monthly "revenue reports" — but the trend is really picking up steam now that independent media is taking off.

There are a couple advantages to this strategy, the most important of which is that it's a veritable growth strategy in and of itself. Businesses usually hold their cards close to the chest, so there's a real information vacuum when it comes to the gritty details of what it takes to actually grow a startup.

There's also the argument that an audience becomes more emotionally invested in the success of the business if the owner is more open about their weaknesses and struggles. We all love the Hero's Journey of someone who starts from nothing and, through grit and hard work, overcomes all obstacles and ends up on top.

Even Fox News is vulnerable to cord cutting

This is interesting: for the first time, Fox revealed that Fox Nation has about 2.5 million paid subscribers. That might sound impressive, but some simple math shows that the company has lost far more revenue to cable cord cutters than it gained from its subscription service.

Since 2014, cable has lost at least 30 million subscribers. Fox News generates an estimated $2 a month per subscriber. That means that it's lost somewhere around $720 million a year due to cord cutters.

A Fox Nation subscription costs $4.99 a month. So at 2.5 million subscribers, that's $150 million in annual revenue. That's a $570 million deficit.

One thing I've been harping on for years is that Fox News makes $24 a year on every cable subscriber regardless of whether they actually watch the channel, so the best way for liberals to punish Fox News is to simply cut the cable cord. If you stop subsidizing Fox, then it loses much of its power and influence.

ICYMI: How Maria Brito used Instagram to build a 7-figure art consulting business

My other newsletter: The best longform journalism we consumed this week

Are you following me on social?

You can follow me on Substack Notes, Threads, my private Facebook group, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Twitter.

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Why don’t more publishers offer ad-free content to paid subscribers?

2. Why Twitch is under-monetized

3. Streaming TV is finally profitable

Let’s jump into it…

Why don’t more publishers offer ad-free content to paid subscribers?...