Semafor proved the haters wrong
Semafor proved the haters wrong
PLUS: Are billionaires wasting their money on legacy print newspapers?
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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Let’s jump into it…
Quick hits
A Q&A with Semafor founders Ben and Justin Smith on the outlet's second birthday
“Over the past two years, [Semafor] has expanded to a team of over 80 staff members, amassed 750,000+ newsletter subscribers, averaged 3 million to 6 million monthly unique visitors, produced more than 100 global events, and forged advertising partnerships with 65 companies.”
Prior to Semafor’s launch, there was lots of skepticism about its ambitions to compete with some of the world’s biggest media organizations, but it’s actually stayed fairly lean, focusing on just a handful of reporting beats. This allowed it to keep its burn rate low as it captured an influential audience that advertisers want to reach. — Status
Costco Has a Magazine and It’s Thriving
Costco's in-house magazine "is delivered to more households across the United States than Better Homes & Gardens, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic combined." It mostly focuses on consumer service journalism, though plenty of A-list celebrities clamor to be featured on its cover. It only accepts advertising from participating Costco sellers. — NYT
YouTuber Markiplier Got Passes From Everyone in Hollywood — So, He Made a Hit His Way
Markiplier has 37 million YouTube subscribers and starred in one of the most popular narrative podcasts of all time, and yet he STILL couldn't get Hollywood interested in producing a TV adaptation of that podcast. So he financed the series himself, and now it's sitting at the top of Amazon Prime's "most watched" chart. — Hollywood Reporter
Yahoo Sports Launches New Combat Sports Franchise, Uncrowned, Spotlighting Ariel Helwani
Yahoo's made a big investment in launching a video sports podcast network that will not only be distributed on its own verticals, but also on YouTube, Professional Fighters League, DAZN, and ESPN+. It seems like a cross between The Ringer and ESPN: "The personalities of each show make frequent appearances on other Uncrowned programs, creating a familiar cast of recurring figures in the style of The Howard Stern Show." — Adweek
How to manage an actual online community platform, with Oprah Daily’s Pilar Guzmán
Oprah Daily launched something called the Oprah Insider Community — a $55 a year membership that not only grants access to member-only content but also allows users to interact with each other on topic-specific forums ranging from weight loss to menopause. It's staffed with a team of paid moderators to ensure that the quality of the discussion remains high. — Digiday
Why the Toronto Star sees micropayments as a key part of subscriber acquisition
It's interesting that the few publishers that are experimenting with micropayments don't see them becoming a major revenue generator; instead, they're viewed as a customer acquisition tool — a way to get someone's credit card info and email address into a database so they can be upsold on a subscription. — Media Voices
How Political Wire built its successful subscription offering
When Taegan Goddard launched a paid subscription product for his blog Political Wire, he had been running the site for close to 16 years. By that point, the site was attracting millions of pageviews per month and generating a healthy amount of revenue through advertising. But Taegan had long wanted to diversify his monetization and create a product for his most loyal readers.
So he installed Memberful and announced the membership to his audience. At first, members got access to extra content, but over the next few years Taegan rolled out more and more member perks. Today, Political Wire members get access to op-eds, extra newsletters, a podcast, and an ad-free experience.
In a recent interview, Taegan walked through every aspect of his subscription product including how he announced it to his audience, what he does to drive conversions, which perks are most highly valued by his subscribers, and how he reduces his churn rates.
You can watch, listen to, or read the interview over here.
More quick hits
TikTok Wants to Be Your Next Manufacturing Partner
The Creator Economy plays a hugely influential role in driving product sales, and TikTok is trying to capitalize on this trend by connecting creators to manufacturers — all in an effort to gain more ecommerce market share via TikTok Shop. — Publish Press
The New Netflix Movie Strategy: Make Better Movies
Netflix can't seem to shake its reputation in Hollywood as being a company that overpays for mediocre movies helmed by A-list stars. Now it's shifting its strategy to be more selective in its film projects and develop more of them in-house. — Bloomberg
Cable Companies Have Another Cord-Cutting Problem: Broadband
When I canceled my cable subscription for Comcast, the company just started jacking up my broadband price until I was paying almost what I'd paid for cable. Glad to see these monopolies finally getting some competition. — Bloomberg
Meet the Florida Billionaire Who Wants to Be a Newspaper Baron
If I were a billionaire who wanted to invest in local news, I just don't think I would ever put my money into a legacy newspaper business. That money would get so much more mileage with lean digital media startups that aren't weighed down by the top-heavy infrastructure that plagues most newspapers. — NYT
How to Substack
Former Gawker writer Max Read celebrates his third year on Substack and gives advice to creators who want to succeed on the platform: "Before you start the Substack you need to ask yourself: Can I put a couple thousand words out on the internet under my name every week? Even when there’s no news? On a slow week in the middle of July, can I pull 1,200 relatively lively words out of my ass by Friday?" — Read Max
Can the Media Survive?
"What is one main way The Atlantic and other serious publications drive subscriptions? They buy ads on Facebook.” — Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic
That’s a great quote to illustrate how thoroughly the tech platforms beat publishers at delivering relevant, effective advertising. — New York
Here’s another great quote from the piece:
“It is a great time to be in the excellent-journalism business, and it’s a shitty time to be in the mediocre-journalism business. I think there is a great business in hit-driven journalism — the biggest scoop, the biggest investigative story, maybe the top 20 percent of what great journalists and news organizations are doing,” says The Information’s Jessica Lessin.
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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