Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my tech and media newsletter. If you've received it then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter camp, then you can subscribe over here. Or just click on this handy little button:

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Why it’s so hard to scale paid podcast subscriptions

More and more publishers are investing in podcasting, but, for the most part, they’re monetizing their podcasts with ads and live events. There’s a lot of experimentation occurring within the podcast space for offering paid subscriptions, but thus far the model has struggled to scale. [link]

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Other news:

A really interesting case study of a publication that decided to make audio versions of every single one of its articles, getting the journalists to read and record their own stories. The publication's audience loved it. [link]

800,000 people have opted into The Dallas Morning News's push notifications, and these notifications drive 4% of the site's traffic and 11% of returning visitors. [link]

An interesting approach to driving paid subscriptions. If you become a TechCrunch member, you get access to "$1,000 worth of Amazon Web Services credits, 100,000 Brex credit card reward points and six free months of customer support software Zendesk." [link]

Spotify continues to take pages out of Netflix's playbook. It recognizes that, in order to achieve worldwide dominance, it needs to launch original content native to each country, focusing heavily on emerging markets. [link]

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