Can local podcasts become profitable?

PLUS: How Michael Lewis became a nonfiction juggernaut

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:

If you’re already signed up and want to support the work I do here, the subscription link below will give you 10% off for your first year:

Let’s jump into it…

Fix your CMS and make Enterprise WordPress work at scale

The New York Times, CNN, Wired, Salesforce, Spotify, Sony: They all use WordPress to publish at scale.

The key is partnering with an agency that gets digital media. For more than a decade, today’s sponsor The Code Company has worked with publishers to erase technical debt, cut down development costs, and make tech stacks lean, fast, and flexible. 

"From the media side of FreightWaves, one of the most valuable ROI we’ve made was the work The Code Company did. It’s almost unmeasurable the amount of potential and growth we’ve unlocked." — Nick Torres, Director of Media Technology at FreightWaves

Contact The Code Company here to find out how they can help you turbocharge your tech.

How a newspaper columnist made a successful jump to an independent newsletter career

Lyz Lenz, a former newspaper columnist, wrote about hitting her three-year anniversary of launching a paid newsletter. It's always fun to read about traditional journalists who make successful jumps into the Creator Economy:

Three years later, my newsletter draws more traffic per day than the place I previously wrote for. It’s my primary source of income (though I still rely on book money). I’ve hired an editor and a podcast producer … I’ve built a Discord community and made space for an incredible community of people who care about the places so frequently flown over.

And I’ve learned a lot about media, money, and what it means to be a writer.

LinkedIn still actually wants to be in the news business

Earlier this week I noted that publishers have seen a sharp decline in referral traffic from platforms like Facebook and Twitter, mostly because those companies have made deliberate moves to siphon off that traffic. For slightly different reasons, both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have decided they no longer want to be in the news-delivery business.

You know who does still want to be in the news business? LinkedIn. At least that’s according to its editor-in-chief Daniel Roth:

The site’s content operations are overseen by Roth and a newsroom of 250 editors and writers, spread across 30 countries and 17 languages. The good news for media operators is that, unlike Facebook and Google, Linkedin is highly enthusiastic about the news business.

“News is essential to us,” Roth says. “You cannot get ahead in your business or your career without knowing what’s going on in the world. It is important that people be able to see headlines and in-depth stories and analysis that makes them better understand the world.”

“So you’re just going to see us increasingly find ways to be able to support newsrooms and high-quality news content and journalists, and make sure that they’re being successful on Linkedin, because we think it’s really important,” Roth says.

I’ve certainly spoken to media operators who cited LinkedIn as their biggest source of social traffic, but I still get the sense that the vast majority of publishers — even business publishers — aren’t seeing much traction on the platform. Despite having nearly 60k followers there, for instance, I’ve never been able to drive much of an audience to my newsletter, and I’m not sure why that is.

Do you live in the Washington, DC area?

I like to regularly organize group dinners and other social gatherings with media operators who live in this city. Sometimes I make a reservation at a restaurant and other times I’ll have folks over to my own house for cocktails and snacks. If you’d like to be invited to future get-togethers, then shoot me an email and I’ll add you to my spreadsheet.

WhatsApp isn’t just for personal messaging

Apparently some publishers are successfully leveraging WhatsApp to drive traffic back to their websites:

At the time of writing Reach has 80 Whatsapp Communities with around 100,000 subscribers delivering several million pages views per month and additional in-app video views.

The open rate for messages shared via Whatsapp Communities is, according to Reach engagement director Daniel Russell, around 90%.

Can local podcasts become profitable?

Nieman Lab reports that The Athletic has shuttered most of its local sports podcasts:

Let’s look at The Athletic’s coverage of the NBA, which has 30 teams. The Athletic has three national podcasts — No Dunks, The Athletic NBA Show, and Game Theory Podcast — that remain active. The Athletic’s website lists nine local NBA podcasts, including three covering the San Francisco-based Golden State Warriors. Of those nine local podcasts, only three are left standing (and two of ’em cover the Warriors).

Podcasts covering the Detroit Pistons, Dallas Mavericks, Brooklyn Nets, Golden State Warriors, Philadelphia 76ers, and Boston Celtics have all gone dark. Other local NBA podcasts, including Jurassic Pod covering the Toronto Raptors, have also been canceled since launching, but no longer appear on The Athletic’s site.

I haven't seen many local podcast success stories. They often don't have enough scale to attract national advertisers, and most local businesses aren't sophisticated enough in their ad buying to target podcast listeners.

That’s not to say there aren’t any local podcasts that found sustainable business models. In 2021 I wrote about Daily Detroit’s success through a mixture of local sponsorships and memberships. I also covered an Ohio sports podcast’s success with getting its listeners to subscribe to a text messaging service. And of course City Cast has been busy experimenting with whether it could pair local newsletters with podcasts, though I have no idea if it’s reached profitability yet.

Can Spotify move the needle on audiobook listening?

Spotify announced this week that paying subscribers in certain countries will receive up to 15 hours of free audiobook streaming per month. Bloomberg published a good breakdown of how this differs from the traditional audiobook purchasing ecosystem:

Unlike Audible, which relies on a credit system and essentially offers one audiobook per month for $15, Spotify is opting for hours. Theoretically, someone can sample various books with their 15 hours, or dedicate that time to a single title …

… This also varies from Spotify’s fellow Swedish audio business Storytel, which offers unlimited listening. That feature is why publishers like Penguin Random House pulled their titles from the service, as well as from Scribd in the US. It’s also probably why Spotify, with its strict limits, was able to secure the participation of top publishers.

Spotify’s initial foray into audiobooks was pretty boring, given that it only allowed you to purchase them in an ad hoc fashion and you couldn’t even pay within the app.

It'll be really interesting to see whether Spotify can move the needle on audiobook listening. The question that’s still unanswered is how it pays for all of this content in the long-term; right now, it offers 15 hours of audiobook streaming to premium subscribers, but based on what I've read Spotify pays out 70 cents of every dollar it makes from subscriptions to music rights holders, and I doubt those rights holders are keen on giving up their piece of the pie.

Will Spotify ultimately launch a separate subscription product for audiobooks? Will it introduce advertising in some way? These are the thorny issues it needs to figure out, but I wouldn’t underestimate its chances given how quickly it muscled its way into the podcast market. There’s lots you can accomplish when you already have hundreds of millions of monthly users.

Do you sell a product targeted toward marketers, media executives, or professional creators?

What a coincidence! That’s exactly who reads my newsletter. You can find out how to advertise to them over here.

How Michael Lewis became a nonfiction juggernaut

This is a great profile of Michael Lewis that dives deep into his reporting process and how he chooses his book subjects:

These books do such tremendous business that Lewis changes people’s lives merely by watching and writing about them. It doesn’t even need Brad Pitt to play you in the movie adaptation, as happened with Billy Beane, the baseball manager in Moneyball. The book causes commotion enough. Katsuyama, thrust into a circuit of CNBC appearances and Senate testimonies after Flash Boys came out, said with a grimace: “That variety of fame was not something I needed.” But it has its upsides. IEX received its licence to operate within two years, whereas without Flash Boys, he said, “I’m not sure we’d have ever gotten approved”. Surprisingly often, one of Lewis’s characters – as he calls them, and as they think of themselves – will put him in touch with more people to write about. I came to think of this as the Michael Lewis ecosystem – a rarefied, overwhelmingly male network within American society.

ICYMI: How Josh Spector monetizes his 25,000 newsletter subscribers

He generates revenue through a mixture of consulting, advertising, and paid subscriptions.

Let’s take this relationship to the next level

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:

1. Substack Notes

2. Threads

3. My private Facebook group

4. LinkedIn