How an economics newsletter reached 35,000 subscribers on Substack

PLUS: The Creator Economy is huge

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:

Let’s jump into it…

Walter Isaacson’s rise as a star biographer

You’ve probably heard that there’s a new biography of Elon Musk out. New York magazine profiled Walter Isaacson, the writer of that biography, and explained how he became one of the leading practitioners of the genre:

“Thirty years ago, there was a powerful room of magazine editors and network anchors, and that’s Walter. He is one of the emperors in that room. That room is destroyed. A new room was built, and it has the Steve Jobses and Elon Musks of the world. Walter knows he is not one of them, but he wants to be in the room. So now he’s the scribe to the new emperors, and that makes him very happy.”

The Creator Economy is huge

Online payment company Stripe published a new report attempting to quantify the size of the Creator Economy:

In 2021, we aggregated data from 50 popular creator platforms on Stripe and found they had onboarded 668,000 creators who’d received $10 billion in payouts. We refreshed that data in 2023 and found something surprising: the creator economy is still growing about as fast as it was in 2021. Today, those same 50 creator platforms have onboarded over 1 million creators and have paid out over $25 billion in earnings.

That's an average of $25k per creator, and that's just the payments coming through Stripe. The Creator Economy is huge and growing larger by the day.

How an economics newsletter reached 35,000 subscribers on Substack

Economics writer Joseph Politano recently celebrated his newsletter’s first anniversary and explained how he was able to build a full-time career by focusing on data analysis:

For me, the fact that this newsletter has been able to thrive amidst an extremely difficult environment for the broader news industry is a vindication of the model and philosophy I built Apricitas on. In my launch post, I said that “in the modern world, news is cheap, but analysis is more valuable than ever before,” and that my goal was to deliver the kind of detailed data and information you weren’t going to be able to find in traditional newspapers. In particular, there is a fundamental tension in data journalism between data—which demands careful and thorough analysis—and journalism—which demands rapid publication of news-cycle-chasing pieces—and I sought to build a home squarely on the data side.

How a data analytics startup took Hollywood by storm

I love reading about information products that don't resemble traditional media companies, so I enjoyed this profile of Parrot Analytics:

Parrot's core product is its demand platform that it says provides a holistic view of audiences' engagement with and interest in a TV show — using social conversation, streams, search traffic, and other signals. With subscriptions starting at $99 per month, Parrot wants to make its products accessible to individual creators who might be priced out of Nielsen, which is geared toward big companies.

With some 150 employees, Parrot has raised $18 million from investors and is profitable, according to Seger. Its clients span the entertainment ecosystem, with names like Disney, CAA, Amazon's Prime Video, and Legendary.

Debunking claims that the Creator Economy is in decline

I’ve seen a lot of bad tech punditry lately that’s tried to link the health of the Creator Economy to the decline of VC funding for Creator Economy startups. Hunter Walk published a good piece explaining why this is such a silly metric:

I judge the health of the creator economy by one single controversial factor: ease of access and probability of survival for its participants. That is, if you are someone who wishes to earn a minimum viable living being creative, what is the likelihood you’ll be able to do so? A singer who wants to sing. An animator who wants to draw. A comedy troupe who wants to make you laugh. A writer who wants to blog about culture. With the question – can I figure out how to make enough money to keep doing this?

My bold statement is that there has never been a better time for Creators by that objective function ,,, It might be harder than ever to earn $1 million/year as a creative but it’s never been easier to make $50,000.

Yes. Tech pundits like to throw cold water on the Creator Economy by claiming there's no "middle class" of creators, but the creator middle class is the largest it’s ever been in human history. And it's only going to get larger.

How Lenny’s Newsletter grew to 500,000 subscribers

Lenny Rachitsky reflects on what it took to get to 500,000 newsletter subscribers:

You may feel like there are a billion newsletters out there—how can you possibly break through? I felt the same way when I started. It turns out that 99% of the content in the world is not very good. There’s always room for, and interest in, better content. You just need to rise above what’s already out there. And that takes work.

Leveraging ChatGPT to drive audience engagement

A news outlet used ChatGPT to write short summaries of its articles, then placed the summaries at the top of its articles. 74% of respondents said the summary made them more likely to read the article:

VG’s article summaries have a small blurb at the top of the article; then users click a button to see the entire summary. The summaries are created using OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 model, which generates eight different summaries for each article …

…VG’s tool for creating articles automatically generates summaries. An article summary field appears at the top of the article, and journalists can generate a summary by pushing a button … Now, once AI creates a summary, the journalist becomes responsible for reading and approving a summary — and making any needed edits.

Want a daily dose of media industry news?

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