How to drive paid subscriptions without a paywall
PLUS: Medium is tweaking its author payouts in an attempt to incentivize more high quality writing.
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
“It used to be somebody would Google a question about a celebrity and they would get ten links, one of which might be Bustle. Today, they’re getting the answer directly on Google and have no need to click out to the open web. … it’s been a slow decline with Google over the course of four or five years.” [Press Gazette]
Sports coverage used to be produced mainly at the local level, but it's increasingly become nationalized as local newspapers shrank their sports desks. [Second Rough Draft]
"Bloomberg Media CEO Scott Havens told me … that events are about a quarter of Bloomberg’s business. Getting groups of like-minded people together in person is now more of a flex than bragging about your ComScore uniques." [The Rebooting]
Medium is tweaking its author payouts in an attempt to incentivize more high quality writing. The last time I wrote about Medium, I noted that its author payout system was incentivizing writers to churn out high volumes of clickbait and that this was probably alienating writers who actually took the time to hone their craft. [Medium]
"The toilets popped up on our radar a few months ago when we noticed that channels making this content were some of the fastest growing on YouTube. Each new video handily clears 10 million views in 24 hours and last month the main channel pumping these out, DaFuq!?Boom!, had more new subscribers than MrBeast’s." [Garbage Day]
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 covers. 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
If you want a sense of the kinds of folks I like to interview, check out my podcast archive.
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. )
The products that Noah Davis, the co-founder of Three Point Four Media, can’t do without
Noah started out his career as an editor for Media Bistro, a news site geared toward media professionals, and later moved on to freelancing full time. In 2017, he and another freelancer named Bill Bradley launched Three Point Four Media, an editorial studio that creates content on behalf of brands. “We saw an increasing number of companies producing editorial and editorial-adjacent work, and so much of it was bad,” he told me. “Our initial inspiration was to use the skills we developed as journalists — storytelling, interviewing, reporting, writing, understanding your audience —to make it better.” Its roster of clients includes big names such as Google, Dropbox, Conde Nast, and PepsiCo, as well as plenty of smaller, fast-growing companies.
Noah walked us through the products that are absolutely essential to his business. You can find his interview over here:
BTW, I’m still looking for creators and media entrepreneurs to feature in this series. Each interview is heavily featured in front of my 14,734 newsletter subscribers, and I share it out to my 70,472 social media subscribers. Go here if you’re interested.
Do you sell a product targeted toward marketers or media executives?
What a coincidence! That’s exactly who reads my newsletter. You can find out how to reach them over here.
How to drive paid subscriptions without a paywall
Earlier this week I hosted a live Zoom call with two incredibly smart media executives.
The first was Carla Zanoni, who ran audience development teams for places like The Wall Street Journal and TED. Here are some of the things she spoke to:
How her team leveraged The Wall Street Journal’s massive social channels to drive paid subscriptions
How to utilize “gift” links to allow your paid subscribers to share your content with their friends and colleagues
How TED drove paid memberships without locking any of its content behind a paywall
How TED created live Q&As as a member benefit
The other operator was Ryan Sager, the co-founder of Who Sponsors Stuff, a massive database that tracks which brands are sponsoring newsletters. Here are some of the things he spoke to:
How newsletters can leverage their first party data to lure advertisers
How super niche B2B newsletters can convince companies within their niche to become sponsors
Why too many newsletters are charging too little
Why newsletters should convince their sponsors to set up a dedicated landing page so they get full credit for all the traffic they send to the sponsor
Whether you should accept multiple sponsorships in a single issue of a newsletter or limit it exclusively to one sponsor
Why direct response ads are still much more prevalent in newsletters than brand advertising
The session was jam packed with actionable insights, many of which I plan to steal and use in my own media business. You can watch our discussion in the video embedded below:
If video embeds don’t work in your inbox, go here.
Want to access video recordings of previous Office Hours sessions?
I’ve compiled them all on a landing page over here.
Have you scheduled your one-on-one phone call with me yet?
As I announced a few weeks ago, I’ve added a new benefit that allows paid subscribers to book a half-hour one-on-one introductory call with me. I don’t want this benefit only to be available to new subscribers; if you haven’t yet booked a call with me, reach out and let me know. You can find my contact info over here. I’ll send over a Calendly link where you can book the call.