How to supercharge your newsletter growth

PLUS: You're probably not paying enough attention to your onboarding process for new paid subscribers

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…

Do you live in Los Angeles?

I’ll be in the city next week and want to organize a small dinner gathering at an LA restaurant. It will probably be on the evening of Wednesday, February 22. If you’re interested in coming, reach out to me.

Quick hits

You're probably not paying enough attention to your onboarding process for new paid subscribers, and that's increasing your churn. [INMA]

Do fitness influencers have proprietary ownership of their workout routines? I'm extremely skeptical that this will hold up in court. [Insider]

Crosswords are one of the biggest drivers of The New York Times's subscription success. This is a fascinating interview with the paper's crosswords editor. [New Yorker]

Plagiarism is becoming a bigger and bigger problem on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, with creators copying videos shot-for-shot without any acknowledgment of the person they stole the idea from. [Creator Support]

"[Substack] post pages now get 60% more subscriptions from search than they did this time last year—no plug-ins required." [Substack]

More and more people are finding themselves featured in viral TikTok videos without any prior knowledge that they had been filmed. In some cases, those videos are purposefully mischaracterizing their role in the video. [BuzzFeed]

This single TikTok video caused a novel to shoot up to #1 on Amazon. [Stone Maidens]

Are you a local news entrepreneur?

I’m looking to publish a series of case studies about successful local news companies. If you run one, then I’d love to interview you about your experience building your business. Please reach out so we can set up a time to talk.

How to supercharge your newsletter growth

When it comes to content distribution and owning your audience, there’s no medium more important than an email newsletter. That’s why every form of media company— whether it specializes in video, podcasts, or text — is doubling down on its newsletter operations.

But newsletter growth and monetization are difficult to scale effectively, especially because the medium is decentralized. That’s why I recently pulled together a panel of experts to discuss the best strategies for growing a newsletter and building a business around it.

Those experts included:

• Judd Legum, founder of Popular Information, one of the most popular newsletters on Substack

• Ernie Smith, founder of Tedium, a newsletter that’s been featured on NPR’s Planet Money and Vice

• Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True, which may be the oldest continuously-running email newsletter

• Patrick Trousdale, creator of The Daily Upside, a finance newsletter with over 500,000 subscribers

• Ari Lewis, co-founder of Payload, a newsletter about the space industry

You can watch our discussion in the video embedded below: