The newsletter platform wars heat up

PLUS: Twitch vs Youtube Streaming Revenue

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

Some housekeeping notes

So this is probably my last newsletter for 2024. I’ll keep plugging away at my longform content but will hold off from publishing it until people return from their holiday travel.

Before I dive into today’s issue, I wanted to share a very nice note one of my paid subscribers sent me yesterday:

Simon,

I saw your post on LinkedIn about the new book case and my immediate reaction is that you should raise prices to cover the capex of a bookshelf. 😊 But seriously, you and too many others are underpricing your expertise. When I was in publishing, there were two ways to price. The first was to the market (“everyone charges 25-cents for a daily newspaper” … yes, I am that old). The second was for the value delivered. When I published newsletters on finance, M&A and other topics, we routinely charged $1,000-2,500 because we could deliver news and insights that couldn’t be found elsewhere and the value to a CFO or investment banker was a rounding error on the money they would save or make. Now, I realize, you don’t have a Wall Street market, but I’d encourage you to envision a prosumer package in the $250-500 a year range. And, in general, you should raise prices to at least $15 to $25 a month. You have great insights, a fantastic network and a dragnet that captures so much more than I have time to find. I’d easily have to spend five hours a week reading what you read and would still miss things. There is a huge benefit there.

Best to you,

[redacted]

Now, I don’t plan to raise my prices anytime soon, but I’ve had literally dozens of my paid subscribers admonish me for charging too little. One of my subscribers told me recently that he couldn’t believe I offer a half-hour introductory phone call to someone who is only paying me $100 a year. In fact, here’s another email I received from a paid subscriber a mere hour ago:

Simon,

That call was awesome. Thank you. We both learned a lot. [redacted] is now subscribing, so we can get another half an hour. It's fun and inspiring to meet with somebody who, out of the gate, has such smart and do-able suggestions.

Best,

[redacted]

OK, that’s enough self-aggrandizement for now. Suffice it to say that I put a lot of work into delivering insights that will help you market and monetize your content. Most of the media entrepreneurs I profile have never been interviewed by any of my competitors, and I already have dozens more in the queue that I plan to interview. Now’s a great time to become a paid subscriber so you don’t miss any of these case studies when they go live in 2025:

And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you so much for supporting my work. The last few years have been the most rewarding of my career. Happy holidays!

Here’s a Hollywood Twist: Streaming Success Runs Through Theaters

Hollywood studios have come to believe that a theatrical release will paradoxically drive more streaming viewership, mostly because it generates more word-of-mouth buzz ahead of its streaming release. [NYT]

Walmart starts its own Game Informer-style gaming site

Walmart launched/funded a new video game review website. Reviews link to Walmart product pages, but the editorial mission statement says that any purchases won't result in a revenue kickback to the site. “We hope you can see this gives us zero incentive to provide biased review scores or other information about a game.”

I mean, sure, but presumably Walmart will only continue funding the site as long as it generates revenue for Walmart, so it could be argued that the writers are incentivized in some way to drive product sales. That's not to say that I'm against this type of media operation; I think it's a cool experiment. [The Verge]

Forbes is cutting ties with freelance writers, citing Google spam policies

For the past few months, Google has been dinging news websites that run product recommendation content that's really only geared toward visitors who come in via search engines. In many cases, this content's been supplied by third party providers that are licensing the same articles to multiple websites. Forbes seems to have been creating its own product recommendation content internally but got dinged by Google anyway. [The Verge]

With Beehiiv, Tyler Denk Is Riding the Newsletter Wave

This is a great profile of Tyler Denk, an early Morning Brew employee who later launched Beehiiv, which is often cited as a competitor to Substack. [Inc]

Beehiiv's biggest differentiator from Substack — other than a model that charges an upfront fee instead of a 10% cut of revenue — is that it's built out tools that make it easier for creators to monetize with advertising, whereas Substack remains committed to a subscription-only model.

It's clear though that the Inc writer doesn't have much familiarity with the Substack platform. For instance, the article includes this line: "Plus, Beehiiv would be designed to help anyone develop a newsletter community, not just those with hundreds of thousands of social media followers." Anyone with a passing familiarity with Substack knows that a huge percentage of newsletter signups and paid subscriptions are driven within Substack's own network. There's nothing in this piece that explains why Beehiiv is supposedly better at helping unknown creators to organically grow their audiences.

Anecdotally, I've heard Beehiiv's analytics dashboard is superior to Substack's, though I don't have any firsthand experience with it. A Substack user named Michael Estrin posted this observation earlier today:

I use Beehiiv at work. The analytics dashboard is akin to what I’ve used at various trade pubs over the years. For example you can A/B test on Beehiiv, but I’m not sure you can do that on Substack. Beehiiv also has deep ad tech integrations that Substack doesn’t have any interest in. There’s also a lot more design options.

The new media, powered by Substack

Substack reveals it's developing an "enterprise" offering that will be made available to larger publishers. One of the knocks against Substack over the years has been that it's great for individual creators but lacks the customization required by more established outlets.

"We are building a toolset that will allow high-volume publishers with sophisticated needs—including custom branding, website design, and support for large editorial teams—to take advantage of Substack’s best-in-class publishing system while also being plugged into a network that drives subscriptions." [On Substack]

What no one wants to admit about comic book sales

This is fascinating. Apparently Marvel and DC combined only make up a tiny portion of the US graphic novel market. Scholastic is, by far, the leader, and it only entered the graphic novel market 20 years ago. [matttt]

How the Tangle newsletter reached 77,000 readers and $624,000 in annual revenue

If you ask Isaac Saul about the origin story of Tangle, the politics newsletter he publishes five days a week, he almost always cites his childhood in Bucks County, a suburb north of Philadelphia. “It’s a bellwether county in Pennsylvania,” he told me. “It's a place that everybody watches in national politics because it usually dictates where Pennsylvania goes, which is where the presidential election typically goes.”

Growing up in such a politically diverse area meant that Saul had friends and family across the entire political spectrum, and he believes this experience guides the ethos of a newsletter that goes to great lengths to consider all partisan angles before rendering a verdict.

Saul launched Tangle in 2019 when he was still a politics editor at A Plus — the viral news outlet founded by Ashton Kutcher — and the dual role meant he had to wake up at 5 a.m. every day so he could get the latest edition out. What started as an email list of 13 friends quickly grew to thousands of readers, and after about eight months or so he debuted a paid subscription. “I was making probably like $70,000 a year or something at the time,” he said, “and overnight I almost matched my yearly salary on this newsletter I'd been working on for eight months. And so I quit my job a few weeks later, since this was a real pathway for me.”

From there, Tangle’s audience grew rapidly, and today it boasts over 77,000 readers, $624,000 in annual revenue, and a small staff. Saul has also begun to branch out into other mediums like podcasts and video.

In a recent interview, Saul discussed how he came up with the newsletter’s signature format, how he converted his free readership into paid, and why he made the recent decision to accept advertising.

You can find the interview over here.

More quick hits

Forbes to open first private members’ club in Madrid

Forbes is launching a private club in Madrid that’s “set across seven floors and features a rooftop bar, a restaurant headed by Michelin starred-chef Adolfo Santos and a wine cellar.” This isn’t entirely surprising given its heavy investments in live events over the past few years. Clearly it thinks there’s potential in leveraging its media brand to drive people toward real-world experiences. [Financial Times]

2024 was the year Reddit made a play for social media’s organic sports crown

Reddit's content partnership team has been working with the major sports leagues to get them more involved on the platform. "The platform recorded a 35% year-on-year increase in engagement in over 1,000 sports-themed Subreddits." [Digiday]

Twitch vs Youtube Streaming Revenue

A longtime gaming streamer compares what he makes on Twitch vs YouTube. Twitch generates way more revenue during the actual live stream itself, but YouTube far outpaces it overall when you account for video-on-demand watching after the live stream has ended. [penguinz0]

Kamala Harris’ digital chief on Democrats ‘losing hold of culture’

Apparently the Kamala Harris campaign pitched several sports podcasters for sit-down interviews but was turned down because those hosts didn't want to turn off the conservatives in their audiences. [Semafor]

From Fox News to NBC, Legacy Media Wants In on TikTok

Many TV news correspondents are filing official reports for their networks and then firing up their own personal TikTok accounts to relay the same information in a more conversational matter. For the most part, their employers are completely fine with this dynamic because they believe it'll expose to the news brands to a younger audience. [WSJ]

New York’s David Haskell Tells Mel Ottenberg Why He Still Believes in the Power of Magazines

"New York magazine’s business is probably more durable than it’s been in its entire 56-year history. And that’s because we have a subscription business that’s working and growing." [Interview]

Sony hasn’t been this hot since it made the Walkman

Sony went against the grain by not making a huge, expensive bet on a streaming app and has been quietly killing it by just focusing on expanding its entertainment IP. [CNN]

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 features. 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

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.)

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