There’s more room for niche “Morning Brew for X” newsletters

PLUS: Does Substack help creators with audience growth?

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

What a New Deal for ‘My Favorite Murder’ Tells Us About the Podcast Market

Podcast networks are less interested in signing huge mega deals and are instead pairing smaller upfront advances with ad revenue sharing. [Bloomberg]

Where Is James Bond? Trapped in an Ugly Stalemate With Amazon

Amazon paid $6.5 billion for a film franchise it has no creative control over. Brilliant move! [WSJ]

Changing Laws and Changing Lives: Why ProPublica Is Dedicated to Local Investigations

Pro Publica is plowing more investment into its local news investigations to help fill the void left by shrinking newspapers.

"As part of this effort, we pay for a reporter’s salary and benefits for one year so they can dive deep into a project that matters for their communities or regions. We also pair those reporters with editors here and members of ProPublica’s data, research, crowdsourcing and news applications teams so they apply new and innovative techniques to their reporting.” [Pro Publica]

There’s more room for niche “Morning Brew for X” newsletters

A newsletter for HVAC contractors started 15 months ago with only 45 subscribers, and now it's launching a spinoff plumbing newsletter and looking to acquire a podcast. It's also experimenting with live events. This is further proof that there's still a lot of room for niche "Morning Brew for X" type newsletters in under-covered industries. [Homepros]

The Best Streaming Service, Worst Studio and Top Director in Hollywood

400 producers were surveyed by Bloomberg about where they'd most want to sell their TV show, and Netflix was the winner by far, with 50% of the vote. My guess is this boils down to global reach. Netflix has just proven time and time again that it has a killer marketing engine that no other streaming service can come even close to matching. And if you're a producer who wants to keep getting new projects greenlit for the next several decades, eyeballs matter. [Bloomberg]

Spotify search still sucks

It continues to be absolutely insane that if you search within Spotify for the name of my podcast — the only podcast with that name — you have to scroll through dozens of shows before you get to mine.

Meanwhile, on Google the Spotify listing for my show is the second result, which means that Google is better at indexing Spotify podcasts than Spotify's own internal search engine.

What do I think is going on here? My guess is that my podcast is being penalized because it's not hosted on a Spotify-owned service. That doesn't make it any less insane that people who are specifically searching for MY podcast can't even find it. That's a terrible user experience!

Anyway, if you’re looking to follow my show on Spotify, you’re better off using this link instead of searching within the app.

Baltimore Banner Tops $13M in Revenue, Notches 55,000 Subscribers

The Baltimore Banner has 55,000 paying subscribers, which isn't bad for a publication that's only two years old and operates in a relatively small city.

It's embraced a model that is becoming increasingly common in the nonprofit news space: start with a relatively large grant to get off the ground and then try to gradually diversify into subscriptions and advertising so that it's not too reliant on a handful of large donors. [Adweek]

Want to pick my brain on your content strategy?

At this point I’ve probably interviewed over 1,000 media entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses.

I also spent over a decade consulting with organizations ranging from small nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies on their content strategies.

For this reason I get a fair number of people who reach out to me to see if I offer consulting calls so they can ask me questions related to their own content strategies.

Currently, there are three options for booking consulting calls with me:

1. Become a paid subscriber to my newsletter: When you subscribe, you automatically receive an email with a Calendly link that allows you to book a half-hour introductory call with me. Many of my subscribers use these calls to ask me questions related to their own businesses. Use this link and get 20% off for your first year:

2. Book an hour-long consulting call: Substack has a cool tool that allows you to directly book a call with me. Paid subscribers automatically get a $50 discount for these calls:

   

   Book a meeting with Simon Owens

   Schedule a meeting

   Book meeting

3. Book a series of calls: Sometimes people want to book multiple calls with me. I can offer a significant discount for three or more calls. I also sometimes take on more bespoke consulting engagements. Reach out to me for details.

More quick hits

Publishers Battle for the C-Suite

This is interesting: Semafor is launching a newsletter that's geared toward CEOs and invite-only. There's really no logic behind this other than to create a sense of FOMO that will, theoretically, increase the prestige of the newsletter.

It reminds me of the Raya app, which uses an extensive vetting process that not only causes people to clamor to get into the community, but also results in them using it more often once they finally gain access. [NYT]

Willie Geist Wants New Bite of Live Events Revenue for ‘Today’

NBC News is experimenting in ticketed, live events that pair an anchor with a well-known newsmaker or celebrity. Somebody there probably noticed that more and more media companies are expanding their live events offerings, and that it's a great way to cash in on the parasocial relationships formed between broadcasts hosts and their audiences. [Variety]

‘Paywalls safest way to guarantee journalistic jobs’ says Bloomberg editor in chief

A third of the 5,000 stories Bloomberg publishes daily use some sort of automation: “We have computers that scour social media looking for keywords — some of them grizzly ones — to alert us to news. They also use market data to prompt us to consider writing a story, for instance, telling a pharmaceutical reporter that GSK’s share price has fallen 10% faster than other drug makers — what’s the reason, do you want to write about it?”

It's also started placing AI-generated bullet points at the top of its stories that summarize the most important facts; “Customers like it. They can quickly see what the story is about.” [Press Gazette]

Does Substack help creators with audience growth?

Unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably aware there's a relatively-small-but-loud group of people online who really don't like Substack and are constantly urging writers to pick up and leave for other platforms.

In the vast majority of cases these people don't like Substack because of its approach to content moderation, but they'll often criticize its product features in the hope of giving writers extra motivation to move off the platform.

Now, I think there are pros and cons to using Substack and I'll often list those pros and cons when I’m on consulting calls with clients who are thinking about launching a Substack newsletter.

But I find many of the criticisms lodged by the Substack haters to be either exaggerated or outright false. One claim I constantly see is that Substack doesn’t help its writers grow, and that any signups driven within its network are either fake or completely unengaged. They’re specifically pushing back against Substack’s claims that a sizable percentage of signups and paid subscriptions come from within its own network and are driven by its various recommendation features.

I’ve certainly been the beneficiary of those recommendations features, in that I’ve seen enormous growth in my audience ever since they were implemented. Now, is someone who comes in via a recommendation widget less engaged, on average, than someone who comes in via “direct” traffic? Definitely. After the recommendation tools launched, I had to implement semi-regular list cleaning procedures to remove inactive subscribers.

But that’s true of any non-organic marketing channel. There are lots of newsletters that utilize referral programs, recommendation swaps, and/or Facebook ad buys to grow their lists, and they’d tell you that the subscribers who come in via those channels are less engaged, on average, than organic audiences.

But that’s not to say that they’re all fake or unengaged. Even when you factor in my list cleaning, my open rate is well above 40% and my click through rate is hovering around 5%; both of these stats are well above industry average. If all the subscribers who came in via Substack’s referral tools were “fake,” then those metrics would have fallen precipitously.

Plus, Substack has stated that something like 30% of paid subscriptions are coming in via its own network. If all its growth tools were producing nothing but fake followers, then that number would be closer to 0%.

Another criticism lodged against Substack is that it’s pulling some sort of bait and switch by trapping users inside its own ecosystem. Its critics point to its mobile app and the ability to “follow” creators without subscribing as proof that Substack is just trying to become another social network like Facebook or Twitter that owns the relationship between creators and their followers.

First off, the ONLY way that Substack makes money right now is if a user converts into a paid subscriber, and you can ONLY sign up for a paid subscription by handing over your email address to the creator. So in other words, Substack’s entire business model is predicated on driving signups toward a newsletter. It’s their north star!

Secondly, these criticisms against Substack’s social media features suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of how online audiences consume content. As a thought experiment, consider a scenario where your favorite social media platform — whether it’s Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky — offers a button you could push that would automatically sign you up for the newsletters for every single person you follow. Would you push it?

Of course not! Most of you follow hundreds of people on social media, and subscribing to all of them would render your inbox virtually unusable. In fact, Substack rolled out a “follow” option at the request of its own users. When Substack Notes first launched, you could only subscribe to someone’s Notes via a signup for their newsletter, and very quickly people were complaining that their inboxes had been flooded with unwanted emails. I remember an early post from Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie where he expressed his reluctance to launch a “follow” button because it might undermine a creator’s ability to grow their email list.

So does the “follow” button undermine that ability? I don’t think it does. Think of a paid subscription model in the framework of the classic marketing funnel. At the bottom of the funnel is the paid subscription. Slightly higher in the funnel is the newsletter signup, and then a few rungs above that is the “follow” feature. The more people who follow me on Substack, the more people who are casually exposed to my content there so that they can later be converted into newsletter subscribers and then, eventually, paid subscribers.

Of course, Substack’s critics know this. I know they know this because every single one of them posts content to social media sites that don’t hand over their followers’ email addresses, and they wouldn’t do this if they thought there wasn’t some value in the casual reach afforded by a centralized social media platform.

Which brings me back to my original point: most of Substack’s most ardent haters don’t like the platform because of its approach to content moderation. Which is completely fine! I just don’t like when they layer on disingenuous criticisms to further justify their hatred of the platform.

Flipboard’s new app is a discovery engine for the decentralized web

I find Flipboard intriguing because it's been an ongoing concern for over a decade and yet I don't think I've ever spoken to a publisher that cites it as a major traffic source. At one point it claimed to have 100 million active users, but I doubt that's still the case given how much Apple and Google have been pushing their news apps to their mobile users.

A few years ago someone from Flipboard reached out to me and encouraged me to create a magazine on the app. After I did, they added me to some recommendation list that pushed thousands of people to follow me, but the stuff I posted there didn't generate much traffic or engagement.

I've always thought that Flipboard should hire a small group of staff writers so it can produce some original content that would differentiate it from the sea of other news aggregators out there, but as far as I know it never adopted this strategy. [Fast Company]

Want to Earn Six Figures as a Writer? Try Ghostwriting.

The demand for ghostwriters has never been higher. Every CEO wants to pump out "thought leadership" content and every creator with even a modicum of a following wants a book to sell to their audiences. [WSJ]