Understanding Substack's competitive edge
PLUS: Buzzfeed’s fatal mistake
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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Introducing the Substack Recording Studio
From On Substack:
Today, we’re launching the Substack Recording Studio, a built-in studio that makes it easier than ever to pre-record and publish a show on Substack. Substack Studio, currently available on desktop only, lets you record a solo video or a conversation with up to two guests and publish it when you’re ready, with auto-generated clips and thumbnails included.
Until now, creating video on Substack meant going live, or stitching together a separate stack of tools: a recording platform, a way to create and distribute clips, and something to design a thumbnail. Substack Studio brings all of those tools into one place.
With this move, Substack is essentially competing with SaaS platforms like Riverside and Descript, which make it easy for podcasters to record both video and audio versions of their shows simultaneously.
One detail missing from the announcement is whether the recordings are captured locally on each participant’s machine or in the cloud. Platforms like Riverside record locally, which produces significantly higher audio and video quality than recordings captured through tools like Zoom.
This move is yet another reminder that if you’re still referring to Substack as a “newsletter platform,” then your understanding of the company is badly outdated. Today it offers a wide range of features: a social network, newsletter distribution, podcast distribution, on-demand video, live streaming, an AI-powered video clipping tool, community message boards, audio transcription, and now podcast recording. It even has a TV app for OTT streaming.
In other words, it’s essentially a full-service publishing platform that’s free to use. Other than perhaps Patreon, it’s hard to think of another platform that comes close to matching its breadth of functionality. If you’re taking advantage of the full suite of tools, its 10% subscription commission starts to look pretty reasonable.
Do you live in the Washington, DC area?
With the weather getting nicer, I want to get out and network more with people working in media and communications. If you want to meet up for lunch or after-work happy hour, reach out to me via email and we’ll get something scheduled.
How ShopMy Became 1 of the Creator Economy’s Big Winners
From Inc:
[Tiffany] Lopinsky has scaled [ShopMy]—which allows content creators to earn commissions through product recommendations and helps brands manage influencer marketing campaigns—to reach more than 243,000 creators, 1,600 brands, and $1 billion in annual transactions.
[ShopMy allows] influencers to upload products from more than 20,000 brands to an online storefront, share it with their followers, and earn a 10 to 30 percent commission each time someone [purchases] an item. ShopMy [also earns] a small cut from each sale.
A lot of smaller creators struggle to grow their businesses because they don’t yet have the scale or the connections to form custom brand partnerships, so affiliate platforms like this can become a powerful tool for allowing them to start generating meaningful revenue. Previously, creators were limited to affiliate programs like Amazon’s that paid out paltry commissions, whereas these creator-focused platforms offer revenue shares that are much more generous.
Vanity Fair Bets on Newsletter Boom With New Subscriber-Only Roster
From Net Influencer:
Vanity Fair has launched four new subscriber-only newsletters, expanding its direct-to-reader offerings as legacy publishers across the industry increasingly prioritize owned audience distribution over traditional web traffic.
The four newsletters cover technology, politics, fashion, and art.
I think it’s smart for a media outlet to deliver subscriber-only content directly to readers’ inboxes rather than forcing them to click through to a website. There’s plenty of data showing that paid subscribers who regularly open newsletters are far less likely to churn than those who don’t. Any editorial product that encourages subscribers to open emails more frequently will likely perform better than content that lives only on a website.
ICYMI: How Medium finally pivoted its way to profitability
CEO Tony Stubblebine reined in spending and figured out how to actually reward high quality writing.
From MrBeast to microdramas: Scott Brown’s bet on phone-native storytelling
For most of his career, Scott Brown has operated at the crossroads of Hollywood and the creator economy. After first breaking into digital media during the early days of web series, Scott went on to work across a wide swath of the modern media ecosystem. His résumé includes producing hundreds of hours of Larry King programming for streaming platforms, helping Dwayne Johnson launch a YouTube channel that quickly surpassed a million subscribers, and even producing large-scale stunts for MrBeast. Throughout that journey, Scott developed a front-row seat to how digital platforms were steadily reshaping the economics and creative possibilities of entertainment.
Today Scott believes the next major shift is already underway: the rise of microdramas—short, vertically shot scripted series designed for smartphones and often monetized episode-by-episode inside dedicated apps.
In our conversation, Scott explained how he stumbled upon the emerging format, why he believes it represents the first truly native form of scripted storytelling for phones, and how his own microdrama projects are helping push the medium toward higher production quality.
Check out the interview on YouTube:
If you want to listen to an audio version, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify]
Behind the paywall
Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:
The rise of the creator side gig economy
Buzzfeed’s fatal mistake
The creators launching non-media business models
Let’s jump into it…