The Business of Content

I interviewed an entrepreneur who helped build several media ventures, some of which scaled to millions of dollars in annual revenue.

I recently interviewed Meathead about writing for AOL when it was the biggest game in town, running the third most popular wine magazine, and stumbling into a website venture that made him one of the most famous people within the barbecue scene.

I interviewed Joel Byars, a standup comedian, about how comedians market themselves in this golden age of standup comedy and asked him why he decided to self-produce his own comedy special.

Today, the publishing platform Ghost is used by some of the world’s largest brands, and the hope now is that independent writers will use it to monetize their content. I spoke to founder John O'Nolan about the platform and why he thinks a writer should choose it over a competitor like Substack or Patreon.

Founded in 2012, Industry Dive now produces publications that cover over a dozen industries. I sat down with one of its co-founders Sean Griffey to talk about Industry Dive’s origin story and how it bootstrapped its way to north of $22 million in annual revenue.

To get an idea of how BuzzFeed plans its ad attribution problem, I recently spoke to Rich Reid, its senior vice president of global content. We talked about Bring Me, BuzzFeed’s travel vertical that publishes a wide range of video and text content across its website and social channels. Recently, Bring Me formed an ad partnership with Hilton, and I asked Reid about how his team designed the campaign so that BuzzFeed gets full credit for any business it sends Hilton’s way.

Jacob Donnely is the managing director of audience and growth at Coindesk, one of the leading cryptocurrency publishers, and runs his own paid newsletter about the publishing industry. We talked about how to design the perfect subscription offering and debated whether subscription fatigue is actually real.

I recently interviewed Joe Wadlington about Twitter's podcast strategy and the role it plays in helping improve Twitter’s bottom line.

Jaclyn Schiff recently interviewed me about my history covering the business of content and how I came up with my monetization strategy.

In my interview with Scott Rosenberg, he told me about Salon’s first viral story and explained why the online magazine was way ahead of its time, in both the way it delivered news and how it monetized content. We also discussed Axios’s approach to news gathering and whether it’s “Be smart” tagline is patronizing or enlightening.

Journalist James Pogue recently wrote a piece for the Baffler about what he sees as the negative impact of the streaming wars on magazine journalism. I recently interviewed Pogue about this phenomenon and why he thinks it’s changing longform reporting for the worse.

I interviewed Chris Stokel-Walker, a journalist who covers YouTube for an online magazine called Fast Forward. Stokel-Walker and I went deep on the YouTube algorithm and the ways its biggest stars game it to their benefit.

Ernie Smith is the creator and editor of Tedium, a fantastic newsletter that almost operates as a kind of Wikipedia of obscure topics. Smith also runs a popular Facebook group for the newsletter industry, and he’s one of the most knowledgeable people I know when it comes to newsletter trends.

For the past decade, Bill Beutler has consulted with hundreds of brands, helping them to edit their Wikipedia pages without running afoul of the platform’s strict rules. I recently interviewed Bill about the problems that have plagued Wikipedia for the past decade and the issues its community will need to address in the decade to come.

Founded a little over a year ago, Glow developed technology that allows a podcast’s paying subscribers to listen to paywalled episodes on their podcast player of choice. I recently interviewed its co-founder Amira Valliani about how she’s solving the paywall problem and why she thinks paid podcast subscriptions will eventually scale.