The Business of Content

I recently sat down with Minute Media President and CRO Rich Routman to discuss why he thinks his company is different from many of the other venture funded digital media sites out there. We talked about the company’s video strategy, how it approaches advertising, and why it expanded into non-sports content when it acquired Mental Floss.

For this episode, I interviewed Kathy Doyle, vice president of podcasting at Macmillan, about where the company has seen the most success and how podcasting allowed it to diversify its revenue.

I recently interviewed publishing industry writer Jane Friedman about her work. We discussed how she grew her newsletter into a sustainable business, and then we talked about the current state of book publishing. One aspect of this world that’s long fascinated me is self-publishing, so I asked Friedman to fill me in on how this market is maturing and where self-published writers are seeing success.

I spoke to Jeff Umbro, the founder of the Podglomerate. We talked about his early mistakes in trying to partner with shows for his network and why it can be incredibly difficult to monetize a show with a small audience.

A few years ago, Advance Publications launched the Alpha Group, a tech incubator that would launch small startups and try to grow them into thriving, standalone businesses. One of those startups was called The Tylt, a platform that allows its users to participate in online opinion polls on a wide range of issues. The Tylt was successful enough that Alpha Group spun it off as its own company.

This year, Kozera and that same co-founder are launching Podcorn, a platform designed to help podcasters monetize their shows. Like Famebit, it will serve as an online marketplace where brands can post RFPs for projects and be matched with participating podcasters. I interviewed Kozera about why such a platform is needed, how the current podcast advertising landscape is flawed, and why podcasters with small-to-mid-sized audiences currently have such a difficult time finding sponsors.

Clive Thompson has the kind of career that most writers would envy. He’s written two books for major publishing houses. He has a monthly column at Wired magazine. And he writes regular features for The New York Times Magazine and other glossy magazines. I recently interviewed him to discuss how he made his big break, what it takes to write the perfect magazine pitch, and why book publishers are more likely to award contracts to established journalists.

I recently interviewed Richard MacManus about the early days of tech blogging and why, for his latest writing project, he decided to eschew blogging entirely and launch a newsletter instead.

I recently sat down with Techmeme podcast host Brian McCullough to talk about how he came up with the idea for a daily tech podcast and what he’s doing to expand it into an entire podcast network.

I recently interviewed Jeff Elgie, Village Media’s CEO, about the company’s history and how it’s succeeded where so many legacy newspapers have struggled or failed.

I recently sat down with Marty Moe, the head of Vox Media Studios, to talk about how the company is monetizing these podcasts, what he thinks about Spotify’s entry into podcasting, and why he thinks he can grow Vox’s podcast revenue from eight to nine figures.

I recently sat down with Linkedin senior editor at large Isabelle Roughol. I asked her about how LinkedIn editors go about curating content, how they distribute this content on LinkedIn, and how they approach original reporting projects.

For a few years, Ben Cohen was living the dream. His political opinion site, The Daily Banter, was growing in leaps and bounds, generating enough traffic and ad revenue to support several full-time writers. But you probably know what happened next. In January 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was pivoting away from news, and that publishers would see a decline in exposure in the Newsfeed. Virtually overnight, Cohen saw his Facebook traffic drop by 90%.

Ten years ago, Robert Cottrell founded a website called The Browser. He would comb through thousands of articles a day and pick the five he found most interesting, adding a dash of commentary to go along with each pick. As time wore on, he began to notice that many of his readers were signing up for an email digest of his daily recommendations.

To get insights into Business Insider’s paywall strategy, I interviewed Claudius Senst, its head of consumer subscriptions. I asked him how editors decide whether to place an article behind the paywall, what converts readers into paying subscribers, and why Business Insider didn’t follow in the footsteps of The Washington Post and New York Times by launching a metered paywall.