Simon Owens

Fox is teaming with top creator Dhar Mann as it races to win micro drama fans Fox is partnering with Dhar Mann Studios to create scripted video series that will debut on micro drama platform My Drama.

Fox continues to be more aggressive than just about every other major media conglomerate in signing partnership deals with creators.

Dhar Mann is an ideal partner because he’s one of the few creators who has successfully figured out how to scale scripted content production on YouTube. Since microd

Public Media Holds Its Apocalypse at Bay, for Now

Public media stations were largely able to plug the revenue gap after Republicans gutted their federal funding, but much of that money came from one-off donations and grants. To achieve long-term sustainability, these organizations will need to fundamentally rethink their business models.

Elizabeth Hughes: There is a path for Pittsburgh to save its newspaper As publisher of The Inquirer, I believe that our own experience over the past decade offers a template for success.

The Philadelphia Inquirer -- which transitioned to a quasi nonprofit model a few years ago -- just had its first year of revenue growth in 2024 and was solidly profitable. It generates 70% of its revenue by charging readers and only 19% through advertising.

www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...

She’s a “centrist” who just coincidentally always pushes right wing narratives.

YouTube video by Simon Owens How a few college students bootstrapped one of the largest sports media websites in the world

How a few college students bootstrapped one of the largest sports media websites in the world

youtu.be/9dBDU_i478M?...

“We’re not trying to recreate social media”: How Minnesota’s Star Tribune navigates a local crisis The publication tries to offer a sober alternative to a social media swarm as a deadly shooting deepens the crisis in Minneapolis.

It's been interesting to see how traditional media and citizen media have coexisted and collaborated during the federal government's violent occupation of Minneapolis. Every protester has been trained to have their phones out and recording during their clashes with federal agents, hence why every vi

YouTube Distribution Is Tilting Toward Shorts, Pressuring Long-Form Reach, Data Suggests Recent changes observed in how videos surface across YouTube’s homepage and search results are reshaping visibility for creators, with analysts pointing to increased promotion of short-form content an...

YouTube has shifted the way that it recommends content on its homepage in the last year, with much more emphasis on Shorts videos. As a result, the top creators that focus primarily on longform video have seen a sizable decline in their per-video average viewership.

The NFL is More Popular Than Ever. It Still Needs to Lean on Creators For Growth Social media boss Ian Trombetta on the league's embrace of the new media mogul, and what is missing from the space.

The NFL understands the writing is on the wall for the TV networks that delivered reliable revenue growth over the past few decades; that's why it's leaned so heavily into creator partnerships in recent years and is busily building out its own streaming capabilities. In fact, it's conceivable that 1

Washington Post Tears Up Plans to Cover Winter Olympics

At this point, it’s hard to say that Jeff Bezos has any real ambition to grow The Washington Post into a larger business. For much of the past year, I was willing to suspend disbelief and assume there was some broader strategy at play. But now it feels more like a company managing decline. In fact,

Wow, I just went and checked myself, and yes, there's not a single mention of Minneapolis. This is a political outlet that isn't even covering the most important politics story in America.

But don't worry, Bari is a heterodox centrist, as a bunch of gullible billionaires keep informing us.

For your consideration

Recipe:
1 ½ oz Popcorn-infused cognac
½ oz Amaro CioCiaro
½ oz Cocchi Storico Vermouth
½ oz Monkey Shoulder scotch
Aztec chocolate bitters
Large ice cube
Add a block of ice and stir
Garnish with cherry

Imagine having to defend your fatally shot son from Stephen Miller's slurs that he was a "domestic terrorist" trying to "assassinate" ICE officers. This is what Trump and Trumpism has brought to the United States.

I don’t watch a lot of animated movies but checked out MARS EXPRESS based on a podcast recommendation. It was incredible. Definitely deserves to go into the pantheon of great science fiction movies.

YouTube video by Simon Owens My mistakes building a subscription business + my winter running strategy

I decided to talk about all the mistakes I made while building a subscription business on Substack.

youtu.be/SOqIEaeSFKU?...

SWEATER WEATHER

1 oz bourbon
1/2 oz ruby port
1/2 oz amaro (Rabarbaro)
1/2 oz pineapple juice
1/2 oz orange juice
1/4 oz allspice dram
Angostura bitters
Stir with ice
Garnish with orange slice

Bluesky sucks so much ass. Just a terrible product. It makes me angry that one of the few social platforms not owned by a major tech conglomerate is run by people obsessed with trying to recreate Twitter circa 2012.

💬🗞️ Why newsrooms are taking comments seriously again Three lessons from running comments at The Times of London

I’ve always thought it was insane that so many news outlets shut down their comments sections in the 2010s. These same publishers spent years complaining that Facebook and other platforms were stealing their audiences, yet they willingly pushed their most engaged readers onto those platforms themse

I don't really see any downside to a publisher blocking pretty much all AI bots other than Google. The traffic they send is pretty negligible while at the same time the value they extract is much greater. It also gives publishers leverage to negotiate specific licensing deals.

British Podcasters Are Moving to the US to Win Fans in a Crucial Market Most of the top podcasts in the UK have yet to hit the same levels of popularity in the US

Many of the biggest video podcasts record their interviews in person rather than relying on remote tools like Riverside or Squadcast. That means breaking into the top tier of the podcast world often requires having a studio in a city where high-profile guests regularly pass through. In the U.S., tha

Introducing the Substack TV app, now in beta Taking subscriber video to the bigger screen

This seems like a waste of time for Substack. While the platform has done a relatively good job of getting its users to upload more video and even attracted some video-first creators, most of what I've seen is unpolished and wouldn't really stand out in the highly competitive OTT environment. I get

If Trump's mumbling of a few barely coherent sentences can send the stock market up or down by hundreds of billions of dollars, then that's pretty much all the proof you need that the stock market is not the economy.

“Does this channel have more juice in it?” YouTuber J.J. McCullough on a “sustainable” life as a news creator "I respect mainstream media a great deal. I think they're doing better work than a lot of new media people do. No one has really risen to dethrone them in terms of news-gathering."

I always love stories about journalists who get laid off from legacy media outlets and use that as the impetus to launch their own independent channels. In this case, a creator took his skills from working at a TV news station and used them to build a YouTube channel up to over 1 million subscribers

YouTube video by Simon Owens This social-first news outlet turned street interviews into a 600,000-subscriber YouTube channel

How Roca News grew from 0 to 500,000 YouTube subscribers in a single year.

youtu.be/sz4gD3C8eB0?...

Money with Katie (Katie's Version) Why I sold—then bought back—my business.

The writer behind a personal finance newsletter explained why she sold her newsletter to Morning Brew in 2021 and decided to buy it back four years later. There are some good lessons in here for any creator who's looking to sell to a larger media entity -- at the very least, you should try to retain

The Strategy That 2x'd The Dink's Daily Subscriber Rate - Growth In Reverse Thomas Shields launched The Dink, a pickleball newsletter, in late 2020.

Newsletters like Morning Brew and the Hustle had a lot of early success growing their subscribers bases by leveraging referral programs, but these tactics stopped being very effective once lots of other newsletters began to adopt them.

The pickleball newsletter the Dink basically reinvented the re

If there's anything we've learned over the past year, it's that investors will use any excuse to make the line go up. The only thing that will make it go down is if the economy actually crashes and investors have to start liquidating their holdings.

The line between TV ads and YouTube ads is getting very blurry New research suggests advertisers and agencies are shifting YouTube into their TV budgets and out of "online video" and "social" slots.

Even though YouTube absolutely dominates on television screens, it's been hindered by the fact that most media buying agencies categorize it as "online advertising," which is allocated to a different budget from TV ad spend. But now agencies are increasingly recategorizing YouTube as "connected TV,

The New York Times Is Launching Its First Two-Player Word Game: Crossplay The game will be familiar to Scrabble or Words with Friends players, but the Times is adding a few twists of its own.

It's interesting that the NYT decided to launch this as a separate app. That's always a risky endeavor because the product has to stand mostly only the own without the benefit of the larger bundle. That being said, the NYT has tremendous marketing reach across its main app, newsletters, and social m

I feel like MediasTouch is an undercovered media story. It is absolutely dominating on YouTube and social platforms. People have lamented that liberals don’t have their own version of Fox News, but this company is actually killing it at reaching young audiences.

Movie Theaters Want a Ted Sarandos Blood Oath Regal Cinemas’ Eduardo Acuna goes public with his pitch for Netflix to sign a 10-year binding pledge with the Trump D.O.J., ensuring Ted Sarandos won’t go back on his recent promise to give Warner Bro...

Anyone skeptical that Netflix will embrace theatrical releases should remember the company spent years stating matter-of-factly that it would never monetize with ads. The company rose up through the ranks by zigging where every other Hollywood studio zagged, but now that it’s arguably conquered Tins