Advertise on podcast: The Business of Content with Simon Owens

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Jessica Dante didn't set out to build a multi-platform travel media company—she set out to escape one. After an early career managing social media for corporate travel brands, she quickly grew frustrated with the slow-moving, top-down decision-making that defined the industry. So she struck out on her own, initially experimenting with blogging before discovering a more powerful insight: travelers weren't reading—they were watching. That realization led her to launch a YouTube channel focused on hyper-specific, highly practical London travel advice, a niche that was both underserved and endlessly in demand. Over the next several years, that channel evolved into Dante Media, a business spanning YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, email newsletters, and a suite of high-margin digital travel products. In a recent interview, Jessica explained how she identified a scalable content niche that didn't require constant travel, why a "drive-by" audience can be more valuable than loyal fans in certain contexts, and how the rise of AI-generated travel planning is beginning to erode one of her most important revenue streams, forcing her to rethink what parts of her business can still command a premium.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For most brands, TV advertising has long operated as an opaque, high-stakes gamble—an expensive channel dominated by middlemen, limited measurement, and a reliance on blunt audience estimates. That's the system Philip Inghelbrecht set out to disrupt when he co-founded Tatari. Tatari is attempting to rebuild the TV ad stack from the ground up—bringing automation, outcome-based measurement, and software-driven media buying to a medium that has historically lagged far behind digital. In a recent interview, Philip explained how Tatari is turning TV into a performance channel that more closely resembles digital advertising, why the company has rejected the programmatic-heavy approach in favor of direct publisher integrations, and how falling cost barriers are opening the door for a new class of advertisers to enter the TV market.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   The rise of "sleep podcasts" has quietly reshaped a corner of the audio industry, turning bedtime into a high-engagement listening moment. Few creators have benefited more from that shift than Kathryn Nicolai, whose Nothing Much Happens podcast has grown from a scrappy 2018 experiment into what she describes as the largest sleep podcast in the world. Drawing on decades of experience as a yoga and meditation teacher, Katyrhn built a format that flips traditional storytelling on its head—stories designed not to captivate listeners through to the end, but to gently lull them to sleep. Along the way, she's expanded the concept into books, subscriptions, and a growing ecosystem of products built around relaxation and habit formation.   In a recent interview, Kathryn explained how she accidentally helped define an entirely new podcast genre, why word-of-mouth drove her early growth, and how she's built a monetization strategy around an audience that's literally falling asleep.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ Axios Local began as an experiment in translating a national media brand's playbook into the fragmented world of city-level journalism. After acquiring the Charlotte Agenda, Axios used it as a template to launch a network of local newsletters built around a simple idea: hire well-connected reporters, deliver concise, high-signal updates directly to readers' inboxes, and monetize through a mix of local and national advertising. The model leaned heavily on email as a distribution channel and "smart brevity" as a product philosophy, allowing Axios to build strong brand awareness in early markets while sidestepping many of the traffic and platform challenges that have plagued traditional local news. In a recent interview, executive editor Holly Moore explains how Axios is using AI to shrink newsroom staffing requirements in smaller markets, why the company is experimenting with regional coverage models that stretch a single reporter across multiple geographies, and how its long-term ambition could see it expand into hundreds of cities.   

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Robbie Daymond is best known as a prolific voice actor, the kind of performer whose work spans anime, video games, and animation without ever putting his face front and center. After slowly breaking into the industry in the late 2000s and early 2010s, he built a rare, multi-disciplinary voiceover career—one that includes everything from audiobooks to major gaming franchises. He also spends up to 30 weekends a year attending fan conventions where he engages directly with audiences in what has quietly become one of the most lucrative and meaningful parts of his business. That creator-first ethos has increasingly shaped his ambitions beyond acting. In recent years, Daymond co-founded Sassy Chap Games, an independent studio that turned a quirky concept into one of the fastest-selling dating sims ever, fueled largely by viral user-generated content rather than traditional marketing. The project offers a window into how modern creative careers are evolving by blending IP ownership with direct-to-consumer distribution models. In a recent interview, Robbie explained how fan conventions have quietly become a major revenue engine for creators, why you don't always need a huge social media presence to build a large audience, and how revenue-sharing models can unlock top-tier creative talent.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   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.   

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Pat Walls didn't originally set out to build a media company. In 2017, he was simply interviewing founders as a side project while working a full-time job, hoping the conversations might spark his next startup idea. But those interviews—published as detailed case studies on a blog called Starter Story—slowly evolved into something much bigger. Over the next eight years, Pat bootstrapped the site into a media business built around thousands of founder stories, growing its audience through a series of distribution pivots that ranged from Reddit to SEO to YouTube. That journey culminated recently in a major milestone: the sale of Starter Story to HubSpot Media for what Pat describes as a "life-changing" amount. In a recent interview, Pat explained how Starter Story transformed from a scrappy side project into a profitable media brand, why video ultimately became the company's biggest growth engine, and his decision to shift away from advertising toward higher-priced products and boot camps.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Founded during the pandemic, the The News Movement set out with a simple but radical premise: what if journalism were designed entirely for the platforms where younger audiences already consume information? Rather than trying to pull readers back to a website, the company built a newsroom that publishes directly to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts, translating the conventions of traditional reporting into vertical video, carousels, and other native formats.    In a recent interview, editor-in-chief Rebecca Hutson explained how the outlet approaches platform-first journalism, why its reporters function as "triple-threat" video journalists who can shoot, edit, and publish their own stories, and how the company tailors coverage differently for each social platform.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   In 2004, Eric Hochberger co-founded Mediavine, which would eventually become one of the most influential ad management companies on the open web. The company didn't start as an ad tech firm — it began as a scrappy collection of SEO-fueled fan sites, built by three founders chasing traffic in the early blogosphere. While selling $50 sidebar ads and offering SEO consulting services, Eric and his partners learned firsthand how fragile and inconsistent early digital advertising could be. That experience ultimately pushed Mediavine to build its own header bidding system in 2014, a move that quadrupled the company's ad revenue and transformed it from a publisher into an ad management platform. Today, Mediavine represents roughly 17,000 publishers and operates with a 140-person team, primarily serving independent creators rather than legacy media brands. In a recent interview, Eric pulled back the curtain on how programmatic advertising actually works, why "made-for-advertising" sites are siphoning off industry dollars, and how Google's AI Overviews are reshaping traffic patterns — sometimes wiping out entire businesses overnight.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Michael Fritzell doesn't fit the typical profile of a newsletter writer. Before launching Asian Century Stocks, he spent 15 years inside the machinery of global finance — working in investment banking and eventually managing money for a wealthy family in Singapore. A Swedish native who studied Chinese at Peking University, Michael built a career analyzing overlooked equities across China and Southeast Asia. When he struck out on his own to launch the Asian Century Stocks newsletter in 2021, he wasn't experimenting with a side hustle — he was walking away from a traditional finance track to build a niche media business focused on Asian stocks that most Western investors ignore Launched on Substack and now operating independently, Asian Century Stocks sells in-depth, 40- to 60-page research reports to paying subscribers, many of whom are professional investors accustomed to paying banks tens of thousands of dollars a year for comparable research. Michael positioned himself as a bridge between local Asian markets and global capital — offering deeply reported, independent analysis without the conflicts that often accompany sell-side research. In an interview, he explained how he went from anonymous finance professional to six-figure recurring revenue newsletter operator, why he ultimately left Substack for Ghost, and what it takes to monetize serious financial research in a tightly regulated industry.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Michael Fritzell doesn't fit the typical profile of a newsletter writer. Before launching Asian Century Stocks, he spent 15 years inside the machinery of global finance — working in investment banking, buy-side firms, and eventually managing money for a wealthy family in Singapore. A Swedish native who studied Chinese at Peking University, Michael built a career analyzing overlooked equities across China and Southeast Asia. When he struck out on his own to launch the Asian Century Stocks newsletter in 2021, he wasn't experimenting with a side hustle — he was walking away from a traditional finance track to build a niche media business focused on Asian stocks that most Western investors ignore   Launched on Substack and now operating independently, Asian Century Stocks sells in-depth, 40- to 60-page research reports to paying subscribers, many of whom are professional investors accustomed to paying banks tens of thousands of dollars a year for comparable research. Michael positioned himself as a bridge between local Asian markets and global capital — offering deeply reported, independent analysis without the conflicts that often accompany sell-side research.    In an interview, he explained how he went from anonymous finance professional to six-figure recurring revenue newsletter operator, why he ultimately left Substack for Ghost, and what it takes to monetize serious financial research in a tightly regulated industry.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   In 2011, as the golden era of glossy newsweeklies was fading, former Time correspondent Nathan Thornburgh made a bet that serious journalism didn't have to look the way it always had. Alongside food writer Matt Goulding, he launched Roads & Kingdoms as a scrappy Tumblr experiment, using food as a gateway into geopolitics, history, and culture   Over the next decade, Roads & Kingdoms evolved from a bootstrapped digital publication into a creative hub for Anthony Bourdain—who invested in the company and used it as a base for ambitious editorial and branded projects. After Bourdain's death in 2018, the outlet was forced to reinvent itself. Nathan and Matt shrank the operation and rebuilt it around high-end culinary travel experiences. Now, they're relaunching the media arm with a membership-driven model and an annual print magazine   In a recent interview, Nathan reflected on the collapse of legacy media, the perils and possibilities of brand-funded journalism, and why he believes independent, reader-supported publishing offers a more durable path forward.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For decades, Diane Salvatore helped lead some of America's most recognizable magazine brands, including Consumer Reports, where rigorous product testing and consumer safety were core to the mission. Now, as executive director of the MedShadow Foundation, she's applying that same watchdog mentality to one of the most opaque corners of the marketplace: prescription and over-the-counter drugs.    In a recent interview, Diane walked through how MedShadow operates as a nonprofit investigative newsroom, its expansion into social media video, and its plan to build a donor-supported model that funds independent health journalism.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   For today's episode I spoke to Jim Louderback, the writer behind a newsletter called Inside the Creator Economy   Jim is a longtime media veteran who started out in magazine publishing and then eventually made his way over to the Creator Economy. He spent several years running Vidcon, the annual event where the world's biggest YouTubers connect with their fans, and he now helps organize creator economy events all over the world, including the 1 Billion Followers summit in Dubai.   In our discussion, we covered a wide range of media topics. We discussed whether media companies were overreacting from the threat of Google Zero, why athletes are the new super creators, and how YouTube will slowly devour Hollywood.  

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   Kit Chilvers started posting memes on Instagram when he was 14, treating the platform like a video game and obsessing over what made posts take off. A decade later, that experimentation has turned into Pubity Group, a bootstrapped social media company with roughly 170 million followers and hundreds of billions of annual views.    In a recent interview, Kit broke down how he cracked early Instagram growth, why wholesomeness turned out to be a massive business opportunity, and how he's trying to turn platform-native virality into durable media brands, original franchises, and real revenue.