The Digiday Podcast Digiday

In a world where video has become the predominant medium for content creators, Substack offers a reprieve in the form of the written word.
The subscription-based newsletter platform received a surge of interest during the pandemic, garnering hundreds of new creators — including Hunter Harris and Caroline Chambers — who were interested in monetizing their ideas without always needing to jump in front of a camera. And less than four years later, the platform has enabled these creators to monetize their content via thousands of paid and unpaid subscribers — not to mention advertiser sponsorship, affiliate links or even book deals.
In the third episode of the Digiday Podcast’s Creators series, Harris and Chambers discuss how they’ve transitioned their Substack subscriber bases into communities that ultimately help them feed the funnel of audience engagement.

 What started as a part-time, pandemic-induced pregnancy journey vlog has turned into a family business for social media creators Ben and Lazara Martin, and their three boys.
Since 2020, the couple has racked up nearly 8 million followers across social media, boasting family-friendly content to strike deals with brands like Huggies, Flexcar and Applebee's. But even as the influencer and content creator landscape continues to grow, changes in platform algorithms, the looming TikTok ban and more put pressure on creators.
In the second episode of the Digiday Podcast creator series, the Martin family talks being full time content creators, navigating said ban and more.

As a platform, X (formerly Twitter) has seen better days. After Elon Musk took over back in 2022, the platform has fallen from grace with advertisers and creators alike, due to the reinstatement of previously banned accounts, an increase in bots and simultaneous decrease in brand safety. However, X hasn’t managed to scare away everyone.
In fact, Jessica Davis, a part-time creator who focuses on career content, has managed to build out a following of more than 40,000 people since starting her account in 2021. Since then, she's been able to convince subscribers and brands to shell out for her tweets, pulling in revenue from monthly subscriptions and funds from the platform's ad revenue sharing program, which launched last summer.
In the first episode of the Digiday Podcast’s Creators series, Davis talks about being a text-based content creator in the short-form video era, navigating brand safety on X and the future of content creation in the ever changing landscape of social media.

Formed in 2020 after TPG bought Goal.com from DAZN, FootballCo has been steadily growing an international audience of soccer fans across its portfolio of nine brands.
But this year, FootballCo is making a concerted effort to appeal to the burgeoning fandom of U.S.-based soccer enthusiasts under the leadership of Jason Wagenheim, CEO, North America.
Wagenheim, previously the CRO of Bustle Digital Group, joined FootballCo having never before worked in sports media, but that’s what he said his bosses were interested in. Having led the advertising businesses for many lifestyle media companies in his career, Wagenheim said his goal is to convert “soccer curious” advertisers into active spenders by blending lifestyle and sports content into a video-dominant mix that appeals to non-sports native brands.
And with many global soccer sporting events coming up in North America over the next couple of years, culminating in the men’s World Cup in 2026, Wagenheim is hitting the ground running, using these tentpole moments to appeal to advertisers and audiences alike in this market.

Like other companies, Canva has been in growth mode recently, looking to scoop up new audiences to grow the Australian design platform’s user base. Notably, headlines from The Information and Barron's dance around Canva possibly going public in the coming years, but no concrete timeline has been announced.
In the meantime, the focus is expanding the Australian-based company to other markets around the world, like India, Germany, Japan and Europe, according to Zach Kitschke, CMO at Canva.
“We've made some huge strides there over the past few years, but 170 million [Canva users] is just a drop in the ocean of the total population around the world,” he said.
Canva has also been prioritizing its artificial intelligence capabilities, which has become the industry’s latest obsession. On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, we caught up with Kitschke to talk about Canva’s marketing strategy, global growth initiative and plans for AI.

 In the era of so-called subscription fatigue, subscription clothing rental service Nuuly has managed to not only increase its number of subscribers, but also turn a profit while its competitors are scrambling for profitability.
Nuuly, which is owned by Urban Outfitters, hit its first growth spurt in Q3 of last year. Nuuly's net sales came in about $65.5 million last October, up from $35.2 million in that same quarter the year prior, marking a nearly 86% increase, according to the company's earnings report. The clothing rental company also amassed nearly 200,000 subscribers as of last December, according to a spokesperson.
On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, we caught up with Kim Gallagher, executive director of marketing at Nuuly to talk about the company's growth plans through 2024 and beyond.
“This is not the sexy answer, but we feel like we are in this unique spot of we’ve had a lot of growth, we’ve just achieved our first profitable quarter and we still feel like we have a lot of work to do to make our service as good as it can possibly be,” Gallagher said on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “It’s been a couple of years of chasing growth, and we’re like, ‘Yeah, you know what? Let’s just focus on the core for a minute.”