The Business of Content Simon Owens, tech and media journalist

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/
 
What does a professional travel photographer do when all international flights are shut down due to a global pandemic? That’s a question Gary Arndt found himself asking in the early months of 2020. By that point, he had built up millions of social media followers and an entire career from snapping photos in exotic locales, and within a matter of weeks his income streams had completely dried up.
 
Luckily, he had already been batting around the idea for a podcast that didn’t require any travel. In July 2020, he started producing seven episodes a week of Everything Everywhere, an educational show about a diverse range of topics, and it immediately took off. Today, it generates 1.5 million monthly downloads and pulls in much more advertising income than Gary ever made as a travel photographer.
 
In our interview, Gary walked through how he found his audience, where he gets his ideas for new episodes, and why he weaned himself off the social media platforms that once delivered him huge reach.
 

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When Jared Newman launched his Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter back in 2016, the streaming TV market was much smaller than it is today, with most TV networks either not having their own streaming app or requiring a cable subscription to access it. But as it turned out, he timed his launch perfectly, as it was only a matter of years before virtually every Hollywood studio pivoted to streaming. Today, his newsletters has over 32,000 subscribers, and a spinoff newsletter that gives tech advice has also grown to 1,200 paying members.
 
In our interview, we discussed his motivation for launching the newsletter, why his editor let him promote it at the end of his columns, and whether he ever wants to leave his freelance career entirely to just focus on growing his two newsletters.
 

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/
 
Today, the personal finance content niche is absolutely ginormous. You can’t open up YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram without encountering an influencer who gives advice on how to make and save money.
 
Today’s guest Philip Taylor anticipated this content explosion all the way back in 2011. That’s when he launched FinCon, a conference specifically designed for personal finance content creators. That first year he attracted around 250 attendees, but over the next decade it grew into the largest conference in this niche, attracting over 3,000 attendees a year.
 
In our interview, Philip walked us through how he got into the personal finance space, his strategy for growing the conference, and his ambitions for launching similar conferences in other niche categories.
 

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/
 
I’m sure just about everybody has had the experience of looking at a celebrity memoir and wondering: did they actually write that? In many cases, they didn’t, at least not by themselves. There’s actually an entire shadow economy of ghost writers who do the bulk of the work on these books – not just for celebrities, but all kinds of public figures ranging from big-name CEOs to politicians.
 
But how does one go about hiring a ghost writer? And what’s it like to work with one? To answer these questions, I turned to Dan Gerstein, the founder of Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency that specializes in connecting clients to professional ghostwriters.
 

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Ben McCarthy didn’t set out to create a media company focused on Salesforce, he just began blogging about his use of the product as a way to document the various use cases he encountered. As it turned out, there were thousands of other people who were encountering those same use cases, and via Google searches they began landing on Ben’s blog posts. 
 
Fast forward 10 years, and he now runs a 20-person media company that generates over 1 million pageviews per month and is the most authoritative resource for Salesforce customers. 
 
In our interview, we discussed why there’s such a huge audience for Salesforce content, how he monetizes with webinars and white papers, and whether he wants to launch more media outlets centered around other cloud technologies.
 

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My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/
 
When Joe Pulizzi launched The Tilt in 2021, he already had a pretty good idea of how to build a successful media company. Back in 2017, he had sold his previous media startup, The Content Marketing Institute, to one of the world’s largest event conglomerates.
 
Joe ran The Tilt with a very similar playbook – first starting with a weekly newsletter, and then expanding into an in-person conference called The Content Entrepreneur Expo, or CEX. The venture was so successful that he sold it to Lulu Press in 2023.
 
In our interview, Joe talked about his newsletter growth strategy, what it takes to put on a successful conference, and why he prefers the term “content entrepreneur” instead of “creator.”