Simon Owens

"Cruise influencers do not need the follower counts of mainstream lifestyle creators to generate serious income. A creator with 200,000 highly engaged followers interested specifically in cruising is worth considerably more to Royal Caribbean than a creat europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/how-c…

With all the anxiety around Hollywood's shrinking TV and film budgets, it's worth noting that a larger and larger chunk of every media conglomerate's content spend is being redirected to the NFL, which keeps pushing its price up for broadcast rights. Wh puck.news/will-brendan-c…

The Washington Post has been talking about its creator collaborations since August of last year, and we’re finally getting a clearer picture of how these partnerships actually work. In short, the Post hosts the content on its own verticals while allowing digiday.com/media/after-ne…

The Atlantic has done an excellent job capitalizing on the turmoil at the Washington Post, successfully poaching some of its top talent. But it raises the question of whether the magazine is becoming too heavily focused on politics. The Trump era won’t la thewrap.com/media-platform…

This is kind of neat: book publishers typically have to lean on Hollywood studios to adapt their work into movies and TV series, but in this case the publisher is playing a more direct role in adaptation. Animation is an obvious place to start, as it requ publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/in…

For two weeks in a row now I've been hosting live Zoom calls with my audience, and the conversations have been incredible. I'm constantly amazed by how many successful media operators show up at these. My next Zoom call is tomorrow. You should join! simonowens.substack.com/p/join-me-for-…

I don't necessarily blame TBPN for taking the truckload of cash from a company that has plenty to burn, but this is a dumb acquisition. Part of what gives TBPN its charm is it's this independent media outlet where two likeable hosts can give their hones cnbc.com/2026/04/02/ope…

Every single mainstream news outlet is presenting SpaceX’s target $1 trillion valuation with zero skepticism. Literally the entire NYT article about it didn’t quote a single investor who questioned why a company that only generated $15 billion in 2025 is worth over $1 trillion.

What happens when you give a senile pedophile control of world markets.

During the pandemic, a Meta employee launched a culture focused recommendation newsletter on Substack and it quickly developed a cult following, especially among young New Yorkers. Eventually, the newsletter migrated off Substack and launched a full-blown creatorspotlight.com/p/tyler-bainbr…

This is a great profile of a Houston-based news influencer who has amassed more than 22 million followers on social media, publishing almost exclusively in Spanish. While most English-speaking Americans have never heard of him, a recent Pew Research poll newyorker.com/news/the-lede/…

This seems like an odd move for a podcast network that specializes in faux-populist programming from hosts like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly. Red Seat Ventures currently doesn't offer much content that appeals to high net worth individuals, which means axios.com/2026/03/31/red…

Again, Gumroad did nothing to alert me there's a problem. If someone hadn't told me about the error message, I would have just assumed that nobody wanted to buy the ebook.

At no point did Gumroad ever alert me that the checkout process was broken and that I needed to fix something. So this morning I uploaded a new version of the ebook and published it. I'm still getting an error message.

DO NOT USE GUMROAD to sell your content. I uploaded an ebook there and then announced it to my entire audience last week. Turns out that every single person who tried to purchase it received a vague error message.

In a recent interview, voice actor Robbie Daymond 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 youtu.be/nuRY5fhSJbw?si…

I spent like four full days compiling all of my case studies into an ebook and nobody bought it. Being a creator is fun.

Looks like companies are using bogus copyright complaints to get unflattering stories removed from the Google search index. pressgazette.co.uk/news/parasite-…

I wholeheartedly endorse this piece. It annoys the hell out of me that there's an entire cottage industry of business "journalism" that consists of taking some outlandish claim made by a tech CEO -- often in a tweet or offhand comment -- and then crafting karlbode.com/ceo-said-a-thi…

Netflix continues to steer clear of huge sports broadcasting deals, instead trying to "eventize" one-off games in leagues like the NFL and MLB. The problem is that advertisers are pretty lukewarm on paying premium rates rates for these games. As one ad e puck.news/was-the-mlb-on…