The Long Story with Simon Owens

My newsletter: https://thelongstory.substack.com/   Heading into 2025, we knew that MrBeast had a huge online following. After all, his main channel has grown to over 300 million subscribers and 74 billion views. He’s built out an entire studio in North Carolina and is mobbed by legions of fans wherever he goes.   But

My newsletter: https://thelongstory.substack.com/   When JJ Hornblass got his first journalism job in the 1990s, his dad made a deal with him: he could spend a few years as a reporter, but he had to eventually make his way over to the revenue side of the media business. It only took JJ a few years to follow through on

My newsletter: https://thelongstory.substack.com/   The Dispatch was launched in 2020 with a pretty straightforward thesis: that people would pay for quality, fact-based journalism. It certainly had a partisan lean – it was co-founded by conservative journalists Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes after all – but it steered

My newsleter: https://thelongstory.substack.com/ When the Manchester Mill launched in 2020, it operated on a simple theory: that local audiences would pay for news as long as it was original and differentiated. It quickly proved that model out and was able to hire its first full-time employee within a matter of months.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/   When Matthew Schniper launched his Colorado Springs food newsletter in 2023, he ran into a problem many local news entrepreneurs face: he didn’t have enough time to do his reporting and chase down advertisers.   Luckily, by that point he already had strong relationships

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/ What’s the true monetary value of a newsletter subscriber? Tim Huelskamp knows the answer to that question. As the co-founder of the 1440 newsletter, he knows how many emails the average subscriber will open, how much money they’ll generate in ad revenue, and what it cost