The Business of Content

How do you write about the travel industry when people can’t fly on airplanes? That’s a question Kelsey Ogletree had to ask herself in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. By that point, she had worked for several years as a freelance travel writer, and like many of her colleagues, she didn’t know how the travel rest

Ash Read didn’t launch a review website about household products because of some lifelong interest in home decor; instead, his interest came about simply because he was moving into a new house and needed to furnish it.   While it was easy to search for products listed on retailers like Amazon and Walmart, he realized t

For most of his career as professional ultra marathoner, Dylan Bowman didn’t have much of an online presence, but in 2019, he suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands after he broke his left ankle and had to take a year off from racing. That year, he launched a podcast where he interviewed his fellow pro

In 2011, Rafat Ali launched Skift, a B2B publisher that covers the travel industry. At first, Skift was mainly monetized with advertising, but Rafat quickly realized that scaling a B2B niche outlet required a diverse set of business models that included memberships, research, events, and advertising. He also acquired m

Patrick Walls is the founder of Starter Story, an outlet that’s published thousands of case studies on how entrepreneurs built successful businesses. At one point, he was selling upward of $50k a month in sponsorships.   But earlier this year, he not only stopped selling advertising, he also switched from recurring sub

It used to be if you wanted to break into broadcast media you first had to start small – by getting a job as a correspondent at a local news station and then working your way up to bigger and bigger markets.   That’s the career trajectory that Casey Keirnan followed. He started out covering high school sports in small