What can news publishers learn from creators? Interview with Simon Owens

French blogger Hugo Travers brings more eyeballs on TikTok than most European news outlets. One in five Americans encountered Joe Rogan’s news takes in a single week after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the Digital News Report found.

To stay relevant, news media companies should work with news creators – or at least learn from them to borrow the most successful tactics while maintaining journalistic integrity.

Simon Owens is a US-based media industry journalist who writes a media newsletter and hosts a podcast, covering both news publishers and the wider media and creator ecosystem.

We spoke with Owens about what news publishers can learn from the creator ecosystem – and how traditional media companies can partner with creators.

Note: the Q&A has been edited for length and clarity

What are some of the key lessons that news publishers can learn from the creator ecosystem?

I think a lot of it has to do with proper monetisation. The best creators don’t leave money on the table – they're actually trying to monetise every channel they operate in.

A lot of traditional media companies have these huge audiences on YouTube and TikTok, but if you look at their actual content, they’re not really monetising it in any way. They might get a revenue share from YouTube, but they're not selling sponsorships directly into YouTube or trying to use YouTube’s subscription mechanisms to generate memberships. They leave a lot of money on the table as a result.

For example, I did a recent article about Vox Media and their really successful YouTube channel. A lot of their creators had to leave Vox Media and go off on their own in order to properly monetise their content, whereas Vox until relatively recently was not selling many direct sponsorships in their YouTube videos.

Creators are also much more open about thinking outside the box in terms of business models. The most famous example being Mr. Beast with his chocolate bars. They’re not relying on traditional media business models like sponsorships and subscriptions. They’re selling physical products, services, their own tools. You really don’t see many media companies thinking outside the box about what they can offer beyond selling advertising and subscriptions.

And finally, the most obvious thing is leaning into personal brands and personalities. A lot of media companies are still really uncomfortable with embracing the personal brand and individuality of their journalists and content creators. The personal brand has a lot of currency in the current media environment, so their failure to embrace those personal brands is coming to their own detriment – they’re not able to fully capitalise on the parasocial relationship between creators and their audiences.

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Are there specific lessons publishers can learn from how creators approach platform strategy?

Creators are more willing to create native content for platforms, whereas media companies are still largely focused on sending people back to their own website. They’re less willing to invest in native content on those platforms. Part of that goes back to what we were already talking about – media companies are just not properly monetising their platforms, so they don’t see the reason to continue investing in them.

Creators are also really good about pushing their audiences from platform to platform so they have a more diversified audience strategy and don't become too reliant on one platform. You see this with a lot of YouTubers – they’re trying to push people onto Patreon or Substack or some other platform where they can have a bit more ownership over the audience.

You should always be thinking about cross-pollination. You should have audiences across various platforms so you don't become too reliant on one.

Can you give us some examples of news publishers that have successfully learned from the creator economy – and perhaps some that haven’t done it so well?

Ironically, Vox Media – which I started off by criticising for not properly monetising their YouTube channels – has sort of figured it out on the podcast side. You’re starting to see Vox increasingly work with really large celebrities and creators to basically run their sales and production operations for their podcasts, then they take a revenue share based on that.

You’re starting to see companies like The Washington Post and The New York Times being more comfortable working with creators to launch new shows. In fact, The Washington Post just hired someone whose full-time focus will be creating these kinds of creator partnerships. It's a little too early to tell how that will turn out, but that’s something interesting to watch.

You’re also seeing legacy publishers get more comfortable building editorial products around the personal brands of their star content creators. Bloomberg, for instance, basically handed Matt Levine his own newsletter, and he's created his own fan base around that. Same thing with Joe Weisenthal [and Tracy Alloway] of the Odd Lots podcast.

The Economist – which famously hides the bylines of its reporters – is now increasingly giving several of those journalists their own personality-led newsletters. Same thing with the Financial Times. So you’re starting to see more media companies get comfortable building actual editorial newsletters, podcasts, video channels that elevate the personal brands of their individual contributors.

An example of a relatively small publisher in terms of staff count is Puck, which has basically created verticals around a few star creators, gave them equity in the company and also a percentage of the subscriptions they bring in through their content as part of their pay package. That's created this really interesting balance where it's allowing them to benefit from the upside, but it's also giving them traditional support like production help, salaries, healthcare, editing support. Puck is a really good example of how to balance learnings from traditional media with the creator economy.

On the negative side, I think The New York Times was misguided a few years ago when it passed a policy requiring any reporter who wanted to launch their own newsletter to get permission first. I think that’s a pretty bad mindset – discouraging your own journalists from building out their own audiences and experimenting with their own content. A New York Times journalist having their own newsletter and building their own audience can only benefit the Times in the long term, both in terms of attracting talent and helping to elevate the star power of the talent so it can send more traffic and readers back to the content it’s creating.

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What advice would you give to publishers who want to start not just learning from the creator economy but partnering with creators?

First, try to identify what you have to offer – what you bring to the table that the creator doesn't already have. Maybe it’s identifying an up-and-coming creator who has their own audience but doesn't have the scale yet to truly capitalise on their talent. You're saying, “I'm bringing my audience to the table and I'm going to help you scale up.” So not going after the huge creators that already have millions of followers, but maybe the creators that have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers who need help to go to the next level.

The other thing is figuring out what kind of support they need. A lot of them want simple things – in the US, unfortunately, we still don't have universal healthcare, so health insurance and other kinds of benefits, or maybe just a regular salary. Maybe there’s some kind of system you create where they have a base salary and then they get economic incentives when they hit certain benchmarks.

A lot of them need more production help. They're having to do everything on their own – editing their own videos, their own articles, all that kind of stuff. Providing them a layer of production help so they can focus on the creative content and scale up more quickly. I would start with identifying those weak points and figuring out how you can come in and help them.

Now, how do you partner with them effectively? I see companies going about this in two different ways.

One is you allow them to keep creating content on their channels, but you pay them to also create content for the channels that you own. Yahoo, for instance, is partnering with YouTube creators right now and saying, “You can write articles for the Yahoo website and we’ll share revenue with you, but we own the content that’s on the website.”

The other way is to allow them to own all their IP and their own channels, but you're just coming in and helping them monetise it, and you're taking a cut of revenue – whether it's 30% or 50% – from whatever revenue you’re helping to drive.

Those are the two different ways, and it all depends on what strengths you bring to the table, what your business model is, and where you think you can help. Obviously, if you’re just doing a revenue share with them and they’re owning all the content, that's a harder business to scale than if you are owning the channels yourself and you’re just paying them to create the content for you. That's something you have to balance when you’re coming up with these strategies.

For European publishers specifically, helping creators cross the language barrier would probably be valuable. You’re seeing a lot of creators now experiment with things like voice dubbing and translation – this would probably be more on writing, but it could also happen with video and podcasts. If you found a really talented French writer who writes about healthcare or economics but they're writing in French – could someone like The Economist or the Financial Times offer to create an English language version? Maybe that could be a possibility.

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Is there anything else you’d like to add about this shift toward creator partnerships?

I've seen these partnerships accelerate just in the last six to 12 months. It seems like there's a real paradigm shift happening within media. I don’t know about Europe specifically, but at least in the US, it's happening at a faster and faster clip. My prediction is that two or three years from now, these two worlds of the creator economy and traditional media will be so blended that it’ll almost become hard to really differentiate the two in some ways.

What are some points of differentiation that news publishers can still have in this blended world?

I think there's still value in a media brand. Obviously, personal brands are becoming more and more important, but having the imprimatur, the stamp of approval, the vetting process of a media brand and all the editing and production that goes into that can still elevate an individual creator.

Anything that The New York Times puts out under its own name is going to have a certain level of quality control that you don’t have if you’re just out on your own… You look at music labels and book publishers – how they work with authors and musicians and do so much stuff behind the scenes to enhance that work and ensure that it finds a larger audience. I think media companies can continue to offer that kind of service.

Source of the cover photo: generated with ChatGPT