Our guest today is Matthew Sherry, co-founder and CEO of Platform Media. Founded in 2021, the business is home to some of the UK’s biggest podcasts and was acquired earlier this year for an eight-figure sum. The business was founded to solve the two biggest problems in podcasting: distribution and monetization. Through a savvy social strategy and bespoke partnerships, it has found unique solutions to both of those issues. We get into all the details of how they’ve managed to crack the code,...

Our guest today is Dan Shipper, the co-founder and CEO of Every. Every started at the beginning of the pandemic as a bundle of business newsletters written by different authors. While writing is still at the heart of the business, the model has shifted focus to a daily newsletter that is an essay on technology, productivity, or AI.  Dan and his team have also built adjacent business lines and even incubated a startup called Lex that they spun out last year. We talk through the evolution of...

This week, we bring you two titans of the podcasting world, Tim Ferriss and our very own Colossus chairman, Patrick O’Shaughnessy. We’re biased, but I think these two are two of the best interviewers in the world, and they recorded this conversation on Invest Like the Best for the 10th anniversary of Tim’s podcast. Matt and I thought you, our precious Making Media audience, would enjoy it too, as Tim touches on so many themes that we speak with guests about on this show. Please enjoy this...

Our guest today is sports media veteran Mike Stricoff. Mike spent a decade producing live sports talk on national TV, first working at MLBN before moving to Fox Sports, where he helped launch Undisputed. Mike worked on that show alongside Skip Bayless, Shannon Sharpe, and others as the main line producer. In 2017, he left national TV for tech, going to work at Snap where he led their sports and gaming content. And, more recently, he has launched his own business working as an adviser to...

Welcome back to Making Media. Our guest today is Emily Sundberg. Like many of our most creative guests, Emily has a wide-ranging background. For her day job, she writes her newsletter, Feed Me, which tracks valuable early trends in the consumer and brand space. If you want to know what's going to happen six months from now, read Emily's newsletter tomorrow.  She also writes for New York magazine and GQ, she's been featured in the New York Times, and she's published a documentary. We talk...

Our guest today is Jack Davenport. Jack is the Managing Director and Co-Founder of British-based Goalhanger Podcasts. Goalhanger is the largest independent podcast network in the U.K. and likely the world outside of the U.S. Its stable of shows do 30 million downloads a month. Goalhanger got its first big breakthrough with the excellent history podcast called “The Rest Is History,” and they've since grown into other verticals like politics, finance, football, and entertainment. It was great...

Our guest today is Peter Kafka. If you've listened to media podcasts, you've likely listened to Peter's Recode Media. It has been a fixture in the industry for years. Peter recently announced he's going back to Business Insider, which is notable because he was the first hire way back when it was known as Silicon Valley Insider in 2007.  Given Peter has seen a few cycles, we tried to key in on what is actually new versus what is cyclical. It was a treat to pepper him with questions on media....

Our guest today is the preeminent aviation journalist, Jon Ostrower. Jon is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Air Current, which he started in 2018. It's an independent subscription media business focused on the global aerospace and aviation industries. Jon started blogging about the airline industry as a 22-year-old while working in politics, but he quickly became consumed by his passion and went on to work for Flight Global, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN before striking off to build...

If you make a podcast or like sports, you will enjoy this episode. Spike Eskin runs all of the programming at New York's WFAN, the original and biggest sports talk radio station, and he's only the second person ever to have that job. Now you're probably thinking, doesn't everyone just listen to podcasts now? Well, the answer to that is no, but don't worry. He's also got a podcast, a big one, and his podcast, The Rights to Ricky Sanchez, is frequently ranked at the top basketball podcast...

Our guest today is Adam Hansmann, co-founder of The Athletic. The Athletic launched in 2016 when the idea of paying for content was still considered contrarian and newspapers & local coverage of sports was dwindling. Yet Adam and his co-founder built something that they wanted, solving a problem they experienced in their own lives and riding this massive market expansion. Adam shares a lot of the lessons that he took away from his experience building The Athletic and there is a lot to...

Our guest this week is CBS Sports Writer Kyle Porter. Kyle writes and podcasts about golf for CBS, and he has done so since 2012. In 2021, Kyle wrote his first book, "Normal Sport," which was born out of a running joke with his audience about the absurdities of golf. He has now written and self-published three books and writes a newsletter under the same branding. Even if you’re not a golf fan, there are so many interesting areas to explore about media with Kyle – from the rise of independent...

We reflect on Making Media's inaugural year and 2023 as a whole for the podcasting world. From shifts in the macro podcast environment to our most memorable recordings, we round up our first year and look to the next. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page HERE. ----- Making Media is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Making Media, visit joincolossus.c om/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by...

Today's guest is Craig Fuller, Founder and CEO of FreightWaves and CEO of FLYING Magazine. We get into some of the early observations that Craig had when he was building out FreightWaves, which is a software data business with a media empire sitting around it. He shares the challenges associated with fundraising for a media business and why the market doesn't put a value on audiences. In the second half of our conversation we get into Craig's playbook for buying up niche magazines around...

Our guest today is Jonathan Becker, Founder of Thrive Digital. Paid growth is a complex topic and it is something that we reference quite a bit on the show, but we've never really dug in. Jonathan and his team at Thrive have deployed over $3.5 billion in paid acquisition budgets on behalf of their client base. Naturally, that makes him an ideal guest to dig deeper. In the conversation, we draw on parallels to investing, how Jon and Thrive approach campaigns & what metrics they're looking...

Today, we’re joined by Kaki Orr, the Creative Director for Branded Content at The North Face. After a career as a professional skier where she was sponsored by The North Face, Kaki joined the company and has since led the charge to create mesmerizing films of their athletes skiing, climbing, and running across many of the world’s most remote and breath-taking mountains. We’ve talked a lot on this show about content to commerce but in many ways this conversation covers the reverse; commerce to...

Part of our mission with Making Media is to highlight great content across the internet. Today, we're sharing our favorite pieces of media from the past year and to help us sift through the deluge of content, we have a special returning guest - media aficionado Web Barr. Web is a multiple-time Webby Award and Communication Arts-winning producer at National Geographic magazine, he was Head of Content at Meet Cute, and is currently building something new in the media industry called Hi Barr. He...

Our guest today is Tammy Winter, the Commissioning Editor of Stripe Press. As the name suggests, Stripe Press is a division within Stripe. Founded in 2010 by two Irish brothers, John and Patrick Collison, Stripe is a payment processing business with a mission to "increase the GDP of the internet". From the surface, there doesn’t seem to be great synergies or reasons why a payments business would incubate a publishing arm – particularly one that focuses on publishing or re-publishing physical...

Today we are talking Marvel. It's the cinematic universe that's made over $30 billion at the box office (and that's just the Hollywood piece). Our guest today is Joanna Robinson, Podcaster and Culture Critic for The Ringer. Joanna wrote "MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios," a revealing behind-the-scenes history of the cultural phenomenon. We cover the history of Marvel from the pre-Disney days through what led to the explosion of what happened over the past 15 years and what seems like a fall...

Our guest today is Amy Astley, global editorial director and editor-in-chief of the Iconic Architectural Digest. It's rare to find a brand like AD that has a hundred-year-old history and effectively balances that rich heritage while still being the pulse of the market. Amy talks about the cultural currency that exists with the AD magazine and what that represents to the people featured inside. We also dive into how the business model has shifted since Amy stepped in, the idea of being...

In early October, Matt put together seven insights that he's learned and implemented from this show. Today, it's Dom's turn to pull out his favorite lessons that guests have shared with us and how we've put them to use in our own business, Colossus. Enjoy seven more nuggets of media wisdom. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here. ----- Making Media is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Making Media,...

We are joined today by Bryan Curtis, Editor-at-Large at The Ringer. Bryan writes excellent columns on theringer.com and hosts The Press Box, which happens to be the show with our favorite podcast episode of this past year. We gushed with Bryan over that particular podcast episode with Wright Thompson and we also hit on a wide range of media topics: writing versus podcasting, streaming versus linear, and searching for those water cooler events. We had a ton of fun during this one - please...

Today we welcome Lenny Rachitsky to Making Media. Lenny has built the biggest business publication on Substack, "Lenny’s Newsletter," with well over 500,000 readers. It started in 2019 as an advice column and since starting the newsletter, he has built a thriving podcast, community, and job board. Lenny’s world has become the destination for product and growth people at companies big and small across the world. We explore his journey, the strategy behind his products or SKUs as he calls them,...

Last week, we launched a new Colossus podcast called Art of Investing. It was our biggest and most successful launch ever so we wanted to share the tactics we put in play to help that show off to a fast start. We hope you’ll find them useful and we’ll be back with our normal interview episode on Thursday. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here. ----- Making Media is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of...

This is Matt Reustle and today I am joined by Jacob Donnelly. Jacob is the founder at A Media Operator and publisher from the Morning Brew. Jacob has long been involved in the media space, with a persistent interest in ideas on building a sustainable media company, leading him to launch his own. A Media Operator is a community with a high caliber of both people and conversations for those in the digital media and online publishing world. We cover events, launching new verticals, B2B media,...