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Sam Koslowski  00:03

Young people want news to meet them where they are. Let's look at music - they're in Spotify. They're not clicking out to go and listen to something elsewhere. Netflix - they're not finding something they want to watch and then going somewhere else. News companies were approaching social media as a lead generation tool. 'I'm going to meet somebody on Instagram and say to keep reading, click here'. Young people don't behave like that. They stay in app, and I want them to do that.

Dr Juliet Bourke  00:30

News and the way we get it has changed dramatically in the age of social media, and younger audiences in particular are more likely than ever to consume news on a social media platform. It 's why two young journalists, Sam Koslowski and Zara Seidler, decided to start their own social first news outlet, The Daily Aus.

Sam Koslowski  00:52

We sat down and an hour later we had a 50/50 partnership and a business. And I was bullish and ready to take a massive leap and just go for it, and she wouldn't have done it without me and I wouldn't have done it without her.

Dr Juliet Bourke  01:05

With an of more than a million Australians a month - engaging in their Instagram page, Tiktok, podcast, and newsletters - The Daily Aus has become a thriving business, employing a team of journalists, content specialists and partnership executives.

Sam Koslowski  01:19

Traditional news still doesn't believe that what we're doing is working or legitimate, and I love that. I love being the underdog.

Dr Juliet Bourke  01:36

This is The Business Of, a podcast from the Â鶹Éçmadou Business School. I'm Dr Juliet Bourke, a Professor of Practice in the School of Management and Governance. 2024 was Sam Koslowski's biggest year to date. In addition to the success of their news outlet, The Daily Aus, Sam and Zara launched a book called No Silly Questions and were together named on Forbes Australia's inaugural 30 under 30 list. So given younger audiences are the hardest news consumers to attract, what's been the secret to this startup's success? Sam, where did the idea of The Daily Aus come from?

Sam Koslowski  02:15

So I came up with the idea for The Daily Aus in 2013 when I was on my gap year. I was on a train from Rome to Budapest, and I was thinking a lot about news and why, on my terrible early model iPhone, it was taking so long to load news websites. I couldn't read anything because the articles were too long and it was too tiny text, and so I came up with the idea of a social based news outlet. Took the name The Daily Aus on Instagram, and then did nothing with it for four years. And then in 2017 I had a bad breakup, and my psychologist at the time said you should do a project. I'd worked at News Corp in media for five years up until that point, and I put something on LinkedIn saying, 'I want to start a news company for young people. Does anyone want to do it with me?' And I got one reply, and that was from Zara.

Dr Juliet Bourke  03:05

You began by posting a daily bulletin of five news stories on Instagram. How did that evolve?

Sam Koslowski  03:11

We did it for three years every single day - I mean like every day, not skipping Christmas or New Year's or anything - and after three years, the audience was only 3000 people on Instagram only. So it was by all intensive purposes, a failed experiment. But what we were finding was that it was coming up in job interviews that we were doing for other jobs, and it was something that we could talk about as an interesting out of work aspect of our lives. It was helping us keep on top of the news that we were reading anyway, and what we also noticed is that even though the audience was small it was unbelievably sticky. So we were publishing these news bulletins on Instagram story at 8am every morning, and on the occasional morning we published at 8:30am we'd have messages between eight and 830 saying, where's my news?  And so there were early signs that it was a good thing. I just... growth was so hard. Then came the pandemic, and the pandemic was the turning moment for our growth. We went from 3000 to 40,000 in 12 months, in 2020 and that was when we made the decision to quit our jobs. Went all in on The Daily Aus.

Dr Juliet Bourke  04:02

Wow.Ìý So what was it about the pandemic that really changed it up for you? 

Sam Koslowski  04:25

Well, it was the first time that young people had to understand how government decisions affected their lives. Really.Ìý

Gladys Berejiklian  04:31

What I do want to stress in relation to COVID, we are still in a state of very high alert. It's really, really important for people to come forward and get tested.

Dan Andrews  04:36

This is real. It's serious. It's not over. Pretending that it is will simply make a difficult situation into a tragic set of circumstances.Ìý

Sam Koslowski  04:50

Of course we're all affected by changes in economic policy or foreign policy, tariffs, healthcare... there's a whole lot of places where government decisions impact us. But it's never really happened that it's impacted whether we can see our girlfriend, or whether we could go to another suburb that we wanted to go to, and movement was really one of the sticking points. Vaccinations was another sticking point. We literally did a daily case number post breaking down what all the state premiers were saying that morning, and what we found was that there was this kind of ritual of the 11am press conference. We all watched it. We all tried to figure out what was going to happen next. A lot of young people were watching it going, 'I'm not actually understanding how this bureaucracy works. What's the difference between a federal health minister and a state health minister? Who's making the decisions here? Why they're being enforced by some police and not others?' Lots of different questions. And we would break down that press conference. So by 11:30am or 11:15am even you had a post on Instagram breaking it all down, and that got shared. That got shared a lot. People were sending it to their family chat groups and they were sending it to their housemates. And so the biggest growth driver in that year was private messages. So it was no big marketing campaigns, it was no big blast by influences, it was one person leading to another person leading to two more people and you can kind of picture the kind of pyramid effect of that. And so there we were 12 months later with 40,000 followers and then it became 'Okay, if we can keep this growth trajectory going, there's a real opportunity here'.

Dr Juliet Bourke  06:20

Well, how did you do that? Because the catalyst was the pandemic, but obviously the pandemic finished and people didn't need an explanation of those figures anymore. So why were you still sticky? 

Sam Koslowski  06:31

Well, they needed an explanation then on Black Lives Matter, and then they needed an explanation on January 6, and there was a series of really major news moments that happened. It does seem that since 2020 the news cycle has been unforgiving, and lucky for us, I guess, but unlucky for the world there was a real need to understand and make sense of the world around young people. I think that sense has always been there, but I do think that in certain periods of time it's more prevalent than others. But I think it was just kind of one leading into the other, leading into the other, and all of a sudden we were big enough for young people to start saying 'There's actually this really good new news source that takes young people seriously. It isn't just youth news, which is celebrity gossip and gags and swear words. It's actually really credible, trustworthy information'. And that was different. We've never had that, really in Australia.

Dr Juliet Bourke  07:29

That point of difference... so what I understand through looking at The Daily Aus is that you're not just telling the news, but you're explaining the news. You're sort of situating it in a context, and you're giving some background to it. It hasn't happened before?

Sam Koslowski  07:44

Not really. It's a terrible business model is the kind of sentiment amongst traditional news companies. Because you've got there an audience that, in the eyes of traditional news companies, aren't big spenders - we know they're not going to spend on news, that habit has almost fundamentally changed now - so what's the selling point in giving young people really dense explainers that you can't really monetise very quickly? And our theory was if you do it for enough time, they will want it every single day, and if they have to look at an ad from a partner that they ethically and morally align with that's going to work as well. And it turns out, we were right, and we've built a fully financially sustainable news company - we're now employing 15 people, we've got five job ads in the market right now. 85% of the room is editorial. Every single journalist, in fact, every single member of the team is under 30 - I'm the oldest at 29 and 10 months - and I was really wanting to provide a different option to young people in Australia. Traditional news still doesn't believe that what we're doing is working or legitimate, and I love that. I love being the underdog. And just...

Dr Juliet Bourke  08:59

Yeah, they're not trying to take your market.Ìý

Sam Koslowski  09:00

Oh, we're taking theirs. Like our average age is still 24, so we're still in that young sweet spot, but we're taking older audiences as well. So the number of messages we get saying, 'I know I'm not in your target demographic but I really enjoy the way you explain the news, because I feel a bit silly when I'm trying to talk to my friends. I'm 58 and I just want to participate in conversations at the pub, but I feel like when I read the Financial Review I'm not actually understanding interest rates. So thank you for that explainer.' That's resonating. But also what happens is that if you're a traditional news company, you need some sort of runway, some sort of intro mat to get people to like you for a couple of years and then subscribe to you. And I think the New York Times have nailed that right, with Wordle. I mean, you are engaging a younger cohort, you're getting them used to the brand, you're getting them used to the URL and visiting the website, and then you're saying four years in, why don't you consider subscribing? So there's clearly a business case there, in my opinion. The problem is that there is an underestimation of young people, and I think that lies at the heart of the issue here. Young people want news to meet them where they are. Let's look at music - they're in Spotify, they're not clicking out to go and listen to something elsewhere. Netflix - they're not finding something they want to watch and then going somewhere else. News companies were approaching social media as a lead generation tool - I'm going to meet somebody on Instagram and say 'To keep reading, click here'. Young people don't behave like that. They stay in app, and I want them to do that. For the cohort that we're trying to chase, it's not meant to be something that feels massively inconvenient and foreign. So we started embedding the full pieces. You know, we heard all the arguments against that - it's terrible for search because they're images, right? They're not words, so you can't search Instagram for a keyword. But we kind of didn't care, like it's not really about the old school metrics of search for us, it's about brand building. And so if you know that you get your news on Instagram because you're spending three hours a day on Instagram anyway, and you're getting it from us, when we say 'Hey, there's also a podcast you can listen to', or 'Hey, there's a newsletter', or 'Hey, we released a book', they come straight there.

Dr Juliet Bourke  11:10

Do you think you've been able to open up a younger audience to news that actually had no interest at all? Because I think you were pitching to people who had an interest and it was unmet. But do you think you've been able to create a new market?

Sam Koslowski  11:23

Absolutely. I mean, we are getting feedback from people saying, 'I simply didn't give a shit. And now I do'. We are seeing greater voter enrollment from the Australian Electoral Commission for those under 24 than we have in any other point in history. That's not just because of TDA, but TDA, I'm sure, is helping.

Dr Juliet Bourke  11:42

Do you have a strategy to get those in who have no interest at all?

Sam Koslowski  11:45

Keep showing up. Keep showing up and show them that when something happens that hits them with proximity - whether it be a law that impacts their profession, whether it be a stabbing in their shopping center on a Saturday afternoon - whatever point in time the news presents something that you actually need to take an interest in because it directly impacts your life, we're there for it. And that is a slow burn, and sometimes that can take years and years. And they might come in for that Bondi Junction stabbing afternoon to work out where the road closures are and then tap out for two years. But then when the next thing happens, they'll then think I had a good experience getting up to speed on that one thing I needed to know. From a business perspective, the strategy is be there every single day, all the time.

Dr Juliet Bourke  12:28

How have you managed to make this a business that you're now employing 15 people?

Sam Koslowski  12:33

Yeah, so we started just with that Instagram page. So by the time we quit our jobs, we just had that page. We've since expanded to newsletter, so the newsletter currently has 250,000 daily subscribers. Totally free, but that's a really lucrative product for advertisers, and the newsletter market in Australia is really underdeveloped. There's newsletters that do kind of a link list - 'Here's the top 10 articles on this particular news website. Click it and go and read it' - but it's not a curated read. In the US there's a thriving newsletter scene, where newsletters are summing up news stories or doing particular opinion columns via a newsletter sub stack has become bigger and bigger. There's a brand called Morning Brew, which is business news for young Americans, it sold for $100 million. So there's a lot of value in the US market on newsletters, not the same here. So we've started a newsletter, we now have gone from one to three newsletters in the last six months. So we've introduced TDA Sport and The Good News, which is just positive news once a week. So the newsletters, the podcast - we've got a top 10 news podcasts that we've been doing for three years now. Then we've got Tiktok, YouTube video products, and between all of that we commercialise across every single one with advertising. But the way we pick our advertisers is very specific, and we knock back about 50% of advertiser pitches that come into us. And the reason for that is that young people expect their brands to be purpose driven, and we are a brand. So if we partnered with big mining and oil company, it's no longer the old school media model of you're watching the news on a commercial network, and then whatever ads you see in that ad break you're not associating with the program. People associate us with the brands that we work with. It's our endorsement of that brand. And so what we then see on the flip side is crazy engagement, because you're then seeing us present a brand to you and then going, 'Okay, so if TDA thinks it's cool, I might check this one out'. Apart from, you know, saying no to oil companies. Who do you say yes to? We say yes to brands that have transparency, that have faced scrutiny before, and we've seen how they responded to it. That are backing TDA because it's TDA, not because they think they can make squillions of dollars off people clicking on stuff, because our audience, they might need to be introduced to a brand 10 times before they actually take a bit of a deeper dive. We're in a world where a lot of brands just use Facebook ads to blast people with something to get really quick hits of sugar. That's not the right fit for us, so we work with, you know, Up Bank is probably our longest standing client. A bank targeted at young people with particular tools integrated into it that help you track your savings and manage a budget, that's perfect. They've got a clear mission statement around where they invest money in, they've got clear strategies around... we want to help people when they travel, we want to help people when they get into relationships, we want to help people when they're in a share house. Perfect. So we've been able to commercialise really successfully there. We've just started to reader revenue program as well.Ìý

Dr Juliet Bourke  15:41

What is that? 

Sam Koslowski  15:41

So it's basically... people messaged us saying, 'Can we give you money?' 

Dr Juliet Bourke  15:46

Oh, as sort of like a donation? 

Sam Koslowski  15:48

Yeah, like The Guardian or Wikipedia. So we've put something out there now that's 'If you want to keep news accessible and free to all and you can afford it, then here's where you can give us 10 bucks a month. And if you can't, don't stress, everything is entirely free and will always be so'. So that's there in the background now bubbling away. Again, I've noticed that the people using that are actually in the older cohort of our readership.Ìý

Dr Juliet Bourke  16:14

Because they've got disposable income?

Sam Koslowski  16:16

Probably. Disposable income, they're less impacted by a cost of living and rental crisis, but also they see the value in what we're doing for a younger group of people. So we'll often get a message saying, 'My nieces and nephews read The Daily Aus and I've really enjoyed seeing how much they're taking an interest in the world around them, and I thank you for that. I don't read you that much, but here's 20 bucks a month'.Ìý

Dr Juliet Bourke  16:35

Nice.Ìý

Sam Koslowski  16:36

So we've got that stream now, and then we're thinking through different ways of doing... you know, do we start a consulting agency? Do we help brands with their own communications? All of that kind of stuff, because diversification of revenue is the key to a good business in media these days. Because it's bloody tough out there and if we look back at the last probably ten youth media experiments across the world, they've all spectacularly failed. So, you know, it's tricky.

Dr Juliet Bourke  16:59

And as your audience is growing and diversifying, how are you making sure that you're servicing their needs and giving them the content that they want? Do you do market research? Has that ever been part of your strategy? 

Sam Koslowski  17:12

That kind of stage started around the pandemic. Instagram released a polling tool that you could just put up a sticker that gives an a or b answer, and we do that a lot now. And so it's not traditional polling in the way that we don't have census weighted data that costs a lot and is done by landline and all of that kind of stuff, but what we do have is masses of information. And we poll our audience every other day, almost, and what we're doing is gathering slowly a really interesting portrait of young Australians. So the average number of responses we'll get to a question in 24 hours is anywhere from 20 to 40,000. That's a big group of people answering a question and telling us what they think. And we know some things about those audiences - we know that 80% of the audience is under 30. We don't know if 80% of the respondents are under 30, but you can kind of do a little bit of whiteboard mathematics, and that really helps us understand, you know, how many of our audience members are renting? Where are they? What are they anxious about? Do they want to become a republic? Do they celebrate Australia Day? Do they have streaming services? Do they want to pet? I mean whatever it might be, we are building a really interesting portrait of Gen Z.Ìý

Dr Juliet Bourke  18:22

So that helps you to keep your finger on the pulse of what your audience wants. But what are the other benefits of having that kind of data?  

Sam Koslowski  18:29

I mean, it helps us with advertisers. If we're going to go talk to a car company we'll just do a poll and say, 'Are you looking in the market to buy a car?' And then the first thing we say to them is we've got 16,000 people who have said that they're ready to buy a car right now.

Dr Juliet Bourke  18:29

So you sell that data? 

Sam Koslowski  18:29

No, no. It's just an indication of the wants and needs of our audience. There's no way that an advertiser would get that data, but we'll use that data to complete that picture of the audience. At the end of the day, we want to bring them an advertiser that actually makes sense to them. So if we did a poll saying 'Are you looking to buy a second hand car?' and 2% said yes we wouldn't approach carsales.com.au and say 'Do you want to do something?' So it goes both ways. I mean, it helps us with advertisers. If we're going to go talk to a car company we'll just do a poll and say, 'Are you looking in the market to buy a car?' And then the first thing we say to them is we've got 16,000 people who have said that they're ready to buy a car right now.Ìý

Dr Juliet Bourke  19:07

Why do you think that you've had such purchase with a younger age group?

Sam Koslowski  19:11

I think the reason why we honed in on young people was because we could see such a gap and such a group of underserved consumers. The truth is that older consumers do have choice in the market for good journalism. They can open themselves up to international outlets. A lot of the mainstream outlets have now taken a very TDA style model of explaining journalism or journalism that pops up on social media in different ways. So there are options out there for an older cohort. I think a younger cohort needs something that says explicitly, 'We are for you.' Because if they don't say 'We are for you', and they say 'We are for everyone', then the posture of a young consumer is 'Okay. Well, if they say they're for everyone they're probably not for me'. So we need to almost take that step and let the audience naturally evolve, but we need to make sure we really keep chasing that younger cohort. Now, I mean, I'm 29 and I started TDA when I was 22. My brother is 22 now, he's a totally different news consumer to me. So we need to make sure that if we say we're youth media, that we don't get older as well.

Dr Juliet Bourke  20:10

I was wondering that, right? And you're going to age out?

Sam Koslowski  20:13

Personally? Yes, absolutely. So I don't want to be making the editorial or commercial decisions when I'm 35. The magic of TDA is that everyone is part of the cohort they're serving, we're talking across from our consumers and our readers not down to, and if I start having kids and thinking about my super and everything, I'm not authentically serving that audience. So TDA is my baby and I always want to be there, but somebody else will need to do the big decisions because it's not authentic then. And I feel like media companies do have two choices at the moment - do they age up with their audience or do they keep retargeting that younger age group? And Zara and I have made an extremely conscious choice to re-target that younger cohort rather than slowly move our content into buying a first home and then slowly move our content into where do you send your kids to school? And we've seen media companies really successfully do that. There is a way to do that. The problem with that model, from our perspective, is that it relies so much then on Zara and I and what we're trying to build is a brand. We don't care about personal profiles in this. I mean, we've only introduced bylines onto our stories in the last 12 months, the first six years of TDA had no bylines, like the Economist. We wanted our brand to be trusted.

Dr Juliet Bourke  21:27

What does success look like? 

Sam Koslowski  21:29

We've defined it as TDA is a mainstay in Australian media.

Dr Juliet Bourke  21:32

Australian you're just going for Australia?

Sam Koslowski  21:34

No, we're going globally. But success is that we know that global experiments are extremely hard to pull off, so at the end of the day the realistic version of success is we want to remain here. Because if we can keep growing an Australian business, then we can do our experiments overseas and try again and fail and come back to our strong home base and try again. But we don't want to put ourselves in a position like the many media companies before us. I mean, Vice was valued at $6 billion when Disney tried to buy 40% of Vice, $6 billion and they're now pretty much bankrupt. So the idea of just blowing it all out of the water and trying to just build this behemoth and raising hundreds of millions doesn't work, and neither does benchmarking success as we are the next global tycoons. We know we can experiment overseas and we know we can do it well, but we need a strong base here to be able to reassure our employees, our investors, our audience, that we are a mainstay. We are going to be here and you can trust us and invest in us as readers because we're going to be here in three years time, we promise.

Dr Juliet Bourke  22:39

And so when you go overseas, are you thinking that it's the same kind of model, but just in a different location?

Sam Koslowski  22:45

Yeah. I mean, there's nothing like us in the US, for example.Ìý

Dr Juliet Bourke  22:48

Would you go the US?

Sam Koslowski  22:49

100%

Dr Juliet Bourke  22:50

Is that your first market? 

Sam Koslowski  22:51

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Dr Juliet Bourke  22:52

Why is that? 

Sam Koslowski  22:52

I just think that there's nothing like us over there. It's such a massive market, so if you can capture a slice of the population there you are running a very successful, lucrative company. But also purely from a content perspective, Australian audiences are so interested in US news that you then can dual purpose the content. So it's not like you have to go and get educated on Swedish politics, this is stuff our audience really cares about.

Dr Juliet Bourke  23:21

Sam was always willing to wait if it meant creating a better product or making a more meaningful connection with his audience. He held on to The Daily Aus Instagram handle for years before he knew what to do with it, and he's happy to wait even longer to break into the international market. Barney Tan is the Head of School and a professor at the School of Information Systems and Technology Management at Â鶹Éçmadou Business School. Barney's done his own research into the importance of perseverance with new ventures, and says it might explain why some leaders seem to be perpetually ahead of the curve.

Professor Barney Tan  23:58

It's important to note that new ventures typically have a five year mortality rate of about 50%. What this means is that, you know, if you want to know if a new venture is successful in the developed economy, right, it's essentially the flip of a coin. While that may probably be lower than what most of us imagine when we think of startups, right? We think of startups like failing all the time and for us that are especially risk adverse, we might feel like, you know, startups is a very risky proposition. Well, it's still significant but it's probably lower than what we imagine. But nevertheless, Sam's success against this backdrop can be considered uncommon, especially given his age, his lack of experience with business, and his lack of networks. So I conducted a study of a mobile payment startup in Vietnam that is now a unicorn. A unicorn, essentially, in startup parlance, is a business that has reached $1 billion US in valuation. So it's one of the most popular mobile payment platforms in Vietnam. It has subsequently evolved into our Super App. Now, what was interesting about this startup that I studied was it was not successful in the beginning, but when we asked the question to the CTO, who took our interview, what is it that made everything click? His answer was, quite simply, I don't know. And we asked, you know, why is it that it looks like whenever new opportunities appeared your startup was first on the scene to be able to grab those opportunities? And what we realised that this was very much a case study in perseverance, the importance of perseverance. Because what this organisation did was they identified a value proposition that no one else in the market was serving, they constantly refined their value proposition along the way, and more importantly they stayed the course. They were probably ahead of their time in the beginning, but when the market was finally ready they became seen as the most established player on the scene, which contributed to their success. So persevering, especially if you think you've got it - you've got a compelling value proposition that meets an unmet need in the market - I think that's critical. But it's also important at the same time that you should also pay attention to what the market is telling you, because not everyone is Steve Jobs. Not everyone can have that grand vision that is exactly what the market wants and needs. So it's really important to collect feedback in any form, right? Like in the case of Sam, he interacted with his client base through Instagram. But that in itself, is probably not all there is to the success of a young entrepreneur, there needs to be a combination of creativity, resilience and, more importantly, the willingness to adapt and pivot if the market dynamics shift.Ìý

Dr Juliet Bourke  27:04

The Business Of podcast is brought to you by the University of New South Wales Business School, produced with Deadset Studios. If you've enjoyed this episode, you're in luck. There are so many more episodes already in The Business Of feed covering everything from marketing to leadership to crisis management. Scroll back in your feed now to choose from our catalog of interviews with the brightest business leaders in Australia.Ìý