Podcast Monetization
By: Tanner Campbell
Tags: Podcast Monetization, Content Creation, Podcasting, Monetization, Podcasters

I view money as an enabler. If you have money, a lot or a little, you’re able to do things that you otherwise could not do. For example, if you had $10 you could buy ten $0.90 lollipops, which is ten lollipops more than you could have bought with $0. Or, if you had $10, you could donate $10 more to a cause you really cared about than you could have if you had $0. If you had $100, you could register a domain name, open up a Shopify store, design some t-shirts, sell some t-shirts, and develop a business that sustained your needs and funneled regular donations to charity. The more money you have the more neat things you can do, both for yourself and for others.

“Tanner you’d mentioned $10K a month, that’s a lot of lollipops.”

It sure it, and it probably seems like an impossible amount of money for your podcast to generate, but before I talk to you about why it’s not impossible, let me talk to you about the current means of monetization.

Patreon and pateron-eque platforms are perhaps the most popular, but there are two problems with them:

The first is that they require additional work from you to work well, and additional investment. The average supporter is giving $6 a month to the creators they support on Patreon, but that support comes at a steep cost to the creators. Namely: the creator has to create more. You already make a podcast, but now you’ve got to make extra episodes, mod a slack or discord channel, create swag items, manage shipping and delivery of swag items, and spend more time than you’re already spending on your podcast. So as your revenues increase, so do your costs and your labor. It’s non sustainable for most creators. It’s also worth noting that, according to Patreon’s own blog which I will link in the show notes, you’ll need at least 30,000 subscribers to make $1000.

$1000 dollars might seem like a good amount of money to earn per month, but 30,000 subscribers is going to take you more than two years (in most cases) to grow. So you’re working a full-time job, you’re moonlighting as a content creator, and you’re struggling for two years before you’re making enough money to pay your rent. Or, if you fancy, before you’re making significant contributions to causes you care about, or contributing more meaningfully to the community you want to serve. And I would be remiss if I did not not mention the labor, your time!, and what it is worth.

Most podcasters are spending 80-hrs a month creating their podcasts (the production, the promoting, the social media management, the whole 9-yards) and they’re spending another 5–10 hours a week keeping promises to their supporters (extra episodes, creating t-shirts, having live hangouts, that sort of thing) — that’s another 40-hours a month maybe. You’re talking 30-hours a week, or 120 hours a month, for $1000? You’re making $9/hr.

“But I’m not in it to make money!”

I can hear some of you saying.

But why not? If you’re in it to serve your community, you’re doing them no favors by not making the sort of money necessary to do more for them. Remember what I said before? Well if you have $1000 a month, you can give back $1000 worth of fill in the blank every month, but if you had $10,000 a month, well, you could give back a lot more.

Money isn’t your enemy, it’s an enabler that will enable you to do more for others both by giving you the budget to do so and by providing you with the sort of personal income necessary to free you from your day job and serve the community you care about full-time.

With traditional advertising, pre-rolls, mid-rolls, post-rolls, etc , you’re going to have a different but equally frustrating problem. Advertisers care about the size of your audience because they know that for every X amount of listeners who hear their advert, they’re going to get Y amount of customers. It’s cold calculated math to them and they pay you by CPM, that’s cost per thousand impressions (or in our case, listeners). Before podcasting became mainstream and podcast stats and analytics became more accurate, podcasters could command a $35CPM, meaning for every 1000 listeners, they’d earn $35. Now that $35/CPM is being split between the podcaster and the service doing the ad-buying and providing the insertion — making your CPM more like $7. But assuming you could still command a $35CPM, how many sets of 1000 would you need, at $35 each, to earn $1000 a month?

Just about 30,000K.

There’s a reason this number is the same in both cases, and that reason is the math I mentioned earlier. Only 1–3% of listeners are going to answer a CTA and convert into a paying customer. Doesn’t matter if that’s a request to buy a pair of meundies, or a request to become a patron. SELLING something to people is hard to do, and frankly, most people don’t want to be sold to — especially in the middle of their free-time as they’re listening to a podcast. it’s offensive.

To make $10K a month off the back of your podcast, you’re going to need an audience of 100,000 and you’re going to need to be running ads and providing a Patreon-type offering. That’s 100 sets of 1000 for your advertisers at $35 for each 1000, that’s $3500, and about 750 Patreon supporters at $6 a piece for another $4500 and you’re still not at $10K. But you are, at this point, making a full time living.

100,000 listeners takes years and most podcasters don’t have years to dedicate to the effort. Further more, most podcasters flat out don’t have what it takes to grow a show to that size. Their content is generally too niche, their marketing skills are limited, and their business sense it too.

“But I’m not running a business!”

Sure, not literally, but if you’re planning on getting to a place where you make enough money to quit your job, service your community full time, and impact the world on your own terms… you’d do well to act as though what you’re running here is a business because, with any luck, it’s the thing that’s going to pay your bills and give you the power to do more for the communities you care so much about. It’s not a business yet, but it could be, and that’s a good thing because of the good things it would enable you to do.

I advocate for a different method of doing this, one that works much faster, requires significantly less sustained effort and upfront investment of both time and money, and that provides a ton more value for your audience than a Patreon account or a Dollar Shave Club ad.

Every Saturday I host a free presentation on what I call Podcast Revenue Machines and while the name might sound a little hokey or sales-pitchy, neither the concept nor the content of that presentation are.

The premise of the Podcast Revenue Machine is that you are not properly utilizing your position as a content creator and you’re attempting to monetize the wrong thing: your podcast instead of the correct thing: your knowledge and passion. A Podcast Revenue Machine is all about creating revenue for your grander endeavors (saving the whales, paying your bills, or giving back more to your community) by leveraging your podcast as a platform for proving your authority and value. This transforms your podcast into something that is increasingly rare these days: an ad-free experience with no requests for patron support — it makes the experience 100% about value for the listener — 100% giving and serving, 0% asking and advertising.

The result of a properly configured and maintained Podcast Revenue Machine is, to start, about $10K a month in gross revenue for you. I have yet to get any of them to work as well as $100,000K a month but, 10K? Yeah, that’s actually easy and has WAY more to do with shifting your thinking about where your value comes from, than it does creating a super amazing podcast.

I’m about to go over my self-imposed time-limit, if I haven’t already, so here’s what I’m going to ask you to do: go to portlandpod.com/presentation and register for this Saturday’s free presentation that’ll flesh this out in a lot more detail. Doesn’t matter when you’re listening to this, I do these every Saturday. The presentation will run between 30–40 mins, and will give you the outline of a Podcast Revenue Machine so you can get started building your own.