I Told Them My Podcast Audience Wasn't For Sale... To THEM

About four years ago, a very popular remote recording platform offered me money to talk about them on this show. I'd been using it that week. It had also, that week, lost one of my recordings. Not glitched. Lost.

I said no. And I want to be clear that this wasn't a moral decision, because it wasn't. It was arithmetic.

This episode is about the thing you're holding and consistently failing to price. Because the belief is that sponsorship is a reward for volume — hit some magic download number and you're finally allowed. So you wait. And when someone eventually offers you something, you say yes very fast, because you've been told this is the gate opening.

Here's the problem with that. Only 7% of podcasts reach 5,000 downloads an episode. Two per cent reach 20,000. The benchmark show you've been measuring yourself against is a rounding error. You've been waiting for permission from a category that's almost entirely empty.

Meanwhile the advertising industry — not me, them — describes mid-tier and niche shows as underpriced. They're on record. And when you look at what they actually pay, business and B2B shows pull $40 to $80 CPM while the big broad comedy and lifestyle shows pull $15 to $35. Narrow is worth more per listener than popular.

So the question stops being will anyone ever pay me? and becomes what's the cheapest I'd take for it? Most podcasters have never answered that. Which is exactly how you end up saying yes to something you've never used.

There's an uncomfortable bit in here about what actually happens when you do. It isn't unsubscribes. Nobody storms off. It's quieter and considerably worse than that.

In this episode:

— Why the download benchmark you're chasing barely exists

— The word the ad industry uses for shows your size, and why it should annoy you

— Why a $50 CPM show can be a better buy than a $15 one

— What it actually costs you when you endorse something you haven't tested