Eric Siu breaks down why small podcasts land massive sponsorship deals. The Operators Podcast charges $500,000+ yearly not from listener count but from audience value. Niche, engaged audiences command higher CPMs than broad reach, with some deals hitting $40 per thousand listeners.
You want to know how to make $500,000 per podcast episode that we do? How? So the Operators Podcast, they charge $500,000 per year for a sponsor. Okay, so to sponsor the Operators Podcast, the minimum buy-in is $500 grand a year for a show that reaches less than 100,000 people per episode. It's because just like TBP or Colin and Samir, the audience is incredibly valuable, niche, and hard to reach. Ridge has spent millions on podcast ads. The largest CPM we have ever paid is $40 because we don't need niche, we need reach. But If Fulfill started sponsoring Joe Rogan, the ads wouldn't work. Joe has 10 to 100x as a big audience, but he doesn't have people looking for a new e-com forward ERP. So you either need a lot of reach to charge $500,000 or you need a very valuable audience. And so when you think about Tech Bros Podcast Network, they might only have 1,000 people or 5,000 people at any given time, but a normal consumer, maybe their average dispensable spend a year is maybe $3,000 to $5,000 a year, if that. Okay. If we have VPs of marketing listening to this or founders listening to this, maybe they're spending $100,000, $500,000, $1 million a year, right? So we do have a deal with HubSpot right now. Okay. But the reality is when we're working with people, yeah, out, chances are we probably can charge and we have, we have charged at least $360 grand a year.
