Eric Siu breaks down five ways podcasters actually make money: funneling listeners to a consulting or product business, selling ads for $1 million annually on his own shows, hosting paid events, using subscription platforms, and direct product sales. The top 1% of podcasts hit 35K downloads per episode, but most creators operate with thousands per month and can still build real revenue.
All right, so today we're going to talk about how you can actually make money with podcasting. We know that podcasting is getting more and more competitive. We know that Spotify and Apple are going at each other's throats right now. You have Apple getting into subscriptions, Spotify is as well. They've been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on buying other podcasts. Amazon just bought Wondery, so the space is heating up. That means a lot more podcasts are popping up right now. It is a blue ocean right now. And I can tell you that, you know, we make a good chunk of money from our podcasting. If you watch one of our videos talking about how we make close to $1 million in advertising just from our 2 podcasts, Marketing School and Leveling Up. And I can talk about the other kind of business models that we have. But first I want to bring your attention to, we have a section over here from Axios. So the headline here is podcast business is booming, but few are making money. Projected change in US ad revenue by by Medium, 2015 to 2024. Okay. So podcast percent change, the number of podcasting is increasing 1,478%. Projected 2024 revenue, $1.7 billion. That pales in comparison to internet, $153 billion. And you look at radio, which is $23.2 billion. And you look at TV, which is at $71 billion. Newspaper magazine, that's continuing to go down. So I think the projected revenue is going to come down on this one. Radio will probably move over to podcasting more. And then out of home, that will probably continue to rise a little bit. There's still a lot of room for growth when it comes to, when it comes to podcasting. So that's the first kind of takeaway here. But it's also not easy to become a top podcast. Top 1% of podcasts get about 35K downloads or more. That's per episode. We're not just talking about overall downloads per month. A lot of people use that metric. Top 2% get about 20K or so. So it's very difficult to be at the top. And discoverability is not easy too. You can see over here, it makes it hard for people to go viral. And I hope someone changes that because I put so much time and effort into podcasting. So yeah, that's what it is. You know, they're talking about dynamic ad insertion. They're talking about adding subscriptions, things like that. We can talk about the different monetization models. From a long-term perspective, I think a lot of people are not going to have these major podcasts, right? They're not going to have a podcast with 500,000 downloads a month, 1 million, 2 million downloads a month. Most of us are going to have podcasts that are maybe getting, you know, a couple thousand downloads a month, which is completely fine, which is one of the first ways of making money. If you actually have a business, let's say you're doing, digital marketing consulting or something like that. And you get, let's say you're targeting luxury real estate agents. Let's say they have a lot of money and you only have 1,000 of those people listening to you each and every month, but you're seen as the authority. And so you can actually get more leads for your business and you can actually grow more. And that can be a 6, 7, 8-figure business for you, which is great. The other thing is we kind of mentioned advertising already. Spotify is adding dynamic ad insertion and I'm sure they'll take a cut out of that. For our podcast, Marketing School and Leveling Up, we have dynamic ad insertion. We don't, necessarily pay out a cut of our revenues, but it's close to a million bucks a year for that contract. That's how we make money. We charge on a CPM basis or cost per 1,000 impressions. And that's another way to do it. The other thing with our podcast is that we have an events business that's tied to Marketing School. And this is a peer group that my partner and I have, and it's called the Growth Accelerator. And these are for 7 and 9-figure entrepreneurs. And we cap the group at about 75 people or so. And people are paying 5 figures for a ticket. The event is basically 3 times a year in different spots in the world. So you can actually tie in events. The other thing you can do too, which we're planning on adding for our podcast, would be Apple just added subscriptions and they added the ability to hit the subscribe button and start paying $5, $10, $15, $20 a month for your podcast. You can have premium content, you can gate the content as well. You have a lot of different options in terms of the playbook that you want to be deploying. So I think that's super powerful. And I do know of some people that are doing subscriptions that are making, we're talking a couple hundred grand a month, which is great because most of that's going to be profit. And sure, you end up paying 30%, which is huge, to Apple in the first year, and then it goes down to 15%. But that's what they charge. That's what it is to be in their ecosystem. And I can say for our podcasts, 80% of our listeners listen from an Apple device. That might change over time because most people in the world are on Android, but we'll see how that develops. Building an audience gives you options and you don't need to be pigeonholed into running ads or doing subscriptions necessarily. You can again build a business around it. Once you have an audience, you could drive them to your list. You can sell them stuff on your site. You can sell them, you know, different products, different services too. I think the world is your oyster. And if audio is kind of native for you, then podcasting makes a lot of sense. I still think it's very much a blue ocean right now. And it's a good time to, good time to get in there and compete. So let me know what you think I missed in the comments and don't forget to hit the subscribe and the bell button and we'll catch you later.
