Eric Siu discusses why podcast advertising pays so poorly compared to other channels. He covers attribution problems that make it hard to track results, declining ad rates, and why influencer marketing often outperforms podcast ads despite their large audiences.
Podcast advertising is a very difficult business to make an arm and a leg for.
And this is no knock on, you know, who we work with on the podcast side. It's not even their fault, but I'm just like, we're better off doing any type of influencer deal than doing like, one, the influencer deal, they're not tracking attribution or anything and they're paying way more. And then on the other side, I'm just like, $3,000 for a month, you know what I mean? So like podcast ads—
It's a lot of work for $3,000.
Yeah, and then like I have to record it too. And we've resorted to using ElevenLabs now And I'm sure you do the same thing, but I'm just like, podcast ads versus influencer marketing, it seems like podcast ads, like pricing seems to be going downwards right now, whereas influencer is just going upwards.
I agree with you. I don't see, unless you're like a Joe Rogan or something like that where you just have a really massive audience, podcast advertising is a very difficult business to make an arm and a leg for. One of the hardest reasons is attribution. Yes, you can send people to landing pages. Yes, it's great for branding, but it's becoming a more saturated place. I'm not talking about podcasts, I'm talking about the ads portion where podcasts are recording 3, 4, 5, 6 advertisements just in one episode and they're not really tying it into episode. And that's a great example of us. When someone's advertising, Eric's using ElevenLabs or he's recording it and they're just slicing it in. While when sometimes when Joe Rogan has a sponsor or some of the other big podcasts that I've seen, they intertwine the ad within the episode and they make it more relevant and it just works better. But that costs a lot more money and it takes a lot more effort.
Yeah. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows, we think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Karat. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. Even Joe Rogan doesn't necessarily weave it into his episodes that much. I've been listening to a lot of podcasts, like Lex Fridman, he'll load the first 8 minutes all like just reads, right? He's not really weaving it in. Only a, you know who weaves it in pretty well? MrBeast.
MrBeast does.
Yeah.
But with Lex Fridman, I just skip the beginning.
Yeah, I just skip the first 10 minutes and I just go into it. So yeah, but anyway, that's what we think about podcast ads versus influencer marketing. I think, you know, anytime someone reaches out to either of us for influencer, we should just try to push them into the podcast and include that in it. That's what I think we should do. Yeah.
But when you look at Joe Rogan, when I look at a version of a successful ad is what he did with, uh, what was it called? Onnit?
Onnit? Onnit. Yeah. Well, he owned a piece.
He owned a piece.
Yeah.
But that was really, uh, well integrated and that did well for him and it did well for Onnit and that allowed them to exit. I forgot who they sold to, but—
Dude, you know what you should weave into your— because your YouTube gets views, right? I'm like, why don't you just weave these little mid-rolls into it? Because when I weave the mid-rolls into like Karat or ClickFlow or Single Grain, we actually get leads from it.
What do you do for your mid-roll rolls?
It's, it's simple. It's like, The video will go for like 2, 3 minutes or so, and then there'll be like an ad. If it goes for another like 3, 4 minutes, there'll be another ad. And then that's how we just keep rotating the ads.
And then do you just pop it up on the video with the CTA on the screen?
Yeah. You should do that because you're getting like hundreds of thousands of views sometimes, right? Per video.
Over time, yes. Not usually in the first—
I think it's worth it. Just do that. I guarantee you, you'll get more. Yeah.
We should try it out.
If you buy me more cookies after that. Yeah. Anyway, that's all I'll say. A jack of all trades, guys, is better than a master of one. See you tomorrow.
