The Future of Podcasting

Today, I want to talk about the future of podcasting. So by the way, if you're interested in podcasting or marketing videos, don't forget to hit the subscribe and the bell button. So I think we're in an interesting time right now. You have drop-in audio apps like Clubhouse and a lot of copycats, right? You have Twitter Spaces, Facebook's doing something, Slack is doing something, Discord's doing something, LinkedIn's doing something, right? So I think it's a really unique space that we're in right now. And then you also have Apple that just turned on subscriptions and they're really ramping up. They're podcast analytics. Riverside FM, they're the podcast recording software or cloud-based kind of podcast recording studio. They've done pretty good. They just raised about a $9.5 million round. And so podcasting is continuing to get bigger and bigger. We know Spotify is, they've been on a shopping spree the last couple of years spending hundreds of millions of dollars paying for Joe Rogan's podcast and also buying a lot of these different like Anchor, a lot of these podcasting Apps. I think the space is very much heating up right now. It's getting stronger and stronger. And when we look at how Apple stepping up their game right now, Spotify stepping up their game, Apple's creating better analytics again. They're creating subscriptions and they're adding a lot more capabilities for their podcasters who they've kind of neglected over the years. That's great. I personally use a tool called Chartable and it's great for analytics. I've been using it for the last couple of years. When we look at Facebook, what they're doing, they're not just doing a Clubhouse competitor. They're also doing a podcast competitor too, right? So I, I think it's when you hear someone's voice, you know, you're retention in an app is likely to be higher. You know, when I listen to someone's podcast, I start to trust them. I start to think of them as, as my friend. Really any of these apps, they want people to stay inside much longer, which is why Clubhouse did so well initially. The problem with Clubhouse is that you have to spend a lot of time kind of engaging inside of the app and then, you know, people start to get burnt out. So I was spending, you know, up to 40 hours a week in it. You know, I got burnt out. Now I spend about an hour a week on it max. Um, cause I do one room per week. By the way, when I was using Clubhouse, I'd actually bought a RODECaster Pro and I was actually recording a lot of the episodes and I was posting them. People might think podcasting is too mature right now. I think it's great here. And here's the reason why I think it's great. We get 1.5 million downloads a month. Let's say a small percentage of those people convert. So maybe 10,000 of the 1.5 million convert into paying customers for our— maybe we have a premium subscription. Maybe they're paying $10 a month. Well, that's $100,000 a month multiplied by 12. That's $1.2 million a year. So I think subscriptions are here to stay. Also the ability to create a community around it. So we have, for the Marketing School Podcast, we have a peer group called the Growth Accelerator. And that's where we have 7 to 9-figure entrepreneurs getting together. And we talk about business, we have amazing speakers come in, we go to different spots around the world. And it's just great learnings, it's great relationship building. Having an events type of business could make you $1 million, $2 million, $3 million a year. So before you know it, I mean, all of a sudden you have a podcast doing, you know, $4.2 million a year. And you can also add advertising on top. So Maybe that's another $500K to $1 million. Let's call it $1 million. So $5.2 million a year. These are the possibilities for you starting a podcast, right? You can take it all the way up. On the other side, maybe you don't need that many downloads. You don't got to worry about the subscription stuff. You don't have to worry about advertising. What you could do is you can make a very niche podcast. Maybe you have one that talks about selling $50 million homes or $100 million homes. And you might have 1,000 people that listen to it a month, but all these 1,000 people, They're all people that are in the industry or people that are interested in this stuff and they probably are within your ideal client profile, right? So why wouldn't you want to talk to these people? In that case, I mean, maybe the advertisement is just your business and you're doing these episodes with, with, uh, you're building these great relationships with people. So it's just different perspectives, right? And then you can make all your money in the backend. You don't necessarily need a very big audience. You could have a very captivated audience that's relevant, Okay. And then from there you can just drive them into whatever offering it is that you have and you can make great money there. And maybe that's how you make your millions of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? You don't necessarily need to make millions of dollars. I'm just giving you examples. Like you could have something that's, you know, the podcast alone generating millions and millions, or you can have it push into your business. You don't need a lot of volume there. You just need the right people. You could just be doing it as a student. You could be interviewing amazing people and then maybe you can get a job from these people later. For me with the Leveling Up podcast, Again, for the first 2 years, I didn't have much success. $9 a day after the first year and then $30 a day after the second year. But I was building great relationships. I was learning a lot too. These lessons are worth, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, right? So it just depends on how you look at it and what you're trying to get out of it. But I think the future for podcasting is very bright. I think a lot of these drop-in audio apps will add the ability to have podcasting features or the ability to record. I just think the ability to express yourself through audio, especially when you don't have to get ready for the camera, I think it's here to stay. And I think the feature podcasting in general, whether it's short form or long form, we're still very much in the early days right now, but there's a lot of opportunity. So let me know what you think in the comments, what you think I might've missed. And don't forget to check out the next video over there. And don't forget, if you like videos like this, hit the subscribe and the bell button, and we'll see you later.