Can You Monetize ANY Podcast? - The Podcast Report Episode #36

Can youn Monetize Any Podcast? It's The Podcast Report episode 36 show notes, links, conversation and more@the podcastreport.com 36. It's the podcast Report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul. Okay, first, the big idea. Sure, you can monetize any podcast you want, but is the juice worth the squeeze? Hi, my name is Paul Colligan. I am the author of a number of books, including right now, the number one best selling how to podcast 2015. I've been part of the podcasting space since day one, having a blast with it. Love the industry, did many podcasts about podcasting. This is my latest two audiences for this show. Obviously the podcaster. A bunch of you have reached out, have said you appreciate the show. Thank you. Hopefully we're all becoming better podcasters as a result. Second audience though, and if you have someone you can share this with, please do. Those thinking about getting into podcasting, those who know that the conversation, the dialogue is more than you know, what microphone should I use? Podcast Report is not a massive play, but it's a deep one. I'm hoping to go deep with you and I'm not going deep. You want to go deeper. That kind of stuff, let me know. Let's join into the dialogue here. So why this topic? Well, from a raw number standpoint, one thing you want to do in podcasting always is look at what your audience is passionate about. And my audience is passionate about monetization. Every episode we've done about monetization, different models, different approaches, these have been the top downloaded, these have been the top requested, the top commented on, you know, with a bullet. Now, this is not going to be the podcast monetization report. Don't worry here. But it is a topic that you are very, very interested in. It's an important question with a lot of different answers. Now, I'm pretty opinionated about this. If you've listened to any episodes of this show, you know that I've got some ideas here. But I did start a thread on the Google Group, the Google community for podcasting. I know there's a bunch of them. The main one, I've got a link to you in the show notes@the podcastreport.com 36 that brought up some interesting ideas. Didn't necessarily change thoughts, but it changed the direction a little bit for the show and I'm glad I did this and this show will reflect that. Monetization dictates for many what they do next. Some people thought they would be able to Monetize, and then they're not monetizing anymore. And what they felt was, you know, a quote, unquote labor of love at the beginning is now just a pain in the butt because they're seeing no return from it. So what do you do if you realize the answer is no? And that's going to change a little bit when we take a look at what I'm doing with the community comments, but, you know, what do we do there? Anyway, I don't recommend the quote, the movie that the quote came from, it's the Girl Next Door. Not necessarily a great film, if you will, but I think the quote is interesting. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Because the fact of the matter is you can monetize a podcast any way you want to. The question is how much monetization. And, you know, let's jump over to the Google group. So, Sean Thorpe, when I asked, what's your thoughts? Sean said, I'm doing a podcast now that has at best 150 regular listeners and it's currently making $4 a month via Patreon. So is it possible to monetize any podcast? Yes, it is, but is it worth the time? Ah, great. Great point, Sean. Ray Ortega, also great point. I agree with Sean. Yes, technically you can monetize any podcast, but we need some kind of threshold. What's the minimum? What's the difference between hobby money and real income? Great points. You know, I guess the original question at the top of this podcast, can you monetize any podcast? Well, I guess, yes, you can, but, you know, is it worth it? Is the juice worth the squeeze? Todd Cochran jumped. If the advertisers cooperate, I provide opportunities to all shows, no matter the size. I'll leave it up to the individual podcaster to decide if they want to participate. So Todd here is saying, look, you know, you can put your ads in if you want. I don't need to do the big numbers. That's kind of always been Todd's charm. So, yes, again, you can monetize your podcast. Jason Bryant. I'm not gonna read all of his, but jump over. It's good stuff here. Sometimes it takes selling your reputation to people. I've been able to launch eight new shows in the last year that I'm paid to host and produce. Jason is definitely monetizing his podcast. He's doing great. If you read later, he got rid of some old content. He's doing things well. Good job, Jason. And then Fred mentions that, of course, there's lots of ways to monetize points to Dave Jackson's book, which I have a link to in the show as well. So the long and short of it is, yeah, of course you can monetize, but. And that's why the new focus of this episode is the Juice Worth the squeeze. Now, where does this problem come from? You know, nobody ever opened up a restaurant and decided, well, I can make $15 a month on it. Nobody starts a business and says, I can make $15 a month on it. Where did this come from? Well, there are four types in the podcasting world, and if you think there are any more, please let me know. In social or whatever you got. There's the dreamer. When I saw this at the first podcast episode, there's the whole podcast, your passion, and the profits will follow a bit. And I love the dreamers, and I'm a dreamer. But, you know, sometimes it's just a dream. The idealist. Of course, if you build it, they will come. You know, the optimistic economist. You know, there's what, a billion iPhones out there? It's got to be enough people to listen to my show if I put it up. And then, of course, there's the task. The tasks are the, well, get the podcast up. Get the podcast live. And now the podcast is live. Keep doing it. The dreamer, the idealist, the optimistic economist, and the task. Now, monetization models. Hit a few of them. I just did a quick thought process. Ads, obviously, you know, if you think on the ads game, you know, the ads game is a numbers game. You got to get, you know, a thousand downloads to see, you know, that's, that's how it's rated at least. And Todd might be able to set you up for less, but that's the number, that's the metric. And if you're not seeing thousands, boy, ads aren't going to do you well. Now, patronage through Patreon or, you know, just the good old PayPal don button that works there. But, you know, as you saw on the first examination, Sean here, you know, makes $4 a month niche specific sponsors, which I think is kind of what Jason's doing. But if it's not, you know, it's basically, if there's a market I'm trying to reach specifically, and there's a podcaster that is reaching that market, I don't have to see a download, you know, if I want. Well, this is not a real podcast, but let's say I wanted to reach presidents of the United States. If somebody had a podcast that was for presidents and Obama listened to it. And if you're listening to this at a later time, whoever president is right now, that would be a podcast I'd be willing to pay a lot of money for to advertise on, because I have access to that niche audience. So niche specific sponsors is definitely that. If you've got a podcast for brain surgeons, for goodness sakes, don't do a GoDaddy ad. There's probably something more you can do with them. If you've got a podcast for presidents of corporations, don't attempt to sell them GoDaddy ads again or that type of thing. Other monetization models, big ticket products. I've spoken to that in past episodes. You know, if you get $1,000 per purchase, you can get a lot of downloads before you get a purchase. Small ticket, product in bulk, CDs, T shirts, that kind of stuff. Past episode I had, you don't need to be popular to be profitable. I've hit that in the past. Not a big deal. And then, of course, Dave Jackson's book, he hits a bunch of monetization models. So we have monetization models and we have the hard code, cold facts that you don't have to make. Well, let me rephrase that. We have the monetization models and we have the hard, cold facts that, yes, pretty much any podcast can be monetized. But the question is, is it worth it? The question is, what do you do? If it's not worth it, what do you do? Well, is the juice worth the squeeze? Now, for me, there were two phases to podcasting. As I mentioned in this. I got into podcasting early in the game. And so for me, a lot of the beginning, a lot of the start was making the juice. I launched a bunch of podcasts to see what would happen. You know, dialogue podcasts, conversational podcast, how to podcasts. And I did that to kind of get used to making the juice. But now I gotta ask, is the juice worth the squeeze? And I don't want to pull this term too much, but I think it's a good one, and I think it's something a lot of podcasters should ask. You know, I think one tragedy in podcasting is you take someone who is passionate about a topic, who loved a topic dearly, who figured out how to podcast, who launched a podcast about a topic, and then the fact that the show's not being monetized, the fact that the revenue's not coming from the show like they thought it was, they start to hate the topic. I've seen that. I've seen companies who speak of a podcast with a frown on their face. I've seen people like, oh, they grab their forehead as if they're getting a migraine. Yeah, I got to get another episode out. This kind of stuff is painful. This kind of stuff does damage. And we've all listened to podcasts where people have gone, yeah, this ain't worth it. I got to do it. I committed to it. But this isn't worth it. You know, the comment here, I'm going back to the Google Group. And again, the link to it@the podcastreport.com 36 Sean's honesty about Look, I'm doing a podcast. Four bucks a month. Is it worth the time or effort? Is the suggested question. And only Sean knows me. $4 a month isn't worth it. If it's purely a passion project, then kill Patreon. Phase one was making the juice, but phase two, and I think this is a place where I need to be and I think this is a place, honestly, where the industry needs to be. Is is it worth the squeeze? Is it worth the time and the effort that you put into this show or you put into your show? And it's funny, last week I started a thread that got some yeah, it was interesting what happened. Upset some people and didn't mean to upset some people. But what was interesting was I mentioned in the Tim Ferriss podcast that Tim was interviewing the guy from startup, Bloomberg, and Bloomberg was speaking in the Startup episode about how, you know, all the work he does, all the effort he does, all the time he spends producing that show. And it's a fabulous show that he doesn't know if it's worth it compared to the interview style, the podcast that Tim Ferriss does. And I'll tell you this, the interview of Tim Ferriss with Bloomberg, to me was far more fascinating than any of the highly produced shows that Bloomberg put together. Bloomberg is getting a lot of downloads, let's face it. Cereal. Five million in one month. God bless you guys. But is it worth it? You got to look at that. And Cereal has a staff of 12 and they worked on this for a year. And oh my goodness, there's a lot of work that needs to be done. So you need to ask if it's worth it. I am making sure that this podcast is worth it. And I've got another podcast on the drawing board that I'm going to make sure is worth it. But here are my thoughts. What do you do if the Juice isn't worth the squeeze? Two options. Option number one Kill the show. Just consider killing the show. And there might be a situation where the back catalog online is doing more damage than good. And in that case, you might want to even remove the show from itunes. Remove the show from the directories, obviously download an archive, obviously keep a copy of that. You might want to kill it. If you got the market all wrong. It might be your only opinion. You know, you've heard me speak to market message monetization media. Well, maybe if you got a market that there's just no message for and there's no monetization for, maybe you just need to kill it. But the other option is, and I've spoken to this in the past, but I want to encourage you again is what Mike Hyatt did with his podcast. And it was funny. Mike Hyatt's podcast was doing great, but he realized even though the money, I'm sure was pretty good, Mike seems to be doing fine. He realized that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze for the way he was doing the podcast. And in episode I think it was 100 of season one, he shared that, like, here are the things he didn't like. Here are the things that he did like. Here's the thing that he's going to do differently. And then he rebooted the show. He started the show over again. He went to season two with a new format and he changed almost everything about it, but kept the subscribers because the audience was good and the audience went with him. And I think it's a far better show. So if the juice isn't worth the squeeze, two options, kill it, which is viable. There's a couple of podcasts I need to pull off of itunes myself now that I'm saying this, of course, option number two is the season two or the reboot. I'd like your thoughts on this one. Would love to hear your thoughts. You can head up to the podcastreport.com 36 make some comments on this one. We've also all the great social places. The podcast report.com forward/twitter, the podcastreport.com Facebook. All those places will take you there. If you'd like a transcript of today's episode, go ahead and text hashtag ep36 as an episode 36 to 500 38971290. You can also feel free to leave a voicemail message. If you'd like links@the podcastreport.com 36 link to the how to Podcast book. Got to put that there. Obviously the how you know, can you monetize any thread that got me to change all this and I'll link to Dave Jackson's Podcast Monetization book. It's definitely not the definitive work on the subject, and it doesn't cover everything but what it covers it does great. Dave has a very realistic approach to podcasting and I just appreciate what he's done and I definitely want to give a shout out for that. If this is your first episode of the podcast report, or you are listening to the podcast report over@thepodcastreport.com or some other embedded website, definitely think about subscribing to the show. One of the benefits of subscription and podcasting is simply that the new show comes to you. Everybody who subscribed to the show. The second I publish it, and this one's getting recorded the day of, it's automatically going to go to your device. You don't have to find me on social, you don't have to get an email Subscription means it comes to your device and you can subscribe. 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