Where Did Tim Ferris Go Wrong? Could He Not Monetize His Podcast With Fans?

Foreign. Probably the smartest thing Tim Ferriss did with his podcast announcement was say no to the never ending stream of free money with no obligation. What the heck am I talking about? Let's get to it. Hey, this is the podcast report. Most of the time we go right to podcast. Occasionally I record this on Facebook and then take the recording, put that up at the podcast. I am doing this on Facebook because I want to show you a couple things in the blog. If you listen to this on the podcast, I'll walk through it. But if you're on Facebook, definitely. If someone could put this link in the notes, great. If not, I'll do it after we go live here. But essentially we got an interesting announcement from podcast land and Tim Ferriss. I know Tim, I've met Tim. Tim has an amazing podcast that has amazing money, has amazing revenue, has amazing guests, has amazing content. He's been killing it in the podcast space. And he recently jumped to a model to where he went fan supported, basically no more commercials. And his commercials were long. Sometimes his commercials exceeded like the first six minutes of the show. They were long. He dumped them all for fan support, the Patreon model, the OPB model, you know, that kind of thing, for lack of a better idea. And so Tim jumped to that and he said he was going to run it for a little while. And the fact of the matter is he cut it quick, he cut it short quickly, and that's basically what this blog post is about. And he went out today and he told everybody why he's stopping it. And some naysayers, some complainers, some different people have some different responses to it. But I want to point out a couple of things. It's really important here. When you're thinking about what Tim did, where you think about where Tim went wrong, and maybe when you think about what you're doing. And first of all, the money side of this was tremendous. If you read the article, the money that he was getting from this was absolutely good. It was absolutely solid. In some cases, a user supported podcast, user supported artist, user supported whatnot is a good idea. And sometimes it absolutely works. And when this was first announced, a couple people went out and they said things like, well, he didn't make any money, people really weren't willing to pay for it, that type of thing. Not necessarily the case. And I think what's really, really interesting is if you read down at the bottom of the article, he really sums it up on a really, really interesting element here. He says the short conclusion to the experiment seems to Be the don't fix it if it ain't broken. My sincerest thanks to all who provided support, feedback, etc. And the long story short is Tim basically decided that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. People were listening to the podcast with the ads. Some enjoyed the ads, some didn't, some didn't mind the ads. And the ads was simply a read that he did not. At the same time, if you listen to them, they were edited in. Somebody does the contract negotiation, he gets to play with cool products. Bam, bam, bam, bam. He puts in the ads, he's done. He, he goes onto the podcast. If you listen to anything that Tim talks about and Tim's does, he's about simplicity and minimalism and these types of things. And this process where people give you hundreds of dollars per thousand that you can do multiple times in a truly cut and paste thing where there's a whole bunch of people waiting in line for it, is a really easy model. But what happened to Tim if you read this is that he actually got to a point to where maintaining the givers was going to be an issue. He had people who were paying him a good chunk of change to be members and he was emailing them. And he's got a membership thing for him. And although he's going to be turning it all the date, he's going to do a live Q and A for his supporters again. And basically what it is, the long story short is Tim realized that this model of giving everybody stuff for free essentially with the ads, took less time than him charging people and having all these different levels and doing all this customer support and that kind of thing. And this is interesting because, you know, if a podcast takes you an hour a week to do and makes you a dollar, and a podcast takes you 10 hours a week to do and makes you $5, that first hour for $1 is actually a better deal. And Tim ran the numbers and Tim realized with what he's going to do and why he's doing it and what he wants to do and who he's doing it for, he realized that the simpler way is a better way for him. And again, if someone, I see a bunch of you watching this live, if someone wants to take Tim blog as the link, if not, I will get this into the comments afterwards. But the fact of the matter is he realized that one process was easier. And this is huge. Internally to the podcast partnership, we have this process called the Time to Impact process. And the time to impact process is how do we figure out how much Time is needed to get this impact in as little time as is humanly possible. I was on the phone today with a client who has a fantastic, amazing wealth of training, already done hundreds and hundreds of hours of amazing training that the world needs to hear, the world needs to see, the world needs to get involved with. And what this person needs is this person needs someone to go in and listen to content, cut out the best of the stuff and make a podcast out of it. How much work does it take for that particular person to do? 0. Time to impact, you know, how much time do you need to figure out what it is that you're doing with your podcast? Is tremendous. It's is important. Now this person at some point is probably gonna be doing interviews and probably going to be doing some stuff specifically for the podcast. But we can get that content out there really, really quickly with minimal work, with minimal effort. And I think this is important for everybody in the podcasting space. What are you trying to do, what are you trying to pull off and what is the shortest path to doing that? Tim, if you listen to Tim for any episodes, he wanted access to people who are getting stuff done for high achievers. I think was the uses in the intro to the podcast. He wanted access to them. And the numbers he did on his podcast and the downloads he got got him access to pretty much anybody wanted he could grab a microphone, do an interview, get the access, get the insights, get the connections. And by the way, those connections made possible the last two books, if you read them, they're basically just the notes from the podcast. Funny enough, the last book has actually got a number of people who didn't make it to the podcast, but still just want to be associated with Tim's name. So now instead of having a multi level membership system where he has to do Q and A for a small group and he's got to make sure the thousand dollar a month level and there were some, you know, people get something different than the lower level and all that maintenance and all of that internal stuff. He realized that he just wanted to create content. Now I'm not saying that you take from this I should just create content because you're not Tim Ferriss and not everybody out there can just make the stuff and have the world flocking to them. But I can say be strategic about what it is that you're doing. A podcast that takes one hour and makes you a buck is much better than a podcast that takes 10 hours and makes you 5 bucks. Just think about the numbers on the time the effort that you're looking at. Do you need to be fully editing what it is that you're doing, or do you maybe need to get a second episode out? I'm doing this as a Facebook Live and it's interesting. Some of the best numbers I've had in Facebook Live in a while. And we're just going to take that audio and through the Dial Talk done system, we're going to basically just pull it and publish it directly to the podcast. How much editing work needs to be done? Very minimal. Can I send this out to an editor? Sure. But this live in the moment, Thursday afternoon recording type of situation is what my audience tends to come through. And Steve and Mario and Andrew and Melanie, thank you for jumping in live, you know, and interacting with this live situation. And know the podcast itself is the recording of the live situation. We are at a good place. So my question for you is what is your shortest time to impact and even if maybe less hours, not as much money, but more money per hour, is that something that you should be doing? Should you be changing your model because what you're doing right now isn't currently working or isn't as streamlined or takes too many things? Just like Tim is kind of recognized in his current situation. Tim didn't leave because he wasn't making money from the donations. Read the article. Tim didn't leave because it wasn't sustainable. Read the article. Tim didn't leave because this step was basically not necessary. Are you taking steps in your podcast that aren't necessary? Are you taking steps in your life that are not necessary? Someone to think about and someone to go with. There are a bunch of you in the Facebook Live. I will answer any questions that pop up and Andrew, I'll make a comment on comment in a second, but I'm going to go quickly. Remind everybody to subscribe to the podcast wherever fine Podcasts are found. ThePodcastReport.com AppleThePodcastReport.com Google ThePodcastReport.com Stitcher, Pandora, they're all there. We'd definitely like to have you come. Not all episodes come by Facebook Live and not all episodes come, you know, through social media. But if you are subscribed to a podcast, and this is one of the beautiful things about a podcast, it comes to you all automatically and spam free. So I would love to have you as a subscriber to this show. Now, I will answer a couple things and we'll go from there. So number one, Andrew says he went wrong by being too much of A weirdo. I'm going to disagree with you, Andrew. I think. I think Tim is amazing. He's fascinating and he's wacky, if you will. But I don't think he's a weirdo. I think he's a really good place. A lot of people like him. A lot of people are downloading. Mario says, the first six months of launching my show, I questioned, is this necessary? Yeah, Mario, you should be questioning this. Others should be questioning this. Everybody should be questioning this. Why am I doing this podcast? Is a new episode every week necessary? Do I need to have new content on a regular basis or do I just need to be publishing or that type of thing? We've got a client working right now that had his best month ever. His best month ever last month. And released no new content last month. Best month ever last month. Released no new content last month. Now released some best of, released some greatest hits. There was new stuff in the feed, but it wasn't new content. And he spent absolutely zero hours putting all this together. And that's an interesting place. Mario wants to know if I using Restream for the go around. You know, Restream on my tread. A couple of months ago, I had a couple of problems with it. I just haven't had the time to get it out. I actually like doing the podcast live here to Facebook because what happens is it allows me to have the thrill of going live without necessarily all the elements. Someday I'll sit down and make Restream work. And Restream now actually goes to LinkedIn as well. And I could have it at all those places and one day I'll get to it. But really it goes back to this bang for the buck thing. I'm trying to get a podcast episode out. The majority of the people, you know, it is hundreds of times more people, not thousands. It's in the hundreds of times more people grab it from the podcast than from something else. So there we go. Rob says, how often do you post podcasts? Thanks, Rob. About once a week. We are in the middle of some pretty intense production with the Dial Talk done product. If anybody's going to be at podcast movement this year, come by the booth and take a look at the product. Pretty fancy stuff. And we've got some big clients who are doing some big launches and I'm having a great time working with them and helping them get their message out. We're at a great place. We get to help people with fantastic messages get their messages out to the world with greater leverage using the tech that's there. So it is a ton of fun. Nancy says he's big hearted. May not have understood how much more value was needed to charge a fee. Interesting, Spearman. I gave him a huge credit for trying. Yeah, Nancy. And Tim is extremely calculated. If you read any of the books, if you hear any of his presentations, if you just kind of listen behind the scenes and what he does in the podcast, he's extremely calculated. And the fact of the matter is, if you read the article, the sum and hole of the article was this was an experiment. This was always an experiment. And you know what? I got the information I needed a lot faster than I thought I may have. And a lot of us are podcasting as an experiment. A lot of us are testing these things. And you know, if you know really, really quickly that this isn't necessarily what you should be doing, then don't do it now. You don't have to be in that place. So appreciate what he's doing and appreciate the heart and appreciate all those things. But also I appreciate the strategy and I appreciate the quick to action and I appreciate the willingness to change. And I thought it was really a high class idea that he refunded everybody. Certainly didn't need to do that. But again, Tim's in it for the minimalism, Tim's in it for the impact and I just respect the heck out of him for it. Thanks so much everybody for listening. I will hang out and answer any other additional questions that are in the chat room when I get done with this recording and we will go from there. It is a pleasure to have you guys on board. Live is always fun. Thank you so much. Chat with you soon. Subscribe to the podcast. Bye.