Tracy Hazzard advises podcasters against placing ads from episode one. She recommends waiting until about 25 episodes (roughly six months) before testing ads so listeners trust the show and convert better. She discusses trade-offs between near-term CPM revenue (paid per thousand downloads) and long-term listener growth, suggests cautious ad-testing (e.g., one ad instead of two), and using renewed advertisers or bonuses to protect early-episode growth while maximizing revenue.
Questions this video answers
After about 25 episodes.
Roughly 10% of listening for the entire month.
Chapters
There's a lot of people who think and, and train and coach people to say that you should put ads in from the beginning of your show to train your audience. And we are not fans of that. We actually find that it doesn't work because your audience is like, are you really going to stick around for me? Are you going to be a good host? Like, oh, you're just doing this show as a vehicle for advertising. And it's obvious to me. So we highly recomm waiting until you hit 25 episodes before you start doing some of these tests. We find that it converts better, you get a better action. Because at that time they say, I think these guys are going to stick around. They've given us half a year. Good job. I'm going to trust them and take action. So your listeners are just less likely to take action earlier on because binge listeners especially are smart and they know that there's lots of people in the podcast industry who quit their show and aren't sure if you're going to be one of them. You're in your first year. That keeping ads off of them is not a bad idea. But past that, it's a maximizing revenue strategy. So once you have some really good advertisers, your first episodes tend to be, you know, you'll take a good look at them and they might be 10% of your listening for the entire month. And so you don't want to take 10%. It depends on how you're getting paid. Of course, if you're getting paid per every thousand downloads, you don't want to miss the revenue on those first 10. But you also need to balance that against your listener growth. And if the ads are preventing listener growth, you don't. You, you know, you kind of need to have that balancing act on it and do some testing. So maybe you want one ad in those episodes and not two. Or you just, you know, are very cautious about it and you don't do it with a new advertiser. You wait till someone renews with you and you give it to them as a bonus. So there are ways to maximize your revenue on that, and that may be one them. So be thinking about that.
