Tracy Hazzard argues against placing ads from the very start of a podcast. She recommends waiting until about 25 episodes have been released before testing ads, because listeners are more likely to trust and take action once they see the show is established. She also discusses balancing short-term ad revenue from early episodes with long-term listener growth and suggests cautious testing (e.g., one ad instead of two, using renewals as bonuses) to maximize revenue without harming audience trust.
Chapters
There's a lot of people who think 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 recommend 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. 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're getting, 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 of them. So be thinking about that.
