How This Podcast Makes $18M a Year

0:00Do you want to know about the podcast that makes$18 million a year? uh sure so scott galloway's podcast make 18 million in revenue a year so basically he has the prof g podcast which makes six million dollars uh basically 25 000 per episode and he has pivot which he does with kara swisher who used to be a reporter for um all things digital yeah all things digital you're right um with kara swisher so that that makes 10 million dollars a year that's 100k per episode and then he has another one called raging moderates with jessica Tarlov. That one does$2 million a year. That's $20K per episode. So he shared the podcast revenue data on Prof G.

0:37And I think he said he'd love to do like, you see these big deals happening, right? You saw the Rogan deal was a couple hundred million dollars. Call Her Daddy was $80 million or$125 million. Something like that. Rogan, was that for one year or multiple years? I don't know. You can look it up. I think he's certainly saying that he's open to I think CNN is a suitor. Joe Rogan,$250 million for your deal. So that's a good chunk of money, right? So their deal with Vox is coming up this year and then CNN is like a potential suitor because Swisher's already an on-air TV contributor. This is interesting because I think podcasts are becoming more and more valuable and we're seeing a lot more of these deals happen and that's exciting.

1:22What's the other one called? Call Your Daddy? No, dude, you keep saying call your daddy. Call her daddy. I don't know, dude. Call Her Daddy Spotify deal. 85 or 125? 60 million three-year deal. Wow, I was wrong. Oh, previous deal. New deal is 100 to 125 million with Cirrus XM three-year deal. There you go. Old one was 20 million a year. New deal is, call it roughly 40 million-ish a year on the high. I actually like the Prof G podcast because he talks about business. And so it just goes, there is an angle there. It's wide-time stuff where he talks about the economy and everything, and he gives his opinions.

2:01And so I think there's a bright future for podcasts. I think we're still very much getting started right now. I think podcasting is going to boom. I think people are consuming it as a new format instead of television. Yeah. Who knows? Maybe in the next cycle, we'll have the presidential candidates on this podcast. Who knows? I doubt that. I'll make you a bet on that one. Well, not if I bring them to leveling up and then publish it here to the account. I still don't think they're going to end up coming on this podcast. You never know if it becomes really big. By the way, oh, this one's fantastic.

2:35Okay. We have too much of a niche audience. We do. But let me tell you this. Have you seen the SaaS benchmark report? So if I were to ask you, which teams grow faster? In-office teams grow faster or remote teams grow faster? Grow faster in headcount or grow faster in driving results and revenue? A median year over year growth rate. For what income? On basically, it's called revenue. For the company? Yes. In-house. Yeah. So how much more do you think it grows? 60%. A little less than that. So, okay. 50 % median year over year growth rate for in-office. And then 39 % for remote. And so this was, I was just talking with my CTO yesterday.

3:23we were talking about this. He showed me this slide. I was like, oh, this is interesting. These are 2024 SaaS benchmark reports. So this is just for SaaS companies. And it says default in-office teams grow faster than remote. And so I've been trolling LinkedIn with all these remote posts, and then it just gets people so pissed off. And I'm like, oh, maybe I found my niche. Maybe on LinkedIn I'm just the remote work guy. But anyway. No, no, you're the guy who trolls the remote work people. Well, I mean, we're remote first, right? So people think I'm really against it. In LA, we have a pocket of people that were just in office.

3:58But this is another data point here. Amazon's mandating its full-time RTO, even though they hit some snags. Maybe they're going to delay it until May. I saw a survey this morning. That mandate, out of five stars, it has a 1.2. People are really pissed off. 91 % of people are really unhappy about it. But when you see this, you just see more and more data points. 70 % of leaders are, Forbes reported this, Morning Brew reported this, saying that most people are going to be coming back. And then you have this one here saying that in-office grows faster. It becomes harder and harder to say that people are not coming back.

4:38I just think most people are going to be coming back unless you're a high performer. So what is the Amazon doing when people have moved to a lot of different states and countries? I think you're just coming back to a hub. I haven't read fully on it, but I think you're either going to come back to a hub. Or you're going to lose your job, which I don't think they care about either. Unless you're a high performer, then they'll probably make some concessions and say, hey, you can work remotely. But if you're not a high performer, they're probably okay losing you. Yeah, I believe that. So I don't think it's like, by the way, both of our companies are remote first.

5:08We're not saying we don't support remote. In fact, I love remote. But I just think most people are going to have to come back because unfortunately, most people aren't high performers. It's not even about the high performance. I do agree with you on that statement, but it's about when you look at any big organization, you only have so many experienced employees that are at the top. Majority of your workforce is going to be less experienced and they're not going to be as great as your A players or your executives at the top. If you want all your B and C and D players and being a D player doesn't mean you're bad.

5:42A lot of times it could just be your green and you're new and you have a lot to learn. they're not going to start improving the grade that they're at unless they're around other amazing employees. And that's just not going to happen in a remote first environment. While everyone is in person, people learn so much faster and they grow faster as well. Yeah. I've noticed that people in their mid twenties or so, they want to be in the office, at least with us. The people that are older, let's say we're older, right? You've paid your dues. you're okay working from home. So I think it just depends. That's an interesting way that you think about the D players as someone that's still learning.

6:21I think about an A player, like a D player is just a low performer to me. An A player, even if you're really green, is someone that is doing really well in their current state right now, right? So we kind of look at it a little differently. Yes, yeah. I look at it as A player as, for me at least, someone who can bring a lot of revenue, someone who can manage, someone who can execute and get their hands dirty. You don't have to worry about them. They go solve problems and they figure out just ways to improve the business and just generate more revenue. Remember what Brian Chesky said about A players versus B and C players?

6:54No. Okay. So basically Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said this. An A player is someone that is working six months ahead and they're just telling you what they're doing. Okay. Remember that? And then a B player is someone that is doing something in the now and they need some direction. Okay. A C player is someone that is like, they're doing something that they should have done six months ago. And it's like, what are you doing? You should have done that earlier. And so I think that's a really good way of describing it. And here's the thing. Next five, ten years again, we're talking about these McKinsey says 70 % of work is going to be done by AI agents.

7:28I think Amazon, now that Jeff Bezos is back, he said he's working harder than he's ever worked. I don't know if you watched that interview. You watched it, right? He's in. What do you think he's saying? He's like, well, all he's focused on is what right now in Amazon? AI. Yes. And by the way, with people who don't want to come back to the workplace, he's like, no problem. They'll replace him with AI and save money and not have to pay severance. Yeah. And so, you know, you can call him like a greedy, greedy whatever. But like at the end of the day, he's just doing what's efficient for his business.

7:55So yeah, he's just doing what's best for his pocketbook and his shareholders. So we got a couple more that we need to do. So let's talk about Amazon. did you know that the world's largest advertiser spending$20.3 billion a year on ads and promotions? Procter & Gamble? No, Amazon is. Oh, Amazon spending. Oh, Amazon is spending more money on advertising and promotion than anyone else. No. Okay, go on. This is according to AdAge. Yeah. Think about how ridiculous that is. We all know about like Procter & Gamble and Unilever and you know, the Coca-Colas or the car companies who spend our arm and our leg.

8:28But Amazon has been the largest advertiser, according to AdAge, I believe three years in a row. Wow. Well, I think the thing is, people talk about Microsoft, they talk about NVIDIA, they talk about Google, but Amazon is still so powerful. I mean, I can't stop, I don't know about you, I can't stop ordering. And the interesting part when I talk to companies, especially when they're looking to market on Amazon, they're like, man, I can't give them the 15%, this is a rip-off, that's expensive. I'm like, you know how much money they spend to acquire a customer so you can generate sales. I'm like, if you want these sales on your website, you got to spend money on marketing and ads and team members to help you out with this stuff.

9:11Here on Amazon, you're having some team members and agencies maybe help you out, but Amazon is spending an arm and a leg to attract those customers to buy your product. They give you distribution. Yes. And people forget that. They're just like, oh, Amazon's greedy. They just take a big chunk. Well, no, they spent an arm and a leg on marketing to get you that sale. Yeah, distribution's king. I mean, the thing is this, right? I think I see a lot of developers on Twitter now talking about how coding's becoming more and more commoditized. I don't think it's going to become completely commoditized, but everything points back to you got to have the attention, right?

9:41And also what we talked about earlier in today's recording, we talked about, okay, search is evolving. All these things are evolving. Attention's evolving. You have to keep adapting your game because the meta, in gaming, we talked about the meta, right? Which is the most optimal way to play at the time. The meta often changes. The rules often change, which is why when you think about games like StarCraft, for example, strategy game, they often patch things up and to kind of change things up for certain characters too powerful or whatever, they got to balance it out. So the meta is changing and you have to adapt as a marketer or else you're going to be behind.

10:14Speaking of adapting, let's talk about this Google exploit that was discovered that revealed 2 ,000 plus classifiers for click probability, site quality, consensus, and more. So the person that wrote this, okay, it's Mark Williams Cook. That's his name. So I was completely off. But this tweet was from GoFish Chris. He works at GoFish Digital, I think. So this is a 36-minute video. I would recommend that you just search for this. Type Google exploit facts for your model, and you should be able to find it. So go ahead. did you read the search engine land article on it as well? I didn't. Why don't you go with that?

10:55Because it probably is more condensed. I have a lot of takeaways here, which I'll go through, but you go through that first. Well, it's not pulling up for me because I'm terrible at copying and pasting on this iPad. Okay. But I got it. All right. So the expert reveals how and why Google ranks a website. There's query classifications. Google classified nearly all queries into eight. refined query somatic classes. Short fact, bools, short for Boolean, yes or no questions. Other, instruction, definition, reason, comparison, and consequence. Like consequences like your money, your life, right? Or YMYL, which is the same thing.

11:37And then they give different scores for things like brand visibility, user interactions, anchor text relevance around the web, click probability. And this was the interesting one and this is what I want to talk about. It says, Google doesn't use click-through rate directly in ranking. However, it appeared Google use click probability for every organic result. I actually disagree with that one right there because we've seen studies posted in the past. I don't know if you recall Rand Fishkin doing the one on best steak. I believe it was the keyword best steak. Had everyone go Google, click on the second result instead of the first result or click on the first result, click the back button really quickly and then go to the second result or third result was one of them and then hover around.

12:19That result just shot up for, it was, I think the keyword was best steak or something like that. He addressed that in the video. I just forgot what he said, but I just remember he addressed it. Oh, okay. Yeah. I don't remember. Yeah. I just remember he addressed it. So, yeah. But, you know, and we're seeing click-through rate data really affect rankings. I get pitched, no joke, all the time from people like, look at this bot that I created. There was a company in the UK okay, that showed me this. And I've known about this for years, but that showed me this. And they're like, look at the software we built and look at all these people we got all around the world.

12:53And they had a database of like tens of thousands of people, no joke with Gmail's real users. And they were paying them to do Google searches, click and then go to a specific result. And it was impacting rankings, like 110 % sure. I was seeing the data. They were doing tests with random URLs and showing me the like, pick a random URL, picked one, not mine, not a client. And they're like, look what we did. And it was working and I was like, do you want this technology for your clients? I'm like, no. They're like, why not? I'm like, this is a short-term hack. This is not long-term thinking. This over here is interesting to me.

13:26So on measurement, so there's a site quality score, which is scored. Most sites fall between 0.6 and 0.7. So the higher, the better, right? This is actually measured at the subdomain level, which I don't think is the main point, but I find that a little interesting. So this guy, Mark, went and he found the site quality score patent that Google filed. So this is measured using factors such as how often people search for your site, how often people select your site, how often people use your site in anchor text. So this is interesting. With a name like single grain, for example, a lot of people search for single grain malt whiskey, right?

13:59They just search for single grain. So I think there is a little bit of benefit there. But the main thing here is if you're a brand. This one I know directly from a Google engineer. You mentioned this. If someone's searching single grain malt whiskey. Apple. No, no, no. Not malt whiskey. A lot of people, I'm not even saying malt whiskey. Let me rephrase. If they keep searching single grain, they're looking for malt whiskey and they click on the malt whiskey result, it hurts you negatively. Yeah, but here's the thing. In Google Search Console, our click-through rate on single grain is like 60 plus percent.

14:26That's great. They're clicking that, right? That means I don't think most people searching for single grain are actually looking for malt whiskey at that point. Which is getting to my point. You've got to be a brand, right? Yeah. And so if you are searching for Neil Patel or MP Digital, that's a brand. Or searching for single grain, it's a brand, right? If you become a brand, more people are using that in anchor text and more people are selecting your site, then you're good. Your site quality score, in my mind, seems like here. You should go up. And everyone should, if you want to be a nerd, you can read this patent if you want.

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17:12One of the things, and I recommend you guys watch the video again, but I mentioned that he has a, towards the end of the video, he has a SERP. And it just goes to show you that, because there's a lot of SEOs now complaining that links don't matter as much anymore. There's a lot of influencers on LinkedIn. There was a thread where people were just like, yeah, what we're seeing is links don't matter as much anymore, right? And I find that interesting because this guy's kind of proving the same thing too. It's like saying that if you have a brand, after a helpful content update, what happened? A lot of brands won out, right?

17:39The non-brands, the ones that really gamed SEO, it showed that they didn't do as well afterwards. But yeah, I just wanted to close off with that, but go ahead. Yeah, have you seen the Pepsi ad where Santa picks Pepsi instead of Coca-Cola? No, did you see this on TV? No, no, I didn't see it on TV, but Ad Age had an article about it. No, I didn't see it. And I looked at it and I'm like, you know, no matter how clever your marketing is, you won't do well if people don't care for your product. And there's a huge trend right now. Whether it's Coke or Pepsi, there's a lot of people not drinking these products because they're just not that healthy.

18:09And if you look at Coke and Pepsi as an organization, they may have growth, but their growth is coming from products that they acquired or healthier products, not Pepsi and Coca-Cola specifically. Because as a trend, a lot of people are avoiding Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Yes. And there's like that drink, what is that? Lollipop or Lollipop? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lollipop? Yeah. Yeah, that's booming and you're seeing it everywhere. Sparkling water, yeah. Yeah, people are picking alternatives. And this is like, you can create the most clever advertising or do the best marketing campaign, but people tend to forget if your product sucks, you're just not going to do as well.

18:45you need to focus on creating amazing product and service first. I mean, they're trying to be clever there because usually Christmas time, the Santa ads and all that is Coca-Cola, right? But that's maybe something you should have done like five or 10 years ago. So this is a C player ad. That's what it is. Better than the Jaguar ad? Yeah, that's like a, what are you even doing? You're like out of this universe, right? That's like a D player ad. So you can create that. That doesn't even go on a, it's below F. It's pretty much a zero. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, one last thing, right? Have you seen Instagram trials?

19:21The trial reels? What about them? It's a great way to just test your content to figure out if it's going to do well with their algorithm before you just release your content. They'll test it out with a random audience or people who aren't your followers, not really random, and then figure out, all right, if it's doing well and it's getting engagement, boom, you release it to your core audience. If not, you're not wasting your time releasing a lot of junk content. This is very important because the way these algorithms work is if you continually post crap content on your feed and you get low engagement with your followers, in the future when you post really good content, it doesn't do that well and you've got to retrain the algorithms that you're posting better content now.

19:59So using the trial reels will help you save time and it'll improve your overall scores with the algorithm. Yeah, and a little mini hack with that one. So the guy that announced, who's the head of Instagram and threads? Adam Mosseri. Moseri, yeah. Yeah. So Moseri, I follow him now on Instagram. He often talks about the latest. You should probably listen to what he says. He's like, oh yeah, if you post higher quality stuff, you're probably going to get more reach. Oh, okay, I should probably do that. Trial reels. Oh, you're talking about trial reels. Hmm, maybe I should probably do that, right? And so some of the things like we overcomplicate it, but sometimes it's just like, this guy's trying to help you get more reach.

20:29So he's also trying to grow his ad revenue, but which is aligned with what you're trying to do too, right? He's trying to align incentives here and you should listen to him. The better content people create, more people get hooked on Instagram, more they use it, more revenue they generate. So they want you to create amazing content. Trial Reels helps them with that and it helps you. He wants you to be successful so he can be successful. That's right. More successful. Anyway, that's it for today and we'll catch you tomorrow.