2058 – Podcast Monetization: Strategies for Building Your Audience and Revenue with Podglomerate’s Jeff Umbro

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05With us right now, it's Jeff Umbro. Jeff, you are the CEO of Podglomerate. You are on the web at podglomerate.com. Lest anyone worry about the spelling on that, not to worry at all. You just click around in your podcast app, click on the show notes, information icon, cover art. You just click around your podcast app. You'll find a direct link to podglomerate.com. Jeff, it's great to have you here. Thanks. It's great to be here. Yeah. Well, give us a bit of an overview of who the podglomerate is. Sure. Yeah. So we're a podcast services company. We produce market and monetize podcasts. It's all we do all day, every day.

1:46We've been around since 2017. We work with a lot of really, really big clients like Netflix, Freakonomics, PBS, MIT, Stanford, Harvard. And yeah, I can dive into each of those little pieces. But in addition to like the big ones, which are fun to put on to like social media posts and stuff, we also do quite a bit of work with like small and medium businesses, think tanks, universities, just individual people who are trying to get their show out there. And yeah, happy to take that in any direction you want. Yeah, well, you know, to and this is what I was suggesting. If someone wants to see all of the shows that you have your hands in, it's a pretty good roster, including such shows as Freakonomics, one of my favorite.

2:37But yeah, a lot of like PBS oriented shows, NPR, PRX, you know, those types of shows. Bedtime Stories with Netflix Jr. How cool is that? Okay. So given that this is what you do, you've been, you know, in the podcasting space here and, you know, really developed a pretty strong professional reputation. I would love just to kind of hear it from you regarding where we are with podcasting today. Sure. Big question. But podcasting is a growing medium. Every metric is pointed to year over year growth for I think 16 years straight. There's a really great program called the Edison Infinite Dial Report that anybody can download for free.

3:27They update it every March and it shows you kind of the year over year growth of the industry, um, of, of all social media and audio in general, but like specifically they have a benchmarking report for podcasting. Um, you can see that more people than ever are listening to shows. I believe that there's about 132 million people who are listening on, on some kind of recurring basis every month. Uh, they averaged about seven shows. um simultaneously there's a lot of kind of uh upheaval in the industry in the last few years oh interesting yeah i mean it's been exciting and it's grown so quickly and with the pandemic like everybody was moving to like any kind of like streaming audio and video um and because of that there's a lot of like m &a activity in the space and consolidation and uh you know spotify sirius XM, iHeartRadio, Apple, and many others have all really tried to cement themselves as like bigger players in that space.

4:27And they're doing that in many ways, but one of them is by bringing in other companies under their umbrella and other publishers. And with that consolidation comes like different P &Ls and different ways of operating those businesses. And the result of that is kind of a shift in the kinds of shows that are being produced to optimize more for like ad sales and listener engagement, as opposed to kind of what we had grown accustomed to in the industry in the last decade with shows like Serial or anything that Gimlet was producing, which would be like these really beautiful long form narrative shows.

5:03They were really expensive to make and they weren't making a lot of money. And that's why we're seeing kind of a shift towards more of the Joe Rogan and Diary of the CEO type shows that are generally just like a couple people in front of microphones talking, uh, cause they're much easier to produce every week. You can do a lot more of them and you can sell ads against those a lot easier. Um, so yeah, I mean the super high level details are more people than ever are listening. There's, uh, like a lot of innovation in the space over the years, but in the last couple of years, it feels a little bit stale in a lot of ways.

5:40And, um, and the thing I didn't touch on is that, uh, there are a million studies out there that are showing that advertising on podcasting is more effective than advertising in any other digital medium. And you're seeing a lot more brands coming into the space because of that, because they want their own piece of the pie. So. Yeah. So the, I'd like to hear just a bit about Podglomerate, where you came from and how have you gone on to produce just so many shows? My suspicion is that you are like these types of shows. I bet that you are pretty big in the podcast movement conference space. These are podcast movement shows right here, man.

6:30I love it. Thank you. Yeah, well, we actually have three different business lines. So like while we do produce podcasts, like we're never actively working on more than four or five shows at any given moment. um we've just been around for about a decade uh we have 10 people full-time on staff so like that helps a lot like we're able to do a lot more than just one person's able to do on their own um but we uh are producing currently um i think four podcasts that are active out in the space and we have a couple more in development right now um some of them are owned and operated i have a show called podcast perspectives where it's very similar to this but i'm talking to people in the podcast space every day, or I guess every week.

7:13And then we produce a bunch of shows for like universities and small media companies and that kind of thing. And that is really fun. Although with that shift that I was talking about before in the industry, like it's becoming a little bit more of like, it's a different equation when people are trying to decide whether they should be investing in like the podcast space in the future. And something I really like to talk about a lot is like, should you be making a podcast? Should you be prioritizing guesting on other podcasts to talk about your idea? Or should you be prioritizing buying ad space on other podcasts with whatever budget you would put into like your own show?

7:56And it is, you know, kind of like the idea of renting versus owning. and I have a different answer to that question of whether or not you should try and rent for a zone based on who I'm speaking with. But yeah, we produce a lot of different podcasts. We also have a very robust marketing arm where we're running like PR marketing, cross promo app pitching and paid acquisition campaigns on behalf of, at any given moment, a dozen different podcasts. And we represent as well about 30 shows in the monetization front. So we assist them in selling ads directly, programmatically, or like broader partnerships.

8:41We've been doing that since 2017. And I actually got into the space because I was formerly a book publicist and I was creating my own podcast on the side for fun. And one day it just clicked. And it was like, that's the thing that I love doing and I have the most fun doing. So I'm just going to do that forever. um and and here we are uh so uh so we do a lot of stuff you can check it all out at the poglummer.com and we have um yeah we we have a lot of different clients that we work with and client profiles yeah and uh very happy to chat with anybody about whether or not a podcast would be a good fit for them jeff um you were kind of talking a bit about uh growth um what are best practices today?

9:26Let's say that you're speaking with an independent podcaster. They may even have a limited budget to work with, but they know that they really want to grow the audience size of their show. What do you generally recommend as, you know, kind of best practices for that? You know, probably the first is, you know, have a decent show, have some decent content to impact the world with, but I'll let you kind of take it from there. Yeah, that's step one. I have something that's worth sharing. Dan Meisner from a company called Bumper has this great line where he talks a lot about like, does your show need marketing or marketability?

10:05And that's the first place that you should start is like figuring out if your show is something that people would want to share on their social medias or like that they're really getting something out of. And there's a lot of different metrics that you can look at that's available for free for anyone to like try and figure that out um the big thing that people usually will gravitate towards is just like the number of downloads um but that's not really the best way to look at like how effective your show is uh you should probably be spending more time looking at uh like the consumption of the show and like other um kind of like indirect metrics like uh how many times you get quoted on social media or how many emails you get from listeners um or how many times your guest tells you that they like loved the experience.

10:49Um, there's a lot of different ways and everyone's going to have a different idea of like what that KPI is, but assuming you have a good show and that you like understand what your metrics are telling you about it. Um, you, uh, can, can do a lot like the, the two easiest lower lowest lift, uh, initiatives would probably be like, are you utilizing your owned properties, like your website, your newsletter, your social media in the proper way. A lot of people like are not really doing that. I don't think social media is the best way to grow an audience organically. It just shows that in the metrics that like, there are very few shows that really can drive like downloads from like a post on LinkedIn or Twitter or something.

11:35They can get clicks and attention, but it's different from like getting a listener. um and then uh why why do you think that is well it's just an overcrowded marketplace and uh it's it's very saturated i think a lot of people who are on linkedin like are not necessarily in the mindset to listen to a podcast um there's a million reasons uh but overall it's just like these are platforms that are built for people browsing yeah they are not necessarily platforms that are built for like long-term engagement. And even by the way, like YouTube shorts or like TikToks and stuff, like there's really not that much data that shows that you can drive people from short form to long form in a really effective manner.

12:21What does work really well is what's called a cross promotion. So partnering with similar shows and advertising one show on that property and then advertising your show on that property. so for example like you know if i'm going to uh like run a swap with you i would put an ad for your show on my show podcast perspectives and i would uh like say hey this was really great i did an interview i had a ton of fun you should all go check it out and then you would do the same for me um and there are ways to track like pixel attribution tracking for audio to audio swaps and you can really see like how effective these promotions are so you know total number of impressions, conversions, downloads, listeners, et cetera, and like how people are engaging with the show at that point.

13:07Um, and, uh, and it's free, you know, you own the real estate, so you can do that as many times as you want. You can do that with multiple shows on any, on every episode, you can use dynamic audio insertion so that you're putting it across your entire catalog. Um, there's a lot of ways to do that really effectively. Uh, and you know, there's a bunch of tools like rephonic um will build out like a podcast neighborhood map to show you similar shows in the space um pod chaser has email addresses that are pulled from rss feeds that are on those shows uh are attached to those shows and then uh even if you just pull up your podcast and scroll to the bottom of the page on apple or spotify it'll give you a list of like recommended podcasts which are pulled from their algorithm it's showing like if people are subscribed to x show then they are also usually listening to why show and you're able to actually just build a list based on that and then you can just shoot an email to everybody and say like hey i'm interested in a cross promo um so those are two ways uh like really doubling down on your own properties and running some cross promos uh that are proven time and time again to be really effective at growing a show yeah that's great i i appreciate the the insights on that um regarding monetization as well.

14:22What do you see as kind of the state of that side of podcasting? Things healthy or, you know, are there new considerations? Healthy is in the eye of the beholder.

14:38There's a lot of conversation right now about like the 1 % of podcasting. And it is true that like, you know, there are probably a thousand shows that are commanding like more than half of the total ad market that's out there right now. So there are a lot of shows that are doing very well that are bringing in millions of dollars based on their size. And you see that in like the headlines with Alex Cooper and Joe Rogan and smart list and Dax Shepard and everything else. There is a very, very strong middle class of podcasters, I would say that like often go under the radar. And you know, if your show is doing 50 ,000 downloads a month, then it is like very easy to be on.

15:20Well, I don't want to say easy, but it's very achievable to find people who are interested in that audience. You sell those ads at a CPM. It's a pretty easy back of the envelope math problem to figure out your CPM times the number of ads that you sold times the number of ads that you put on every episode. And you can figure out how much money you're going to make. If you work with an agency, they're going to take a cut. But I would say that... And then on top of that there's a programmatic marketplace that's available at this point for most of your hosting platforms like megaphone simplecast omni um that really does drive some decent money like you're not talking millions of dollars but if your show is of like a substantial size like you can be talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars every month that you get in your pocket from doing nothing but hitting a button and turning it on um so all of that to say uh i would say that the industry is, I don't know, I don't, I don't, it's healthy for most, unhealthy for some.

16:24And overall, I think it is more sustainable than it has ever been, which is a really encouraging thing for me. Jeff, your website, podglomerate.com, who should be reaching out? Who do you work with? work with a lot of people uh who are kind of like i would say middle or top tier publishers um so and i mean that in terms of like size and budget and that kind of thing um we're not the shop to go to if you're looking to spend like you know 100 bucks an episode and have your show produced um but we're also not going to charge you you know half a million dollars to make your show. Uh, so we work with a lot of think tanks, nonprofits, universities, uh, media companies, individuals who, um, like might be using, uh, their show as like a tool for lead generation.

17:18Um, those are the people that I think would be most happy with the services that we provide. Um, and, uh, but we're happy to talk to anybody. We have a form on our website that you can fill out with your information and really, really happy to hop on a call with anybody to talk about podcasts. All right. So your website, again, podglomerate.com. When you just pull that up, you'll certainly see the roster of shows. It is impressive. PBS, HubSpot, Netflix, Expedia, NPR, History Channel, Freakonomics, to name a few. Again, that's podglomerate.com. There's a button right on the front page. You can click work with us and certainly get in touch that way.

18:02Jeff Umbro, you are the CEO. Thank you so much for joining. And this has been a great conversation. Thank you, Josh. Really appreciate you having me. Keep producing great shows out there. I'll do my best.

18:20Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program. Please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

19:01I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

19:43I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.