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Creator Science with Jay Clouse
#274: Podcast growth strategies (paid and organic) with Jeff Umbro of The Podglomerate
01:04:18
Jeff Umbro is the founder and CEO of The Podglomerate, which helps you produce, market, and monetize your podcasts
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- [00:01]
A
I think it's something that's achievable for a lot of different people. You don't have to take a swing on everything that you do, but you should take a few in order to try and intentionally grow the audience in that way.
- [00:25]
B
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. In keeping with our recent string of episodes related to podcasting, this week I'm speaking with my friend Jeff Umbro. Jeff is the founder and CEO of the podglomerate, which helps you produce, market, and monetize your podcast. The podglomerate's worked with some of the biggest podcast clients in the world, from indie creators like me to major brands like Netflix, NPR, PBS, HubSpot, Harvard Substack, and more. Since its start in 2016, the podcast, the Podglomerate, has grown to represent more than 70 podcasts, accounting for more than 30 million monthly downloads, with shows topping the podcast charts and receiving features on every major podcast app, with national coverage across print, digital, radio, and television. All that to say Jeff is legit, and he knows his stuff. In fact, one of the things I appreciate most about Jeff is that he's just honest and he's a straight shooter. And in podcasting, there are some questionable characters. And as you'll hear at the beginning of this interview, this very podcast may not exist if not for Jeff and his early guidance for the show. So in this episode, we talk about podcast growth. We explore both organic and paid growth strategies, Jeff's experience with both, and of course, I share my experience as well, and we're not completely on the same page. We have some differing opinions here. If you find yourself enjoying this episode, tag me Aklaus on social media and let me know that you're listening. But now, let's talk with Jeff. Jeff, great to chat with you. What people may not know listening to this is I'm not sure the show exists without you.
- [02:01]
A
To be honest, it's the nicest thing that I've heard today, and I don't believe it for a second. Well, I don't know.
- [02:07]
B
I don't know. So the backstory with Jeff, I might as well share this. I was running a podcast that was not successful, and I met Michael Sacca, who was running Rocketship fm. His podcast, at least in my eyes, was successful. And I said, michael, save me. And he says, I don't know. But Jeff knows, and Jeff helped us grow. And he basically sends me a check every month. And I said, that sounds great. So I got in touch with you. You were very generous with your Time. And you're basically like, listen, your show is already in market, and it's too late for me to save you, but if you ever start another show, let me know. And that's what I did. And podglomerate launched the show, and we.
- [02:46]
A
Love it, by the way. I've learned a lot from you, and it's been really cool to see the journey over the years and. And to think I almost passed on this.
- [02:56]
B
And similarly, before we actually launched it, you gave me a really great piece of advice that stuck with me, which was I was really into WTF with Marc Maron, and I thought to myself, I should just bullshit around for 10 minutes before the episode starts. And so when I sent you the first cut of the first episode, the first 10 or 15 minutes was me just, like, talking about what I was doing. And you listen to it and you're like, this is a show, but it's not good yet, and you should probably cut all of that.
- [03:29]
A
I hope I didn't say it like that, but that's the way I remember it.
- [03:32]
B
So I don't know if it was that direct or not, but you're basically like, you should cut all of that and you should consider adding some production touches to it, like narration. And you pointed me to, without fail, by Gimlet, which is a great show that doesn't exist anymore, and it was really the backbone of what the show was came to be, and I wanted to pass that along.
- [03:53]
A
For anyone listening, thank you so much for saying that. It truly means a lot, especially coming from you. And I do want to push back, though, because I think that you are the type of person who would have figured this out and made this work no matter what. So a different show may have existed, but your show would have happened.
- [04:10]
B
Could be true. Could be true. Okay, so today, podglomerate works with creators. They work with big brands, both on the sponsorship side, but helping them launch shows grow shows. Everything the light touches in podcasting world, it seems like, is sort of your kingdom. But today I wanted to talk specifically about podcast growth and also podcast monetization. And it probably makes more sense to start in the growth realm. So let's imagine somebody comes to you and they say, jeff, need help growing my show? Talk to me about how you meet that person, where they are, and where you would go from there.
- [04:52]
A
Sure. So Pugglomerate, we're a services agency, so we do three things. We produce, we market, we monetize. Sometimes we do all three of them. Most of the time, it's Just one or two of them. On the growth side, the first question that I ask everybody that I speak to is like, what are your goals? What are you hoping to achieve here? It's going to be a really different process if you're trying to grow your show to monetize it versus trying to grow your show for lead generation versus brand awareness versus content marketing and all of the above. So we tried to establish, like, what are the KPIs and benchmarks that you're trying to reach with your show? Just for example, we worked with a SaaS company that was trying to sell their product to Fortune 500 companies that would make your sales outreach 1% more effective. And they really only cared about finding the CMOs of these Fortune 500 companies. So they would go and bring those folks as a guest on the show, and then they would be able to turn around and like, actually get them in a room for an hour or two. They would send them these cool trinkets and a microphone so that they could, like, have that branding and actually have a cool experience when they were recording. And they build, like, all kinds of great content marketing stuff around the show. And they would use as an excuse to, like, go back to those folks a few months later and say, like, hey, can I show you this new tool we have? So they really had like an audience of 500 people on Earth, and that's really all they cared about. Now, there's a lot of factors that go into that. Those 500 people care about finding their audience, so they're going to need to have, like, a group of folks that are larger than that in order to convince them to come onto the show in the first place. And that's where a lot of, like, the other marketing initiatives come in. So the key is really just making a vehicle that was going to be attractive to those folks. And there's a lot of different ways to do it. Now, that's just like, one example of a really niche kind of show that we've worked on where you're trying to do a very particular thing. We work with plenty of other folks that are just trying to, like, make a news program that meets millions of people every month and monetize it through advertising or push subscriptions to their website or something. So we try and establish that early on. Once we've done that, we do a little bit of an audit on this individual or show or partner and, and try and really establish kind of what are they working with with their owned properties. So their social media, their email newsletter, their Web properties, their other podcasts, partnerships, live events, what kind of press outreach have they done in the past? Like, what are the angles that they're using there? Like, have they done a lot of interviews on other podcasts? Do they have relationships with any of the apps or anything? And we really build a plan that focuses in on each of these things. We have like kind of a six tier approach that we build a structured strategy surrounding each of these initiatives and we go back to the goals. And everything that we do is trying to be focused around reaching those goals through these different initiatives.
- [07:40]
B
My perspective on people who are growing podcasts is that there's a segment of people who are trying to grow downloads, because that is how monetization typically is unlocked. And then there's a segment of people who care more about actual consumption of the show, because that is what's going to build trust with somebody who becomes monetized through a product or service differently.
- [08:08]
A
Yep.
- [08:09]
B
And in the middle, there are people who understand that there's a difference between the two. Sometimes people don't even understand that there's a difference and that a download does not mean that somebody listened to it. But I would say for this audience, they're probably going to care more about consumption than download numbers because even if they are monetizing through ads, that's probably not the primary purpose of the show for most people listening to this. So I think as we dive in deeper here to growth strategies, we want to look at growth strategies that are more likely to reach real people.
- [08:47]
A
Yeah.
- [08:47]
B
And get them to give the show a chance.
- [08:50]
A
Yeah. And I know you chatted with Dan Misner from Bumper, and anybody who's listening to this should hit pause and go listen to that episode and then come back and finish this one. But Dan is kind of the king of data. Him and his team, Jonas Woost and several other folks over there have created the Bumper dashboard, among many other things that really show consumption as opposed to downloads. And Jay, you've talked a lot about this both in that episode and on Social and your blogs and that kind of thing. But they've done a really good and interesting job of showing that downloads don't really correlate in many instances to actual listeners and consumption of the episodes. I could go literally all day talking about the mechanics of what drives a retentive listener versus a download and that kind of thing, and I'm sure we'll touch on a lot of that. But when it comes to client work, a big part of what we do is try to educate people about what those differences are and what really matters. I'm with you. I'm in the camp where I'd rather have 10 real listeners than 10,000 fake ones. But at the same time, for better or worse, a lot of people just have to show their boss that people are engaging.
- [09:57]
B
Yeah, that's certainly true of teams and companies that have a podcast, and probably less true for the audience here. Yeah, for anybody who has not yet claimed their Spotify for Creators account or their Apple Podcast Connect account, this is probably the best way, without access to a tool like Bumper, to see what actual listening trends am I seeing? And that's what I'm looking at week in and week out. But then the challenge of course, is, okay, how do I get people to actually find my show for the first time? Click play. Hopefully the episode is something they enjoyed which brings them back a second time. But the game is how do I get this in front of somebody who's giving it real consideration?
- [10:45]
A
So, yes, the goal is to find people who are interested in your show who want to tune in and listen. And we have a six tier approach, I guess, that we use to do that. And with every show that we work on, we're going to be a little bit curatorial for like how we do this. Those buckets are publicity owned marketing, cross promotion, pitching, the apps, paid acquisition, and what we call data management. So for publicity, the idea is that you draft a press kit, you create a media pipeline of like minded outlets that may be interested in writing about the show, and you pitch those outlets for interviews, reviews, features, lists of shows surrounding certain topics, that kind of thing. Mileage may vary when it comes to the results of these articles if you're able to land them. If you find the perfect outlet at the perfect time, it can really drive a lot of traffic back to your show and it might not. But at the same time, it becomes this tool that you can snowball into other opportunities, like sending a Forbes article to Apple and say like, hey, look, people are paying attention. And to your point about finding these folks that are really interested in engaging with the show and sticking around long term, I do find that these media articles are genuinely really great and have good longevity for bringing people back to the show over time. So for example, if you got a food podcast written up in Bon Appetit or Food52 or something, people are going to be finding that article for years to come. And it really does pay dividends long term. We had a show years ago that got written up in just like a collection of five Podcasts from the New York Times and we're still seeing traffic five years later that is coming from that article.
- [12:23]
B
This feels like is probably. That'd be like an 80 20. I bet this is like a 99 one or like at least a 90 10, right?
- [12:33]
A
It's probably like a 95.5 New York Times.
- [12:35]
B
That would crush. I remember Acquired was featured in like the Wall Street Journal. Like all of the smartest people on the planet are listening to this podcast. Like incredible earned media on that. At the same time, I've been in some stuff that like, absolutely no difference. But I think something that's interesting we don't know about yet and maybe you told me this. It seems like getting listed in legacy media for your show might be beneficial in a chat or like an LLM search world.
- [13:07]
A
So that's something that we're starting to see a lot of just across the industry and every industry. A lot of these legacy publications are scored really highly in whatever algorithms like Perplexity and chatgpt and Claude are using. So they are the first things that are being sourced as resources for search results for these outlets. So if your show is covered in what may be like an article that doesn't get tons of attention, it still may show up as like the search result in a chatgpt or something. And we've actually been seeing that both for podcasts that we work on that have been featured in places, but also for just the company as a whole. We're able to see that we're getting some web traffic and attention based on the different folks that have found us through these AI prompts. When somebody fills out a form on puglar.com asking to chat with us for a consultation, we have a little box in there that just says, where did you find us? And more and more frequently, AI prompt has become the selection that people are making to the point where it's probably 10 to 20% of the folks that are hitting our website right now. Now, you can't always trust that people may just be hitting the first thing that shows up. But I mean, there are certainly at least a handful of folks that have found us through that. But I do want to be clear too that this is one of these levers. And obviously resource allocation is a big piece of this and it's probably one of the more time consuming things that somebody could do to try to grow their audience, but could potentially be the most lucrative. And if you're an individual who's trying to do this for themselves, then mileage may Vary. If you have the resources to bring on a third party, then like, you know, you may be able to find somebody great who can really unlock a lot of opportunities. So the second bucket that we like to focus on is what we call owned marketing. So that is really the idea of using your owned channels. So for you, Jay, that is LinkedIn, it is your Instagram, it is your newsletter, it is your website. You know, you can make the argument that your YouTube and your RSS are separate entities there and. And can help cross promote one another. And the idea is really just like, you know, what strategies can you use to translate folks from one platform to another, and where do you want to prioritize that translation? And then there are a lot of tools where you can utilize kind of attribution tracking to figure out what is effective and what's not. So you can see how many people listened to your podcast and then went to your website. You can see how many people heard an ad for your show on another podcast, then went back to your podcast. You can see how many people clicked on a link in your show notes to go to your website. So in aggregate, once you get a lot of that information under your belt, you can start to make smarter decisions as to, like, what is going to be effective to drive traffic to these different platforms that you want to go back and forth from. You do some really interesting stuff with just like, you know, which episodes you're publishing is audio only versus video versus like, both platforms. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure a lot of that is influenced on some of that data.
- [16:09]
B
That you're seeing a little bit. I mean, the biggest thing is resource constraints. So if I could release every episode we did in video, I probably would. But also, I have found that for our channel, most of our viewers are YouTubers or care about YouTube. So most of our videos focus more on YouTube as a platform. Because what we found is we were having more success spending twice as much time editing half the episodes that we felt better about their chances than half as much time for twice as many episodes. But one of the core assumptions we had in the beginning was YouTube will drive audio growth, which has not been true at all. And it could be an issue with us, but we have not crack that nut. If that nut can be cracked.
- [17:03]
A
No, and I don't think it's an issue with you. I think these are two distinct audiences. One thing that I do think people often forget, and I'm not putting you in this camp, is that there are a Lot of ways in which you can use the inventory on each of these different platforms to kind of like build this spiderweb effect across each of your platforms. So, for example, you can run audio ads that are promoting your courses or your YouTube channel in the same way that you might like promote your YouTube channel on LinkedIn. You can push people from the audio property and let them know that that exists. But often you need to kind of incentivize people to go from one place to the other. So you can tease like a special episode on YouTube from your audio property or something. And for you, I don't know that that would work because you're already so integrated on each of these platforms. But like, I do know that it has worked for folks like Darknet Diaries or even the Boston Globe has done some stuff where they're publishing episodes exclusively to YouTube. And this is probably a bad example, but I know of a news network that got an interview with JD Vance and they did a whole teaser episode on the RSS feed saying they were only going to publish it on their YouTube channel. So there are maybe outliers, but there are examples of that working.
- [18:16]
B
Well, I think that direction I could get to work, but that would kind of defeat the purpose to me. I'm not trying to get people from audio to video. I'm trying to get people from video to audio. And we did a Q and A episode, my producer and I, and we asked people tell us in the comments how you listen to this or how you watch it. And everyone who took the time to comment anyway, at least I would say 90% of the people who took time to comment said, I just listened to this. Like, they don't even watch the video. I followed with a bunch of them and said, did you know that we released twice as many episodes? We have an audio only show as well. And people responded and said, I don't want to listen to anything not on YouTube.
- [18:55]
A
Interesting. That's. See, that is the kind of data that I do not have at my fingertips. Have you though, like ever published kind of like a teaser for the audio property, like on your YouTube channel or tried anything like that?
- [19:08]
B
Not directly, but we don't look at YouTube as a broadcast platform in that way. Like, we want to make a video that we think will perform in browse and recommended in like a purely promotional video. Like that wouldn't work. I mean, it would go out to people who had chosen to subscribe for us or subscribe to us, but that's a very small percentage.
- [19:29]
A
Well, it's still hundreds of thousands of people.
- [19:32]
B
But it's not even just subscribe to the channel. It would be people who chose to get notified by that message. Because even subscribing to the show, listener behavior on YouTube is not really to go to the subscription feed for most people. Like, it's just making it slightly more likely your video will be put on the recommended page, really. And I just don't think that video would perform at all.
- [19:54]
A
Yeah, and that's probably, like, true. You're the expert in this space. But I do think that there are avenues in which folks are able to, if they have those audiences, kind of convert from platform to platform. And maybe it is like kind of the other way around, but we have found, like, a lot of success there in certain instances. But I guess this is a great point to make because you are correct, and I do view audio and video platforms as very different. When people come to us for podcast growth and marketing, 99% of the time, like, what they mean by that is the RSS feed. And that's kind of the way that we communicate about that in some instances and a lot more recently in the last year or two, people have come to us and really asked us about, what can you do for video growth? And we do have examples and answers to that question. It's just sometimes that answer is like, you should talk to somebody else. And sometimes based on what their goals are, we're able to handle it and do well there. But to your point, I do view these things as very different, and that's part of the. The bigger conversation that's happening in the industry right now as to, like, this shift to video and, like, what does podcast mean at this point?
- [21:10]
B
After a quick break, Jeff and I talk about how editorial planning and taking big swings can grow your podcast audience. This really got me thinking, so stick around. We'll be right back. My business has grown an average of 75% per year for the last five years. And the reason this is true is because I have just continued to put myself around creators who are a step ahead of me. This. That's it. I can track all of this back to 2020, when I joined a mastermind, and one of the creators in that Mastermind was earning $40,000 per month. I was stuck at $10,000 per month at that time, and I just couldn't believe what this person was doing. But because I could see it, I knew I could be it. And by continuing to put myself in the room with people a step ahead of me, I learned to ask different questions make different decisions. And all of that has led to an increase in revenue. This is why I built the Lab. I wanted to give creators the experience that I had in that Mastermind group. I wanted to give you a place where you could be around other people who are doing things so that you can see it and you can be it as well. Members of the Lab receive access to our always on, always available community forum, access to all of my courses, including Build a Beloved membership podcast, like a YouTuber, the Newsletter Masterclass, and more. Dozens of workshops, most of which were never made publicly available for sale. Creator hq, which is my operating system for creators, a trusted partners directory. These are professionals that our community has hired and vetted for things like ads, design, legal, finance, et cetera. Access to our offline events, our Mastermind matching process that happens twice a year, and weekly live sessions. We have members who have now renewed their membership four years in a row. I wouldn't push so hard if I didn't believe in this membership. Learn more and join us at creatorscience.com lab. That's creatorscience.com lab or follow the link in the show notes. And now back to my conversation with Jeff Umbro. I do think that email is still a big part of my strategy. Trying to get people to audio, trying to continue to tell everybody who receives emails from me that we have a podcast. The one shift we have made is I don't think it's wise to send an email that's essentially just a notification that there's a new episode. Yeah, unless you at least contextualize and provide value, standalone value in that email that is derived from that episode. Because most people won't click a link in an email. So you want people who took the time to open the email and read it to at least feel satisfied with that choice. I think you can do that by contextualizing something. I'm also playing around with manychat on Instagram right now, and I think that's somewhat promising. I mean, the reality in my opinion has been that audio growth is just extremely incremental. But that means that every incremental new listener you get is worth fighting for. So if your ManyChat automation only sends five messages to people who don't already subscribe to your podcast, that's honestly still a win.
- [24:09]
A
Well, it's funny that you say that, because I have three examples, actually, that I want to share here. Two of them are from PJVote, from formerly Reply all now search engine. He was at one point writing kind of Mini essays for his substack promoting search engine for over a year. And he got to a point where he basically said, I would rather spend the time that I'm using to write this essay in order to just make the show. So each time I publish one of these newsletters, all it's going to be doing is basically like, here's a few sentences about what the show is and you're notified now. And I do agree with you. I don't think that there's a lot of traction because many people who are already subscribed to the podcast are getting their notifications in other ways, either from opening their app or getting a push notification or that kind of thing. But I did find that to be a really interesting, very intentional thing that he did. And we'll see if he continues with it. He's only been doing it for a few months, but basically saying, hey, listen, I'm here to make a podcast and if you are interested in hearing it, here it is. And he's probably an outlier because he's so popular that a lot of people will take anything that he does and really love it. But the second example is from PJ Vo as well. He said something in an interview with Peter Kafka a while back, which was tangentially about podcast growth, where he stated that he makes the show that he wants to make and he does it as well as he possibly can. But he also builds all of his show marketing around one tentpole episode that he tries to put out every quarter. So he basically puts all of his eggs into the basket of trying to make one thing that is going to be so good that everyone who listens tells a friend about it. And there was a two part series where he went to Berlin to figure out the birthplace of this nightclub that is really hard to get into. And he ended up talking to Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics about it. And like, and again, PJ is an outlier. Like, he's such a legend in the industry that he can do things like this and get away with it. But I do think that that idea is a good one when it comes to just the idea of trying to create something that's really valuable for your audience. And I think it's something that's achievable for a lot of different people, you know, depending on what kind of show they're trying to create. Maybe it's about booking just a big guest, maybe it's about doing a miniseries on like this really specific topic that your audience loves. And like doing a little marketing campaign around that. But the idea is like you don't have to take a swing on everything that you do, but you should take a few in order to try and like intentionally grow the audience in that way.
- [26:49]
B
I love this.
- [26:50]
A
Yeah, it's great, right?
- [26:52]
B
Because my experience of growth on every platform has been that again, huge power law, like 90% of the growth comes from 10% of the content and probably even more extreme than that. So I like this idea of baking that into your editorial strategy to say, okay, if I do really want to make one episode appointment, must listen to material. Kind of like the recent Taylor Swift interview. Like everyone on the planet tuned into this Taylor Swift interview. That's an extreme example. But what I'm trying to say is when there's something that even your small community, most people have seen or listened to now, suddenly there's almost a pressure to tune into that. And so you get more people taking a chance. And some of those people will stick week to week in the non huge type of tent poles. But I think one of the other things you'll probably get to I don't know if it belongs in this category or not. When I open the Apple Podcast app or Spotify, but especially Apple as a more editorially opinionated player, there are episodes that Apple promotes that clearly have been planned because they have unique visual assets as part of them. And I feel like I've never successfully taken a real swing at that. And it seems like something you have to really get ahead of to have a snowball's chance.
- [28:14]
A
Yeah, so that is one of the buckets. And the idea is really like each of the different podcast listening apps have these different ways that they curate recommendations for listeners. The three main apps that people listen to podcasts on are YouTube, Spotify and Apple. And then there's 10 others that are significantly smaller, like iHeart, SiriusXM, PocketCast, Podcast Addict, Overcast, et cetera. A lot of them have human editorial folks on their teams that are going in and actually curating these different merchandising areas of the app that are based on people pitching opportunities, whether it's based on an event or an anniversary or a holiday or something, or just a big new and noteworthy show or something on the carousel. So what you're referring to on Apple is something where it's called the moment. And those are like specific episodes that Apple deems to be like really relevant to a moment in time. And most of those are actually just pulling the COVID art for the show, putting it in this really cute looking Panel, I guess, and pulling it out as something that should be exceptional listening for anybody who's looking. They also have sections that are like the carousel, which is something where there's a submission form that you can pitch. If anybody is interested in that, shoot me an email@listenpagglomerate.com and I'll send it to them. And, Jay, I can send it to you if you follow up and you can throw it in your show. Notes.
- [29:42]
B
I have a recurring task to submit that form and a Spotify form every month. And I've done it every month for probably two years, and I've never heard anything back, and I've gotten no results from it. But I'm gonna do it every month until they just say, all right, go.
- [29:55]
A
Away, shoot me an email, and I will connect you with humans at both of these places. See, the point is, though, that these are areas in which there are really two main ways to pitch your show. So there's editorial and algorithmic curation. So editorial is filling out these forms and putting it in front of a human being. And they have teams of folks that are on the editorial side at these different apps that are actually looking for big new shows that they can promote. And their entire goal is to get people to continue to engage within their ecosystem. And so they're looking for their Taylor Swift moments so that people come in and play with, like, that particular episode and then listen to more episodes. And for Apple, like, stay within the Apple ecosystem and download an ebook and go to Apple Music or whatever. And for Spotify, it's kind of the same thing, actually get an audiobook and listen to a podcast or music or whatever. But they have opportunities in which you can pitch for those editorial moments. And then there are also algorithmic curation opportunities where basically you can tweak the metadata of your show so the title, the description, the author tag, the art, in order to make your show more interesting and appealing and engaging to the people who are listening to it. And the apps that are a little bit more algorithmic are actually taking into account how frequently people are hitting play and how much of an episode they're listening to and how often they're sharing this. Spotify actually has a really interesting way in which they pay attention to this, where they actually have, like, internally, this system that's tracking how many times people have searched for a particular show or song. So if all of a sudden 500 people search for New Heights or Taylor Swift or whatever, then they're going to know that this is, like, an extremely popular thing at this moment in time. And they're going to surface that in search results more frequently because they know that that's what people are looking for. And that can look a lot of different ways. Like it can be some kind of curation or shelf within the discover section of the app. It can be their chart rankings in the app, or it can literally be that if you type in N, then the first thing that shows up is new heights as opposed to having to type in any W space H. So they're really smart about how they do that. And with those three main apps, YouTube is obviously the most algorithmic and Apple is the most editorial. And then Spotify kind of lives in between.
- [32:22]
B
So one of the beliefs amongst YouTubers is that if you release a new video and you go to X and say new video, if you link directly to that video, it's more likely to be a net negative than a net positive. And so people will say new video. Maybe they'll link to the channel as a whole, or they'll want people to go to YouTube and search. And I wonder if the same is said of Spotify in this moment in time where if I did have a big episode, I tell people to go to Spotify and search for it. If that might actually be beneficial.
- [32:51]
A
I think it would. I don't think it would be a negative. And actually it's funny that you say that because there was a big thing five or ten years ago at this point where the guys from Pardon My Take the Barstool Sports show learned that their show would rank higher on Apple based on the number of net new subscriptions that they got on the show. Or now it's called a follow. So they actually recorded in at least one episode and I think multiple for all of their followers to go to Apple to unsubscribe to the show and then to resubscribe. And they hit the top of the charts for months because of this, because everybody was just going back to like, you know, trigger the algorithm. And there's a. You know, to your point, I think.
- [33:30]
B
This is still true. They probably controlled for unsubscribe and resubscribe. But it's still true that Apple seems to like really weight velocity of new followers.
- [33:40]
A
Yeah, Apple's weighting the velocity of new followers. They're also looking at things like number of times people hit play, the consumption of those particular episodes, the number of times these episodes have been shared. But to your point, on that algorithm, which is opaque, nobody truly knows the answer to this, but it does over index on the number of net new subscribers. But there are a few companies that I don't necessarily recommend that people use that, do kind of exploit that and really push a lot of people to follow and subscribe to a net new show and hit listen. But the IAB considers a download of a net new show to be somebody who downloads 30 seconds of an audio file. And that is great because 99% of the time if somebody's downloading 30 seconds of a show, they've downloaded the whole thing and presumably plan at least to listen to it. But what that has done is opened up the door for a lot of folks to kind of mimic the experience of a net new listener and, and create opportunities for people to download like 30 seconds of an episode or listen to 30 seconds of an episode. Famously, Ashley Carmen in Bloomberg, or at least famous to the podcast industry, wrote a story about one particular app that was incentivizing people to listen to 30 seconds of a show by listening to that show in the ad for like one of those silly iPhone video games.
- [35:02]
B
Like a Candy crush situation.
- [35:04]
A
Yeah, you get Farmville and like, you don't get like your Farmville coins until you've listened to 30 seconds of this. And it's actually like a brilliant maneuver because those ads sell for a very low dollar amount and it's not very hard to figure out like the value of an impression for an advertisement. And usually podcasts will have multiple advertisements on each downloaded episode. So if you're triggering a 30 second listen, it triggers a whole download and then turns into more revenue than expense. And that, my friend, is called arbitrage.
- [35:38]
B
There's a whole lot of stuff like this, this racket in podcasting based on the model, which is why I specified up front that I want to focus on things that get real listeners to consider listening to the show. Because for most people listening to this, it's just. It's just all that matters. We're not the top 1% of shows that are selling huge ad budgets where these impressions add up to huge amounts of revenue. Another thing that I wanted to call out here because I think it's a good spot. I have noticed that video episodes on Spotify are getting a significant boost for me, some more than others, but all of them significantly better than an audio only episode.
- [36:18]
A
I'm glad that you brought this up and I know that we're kind of all over the place, but this actually brings me to the third example that I was going to mention before. But Spotify, and in turn Megaphone, who is owned by Spotify are really incentivized currently to promote video content on the platform. And, and there could be many reasons for that. A lot of people have said that Spotify is trying to compete with YouTube. We know from their earnings report that Spotify is trying to optimize their ad sales opportunities in the industry. And a million other reasons. Spotify is very interested in getting people to watch video on their platform. Megaphone is the vehicle, and Spotify for creators is the vehicle for getting people to upload video to Spotify. And they're trying to incentivize people to do that through a few different things. One of them is they are paying video creators from a separate pool of money from Span Advertising, which is their programmatic marketplace. Jury's out. It kind of depends on who you are as to like if you're making any real dollars from that. But one of the ways in which they are trying to ease the concern about the monetary side of this is that Spotify's algorithm is currently favoring people who are uploading video to their platform. And I can only speak to, at this point, about 10 examples of folks who have done this and like the actual results from doing this. And I can tell you that in about 70% of the cases that I've seen, the Spotify viewership has increased over the course of a few months when people start uploading video as opposed to just audio. Now, in terms of the monetary side of that, I still don't. I'm not able to say if you're really making more dollars from that. The quick and easy way to kind of rationalize it is that you may be getting less total dollars coming from a listen or a download of your episode because you have less ad slots. But for every view of your show, you're getting 3 to 4x what you would be paid for one individual impression on a download.
- [38:23]
B
Yeah, I'm just looking at my data here, and we had a video with Caleb Ralston. It got almost three times as many plays as our typical episodes. And three quarters of that was video consumption. So it's just. It seems to me that video episodes are getting surfaced within surfaces of the Spotify app. And if that performs well, I'm sure this is algorithmic as well. They'll continue pushing that on these surfaces or not. Cause I see some other video episodes who are higher than my audio totals, but less than that one. And if I look at the retention graphs, retention graph is a little bit lower.
- [39:03]
A
So that makes sense because you're getting net new people. Yeah. So Spotify has a lot of different tools that are constantly in and out of beta. And Caleb may be an example of somebody who is really popular on the platform at that moment in time because of something that has happened either with him on other podcasts or if he has a show and how people are engaging with that. So there are a lot of different things that could trigger the growth on that one particular episode. But at the same time, there's also a lot of innate growth that is inherent in just publishing video in the first place. Are you publishing clips on Spotify?
- [39:43]
B
We took the time to try it once with one episode and didn't follow up on it. I'm not sure what to expect from that. If it makes a meaningful difference. Again, it's just resource constraints. So you can see how, like this is another example of a rich get richer world. Like the teams who are publishing more video based episodes who have the resources to create clips, they are going to get the vast majority of the benefit from these programs and these opportunities. But if you have the capacity and the interest and you're sitting here, you're saying, well, I could publish more video episodes. I think you could. I even saw a tweet yesterday of Ryan Trahan has taken his YouTube videos and just uploading them to Spotify as a video podcast and getting a ton of views, getting subscribers, getting money, probably.
- [40:27]
A
Making a ton of money.
- [40:27]
B
Yeah, it's genius.
- [40:29]
A
There's a lot of people that are doing, and that's a big part of why Spotify is doing this creator fund in the first place, because they want to get folks from YouTube to do exactly that. They want to be the place that people are watching this and it's working for Gen Z and that kind of thing. I mean, hell, I watch podcasts on Spotify all the time with clips. I'll tell you that I don't have enough data to be meaningful here, but I did recently see something on LinkedIn where somebody had posted, they were uploading clips to Spotify, one episode in particular. The full episode got tens of thousands of views and the clip got 70. However, there was conversion data of people who watched the clip and then went and listened to the full episode and that conversion data was over 50%, 5 0. So this goes back to your point about even if you're only winning 50 people, it's still very meaningful in a lot of ways.
- [41:24]
B
So low reach, high conversion on Eclipse, that's one example.
- [41:28]
A
So I can't officially say that, but I did just read that the other day I have not seen that in my experiments, but this came from a trusted source.
- [41:37]
B
I don't even know where to find the conversion data on Clips.
- [41:40]
A
They just started publishing it this summer. It's in Spotify for creators. Click into the episode data, click Clips and then you'll see it there.
- [41:48]
B
Okay, okay, okay, we're gonna stand by because I can actually do this in real time. I know we did. We did a clip for Mark Manson. Okay, well we've got an N of two now and my N says that this one clip we published got 148 impressions. Only seven plays from clips.
- [42:08]
A
Okay.
- [42:09]
B
So much lower conversion for me.
- [42:10]
A
Way lower.
- [42:12]
B
This is again an opportunity. It's 148 impressions of this clip. So people did see it. New people, I'm guessing. I don't know. I don't know if it discriminates between existing listeners or new listeners, but this is something.
- [42:25]
A
And I'll say too that it's probably. I know resource constraints are a real thing, but it is pretty easy to upload the clips to Spotify. I know you, Jay, are gonna ab test everything and spend a year trying to figure out what title you should give it, but for anyone else, it's pretty quick.
- [42:42]
B
Yeah, I would bet the title. I'm not even sure how much of the title is seen in the surfaces where clips happen.
- [42:48]
A
It's like a 60 character caption or something.
- [42:52]
B
After one last quick break, Jeff and I get into paid promotion strategies. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Jeff Ambro. Well, I know I've derailed our buckets talk here. I would love to spend the time we have left on some of the pace growth strategies that you've tried and hopefully get to kind of a prioritized list for folks to consider.
- [43:20]
A
Yeah, 100%. So generally speaking, there are a few different ways to purchase advertising to promote your podcast. There are in app podcast advertisements. So Castbox, Pocket, Cast Overcast and a handful of others actually sell like banner inventory within their apps. So they all operate a little bit differently. Some I recommend more than others. There are audio buys on other podcasts or, you know, other properties in order to promote your show. There are display ads on Google, there's social media ads on, you know, Meta and Every and TikTok and everything else. There are email newsletter ads and then there's a bucket that I call miscellaneous. So for this purpose of this conversation, I'll skip social ads because that's a very long conversation. And the TLDR is that I don't think they convert very well unless you really over index on a B testing your show and trying to figure out what is actually effective for your particular audience and figuring out the recipe there. And the same applies to display ads. It's high volume, low conversion email newsletter ads. Results may vary based on what you're purchasing, but we have seen some really amazing impact on the right kinds of advertising. Price points vary pretty widely as well. So for example, we've had ads in the Morning Brew newsletter that cost tens of thousands of dollars, although they do offer fractional buys so it doesn't have to cost that much. And some of them have done pretty poorly and had 0.1% conversion rates on what we bought. And some of them have done very well and have had nearly a 1% conversion rate for for actual listeners of the show, not just clicks. And you can track that with like up until December 8th of 2025, a chartable smart link. But then there's also swap FM smart links, Magellan listen links, pod links. There are tools that you can use at different price points to track essentially like a bitly conversion rate of your buys.
- [45:26]
B
What do you think was the biggest component for what would make a campaign and email more or less successful? Is it the positioning of the campaign? Is it the quality of the show? I. You wouldn't even know the quality of the show until you click it. So what do you think is the.
- [45:40]
A
Difference in this instance? It was a well known brand. I think people knew that it would be a high quality show. It was a very timely episode and we got lucky. The particular positioning was very relevant to what was elsewhere in the newsletter that day. So it truly is a little bit luck and a little bit skill. But that's not always the case. It's really more about looking at the demographic targeting. This was a very techy, very wonky chat show that we were promoting and it was in Morning Brew, which is meant to be a financial entrepreneur tech digest for millennials basically. So we knew that it would perform well. We didn't know how well. Some other examples of things that have worked pretty effectively. We promoted Poglomerate in your newsletter, Jay, and I don't have the data in front of me right now, but I do know that we had hundreds of people hit our website from those ads.
- [46:38]
B
From our side, it's been one of our top, I think two or three of those ads that were in our top 10 most clicks at least of this year. But I think of all time. The challenge is clicks to whatever the next step is.
- [46:53]
A
You can't always track that. Yeah, like engagement and conversions and that kind of thing. And I will, by the way, give credit to Joanie Deutsch, my colleague at Poglomerate, who wrote that ad and she did an amazing job with the copy and everything, which was a huge part of this, and Chris Boniello, who designed the image. But yeah, I think it truly is about just aligning the content and the folks that you're trying to market towards. The most effective way of advertising to promote your show is generally going to be buying ads on other podcasts. It's an old adage that I don't like very much, but ultimately it's much easier to convert a listener for somebody who's already aware of podcasts and knows how to listen than it is to try and teach somebody how to do it, which made a lot more sense 10 years ago. But if you were able to find a like minded show and get a promotion for your podcast on their show, and that promotion can look a lot of different ways, then you're going to be able to convert that listener to at least try out your show. And whether or not they stick around, it's gonna be based on like, how good is the show, how good is the content market fit. So because I know you like to get wonky, there are a few different considerations there. When you're buying an ad on a podcast, you can buy a pre roll, a mid roll, a post roll, or what's known as a feed drop. And there are a lot of different ways to do this. And there's a couple tools here that I'll share with your audience that like I actually really love and I would love it if more people tried them because they need the business, they're new. When you're buying an ad, you want to really try to figure out what is going to convert for you. And you can do that by organically running some cross promos with other shows so that you can start to build some data in order to understand what's converting and what's not. And you can track that data with attribution platforms like Magellan AI, Swap fm, podscribe and podtrack. Those are the big ones. There are others, but those are the really reputable big ones that people are using all the time. These are all paid platforms, but they have different amounts of fees based on the scale of your show. Magellan AI is probably. And Swap FM are probably my two favorites there. And Chartable was up there at the top of the list. But they're officially sunsetting on December 8th of this year. Boo. I know, it's a tragedy. I should also say Spotify spa. The Spotify ad attribution is another tool that you can use, especially if you're buying on Spotify. But the point is you're able to run these pixel based attribution tracking and they have great instructions of how to install this stuff. I can run an ad for my show on Jay's podcast and we can actually see how many impressions ran, how many of those folks came and listened to my show. And then we can figure out how many of them have been there before, how many of them are net new, what's the conversion rate. And then if you have a bunch of these data sets and you can compare and contrast and you can try and figure out, oh, here's the similarities. Like these were all mid roles, which means traditionally that people are more engaged within the episode that they're listening to. Or these are all tech shows and we ran this on like a society and culture show and it didn't do very well. Or maybe we run this on a, we have a parenting show and we run on a true crime podcast. And it worked really well because it just so happens that a lot of true crime listeners are women. So you get the point where you can start to make these assumptions based on the demographic data that you're seeing and the conversion data that you're seeing, and then you can take that data and apply that to your ad buys to try and make them a little bit smarter. So when you're purchasing a podcast, it's usually going to be on a CPM model. So you can get a thousand impressions for X dollars, which is usually going to be between 18 and $25 per thousand impressions. So then you can kind of do the napkin math there and say, if I spend $1,000, then I'll get 50,000 impressions on this podcast. And based on your conversion data, let's pretend it's 1%. You can say I spend $1,000, I'll get 50,000 impressions, 500 of them will come and listen to my show. And of those 500, 300 of them are going to like the show enough to continue listening. So then you know, if you publish a weekly show and you have 300 net new listeners, you're going to get 1200 new downloads every month that you can then monetize. And so you can kind of start to do the math on like what makes sense and what doesn't. And obviously the numbers that I just threw out are all kind of arbitrary and are going to be variable. But that's generally the way that like, we look at it. And we have a lot of spreadsheets that help us understand this better. And we've run hundreds of millions of these impressions before, so we have a lot of data to point to. So feed drops are the idea of actually publishing an episode of my show on Jay's show or your show on Jay's show. And Jay will record like an introduction or a post roll or something saying, if you like that, you can go subscribe to the show on this platform. You can get really creative with how you do this. You can publish part one on one feed and part two on another. You can do a collaborative episode, like Jay can interview me here and then I'll publish that episode on my show's feedback. So you can get really creative. But if you want to purchase these feed drops, which are traditionally going to convert much better than like a traditional audio cross promo ad, again, mileage may vary, but we traditionally see anything from 2 or 3x conversion to like 20 or 30x conversion on these feed drops. Again, depending on the alignment there. I've seen conversion rates of up to like 10% on feed drops before, which is incredible. So if you're trying to purchase these, historically you'd have to approach each show individually and negotiate. You're usually going to pay a really high CPM. Like when you're buying a mineral, maybe you spend a 25 CPM. When you're buying a feed drop, it's usually going to be like $100 or more. And oftentimes it's a little bit more opaque as to like what you're actually buying because you have to rely on the person that you're speaking to to understand their show well enough to know like how many actual listeners are going to get on that feed drop. That's not to say that anybody's nefarious about it. It's just sometimes people have like an education gap there. So. On that note though, the one thing I do want to recommend is a new platform called Introcast. And it is one of my favorite things that have been launched in the last few years. I think that it's really unique and they do have a competitor that does similar stuff. But Introcast works a little bit differently where essentially it's a dynamically inserted feed drop. So they're able to publish an episode of your show in their feed across multiple shows all at once as like the second episode in the feed, or third or fourth or whatever you want it to be. You pay a CPM that's going to be anywhere from like 50 to $100 to purchase these spots. And you can actually purchase based on the number of impressions that you want to buy. So you can buy Feed drops on an impression basis, which is something you can't really do if you're tracking these shows individually. So I could say to Introcasts, I would like to get 1 million impressions via feed drops through your platform, and you'll pay a ton of money for it, but you're able to do it with one go, and they have a sales rep that'll actually do all the heavy lifting for you. And it's great. It's very effective. Again, mileage may vary, but it's something that I'm very encouraged by.
- [54:27]
B
Okay, I'd heard of this, but I hadn't tried it out. Have you tried Pod Roll? What's your thoughts on Pod Roll?
- [54:32]
A
Love Pod Roll. Pod Roll has a very similar value prop as Introcast does. And I want to be very careful with how I say this, but the difference with Pod Roll is that when you are running a Pod Roll, it is dynamically inserting the episode via RSS feed. So, Jay, if you purchased a Pod Roll on this American Life, then it is actually pulling the MP3 file for the episode that you select from your RSS feed and publishing that as the second episode on the feed of this American Life for a set period of time or impressions or whatever you're buying. So every time somebody listens to this feed drop on the feed for this American Life, your megaphone account gets a download triggered, and that includes any advertising that you have on that episode. Now, that in itself is not a bad thing because somebody is listening to this feed drop just on somebody else's feed. And that is a huge selling point to a lot of people. The reason that I like Introcast is because the foundational tech is a little bit different. And also, by the way, with Pod Roll, you're not getting like a unique introduction or anything from, like, Ira Glass. If you're on this American Life, it's just playing the episode. With Introcast, you do get that unique introduction and you get a separate hosted audio file to run this. So it's not playing with your RSS feed at all. And in Pod Roll's defense, they do have the ability to kind of mimic the same tech that Introcast has. It's just a lot of their users aren't doing that, and it's not a bad thing. It's just for me, it doesn't feel like the right fit for like the kind of campaigns that we want to run.
- [56:18]
B
These are very interesting, very testable ideas that I haven't tested yet. Even just getting back to doing cross promotions, as manual as that may often be, you know, I was on the HubSpot network for a while. Yeah. And at some point I left because I was feeling like I wasn't getting the cross promotions on shows that I wanted. And I didn't feel like I had the ability to influence those decisions. So after close to two years, I said, this isn't worth it to me. Fast forward a few months. I can look at my Apple Podcasts Connect account and see that there is a period of time when my month over month new followers has a clear hump of being better. And that was when I was on the network.
- [57:05]
A
Well, cross promos work.
- [57:06]
B
So even though I was a little disgruntled, I can see that. Even though they weren't the shows that I thought they should be and I didn't expect much of a benefit, I can clearly see in the data and it's best explained by consistent cross promos.
- [57:19]
A
Yeah. And in a full circle moment though, like, that's just another instance where it's really important to understand the data and where downloads are not necessarily reflecting actual listeners and followers and that kind of thing. But yeah, I think I know I spoke a lot and gave a lot of examples of different ways that this could or could not be effective. And I hope it's really helpful in that your listeners get a lot out of it. I will also say that there are a million different ways to do this and to do it well. And if you have found something that is effective for what you are looking for, you should keep doing it. Whether that's cross promos or paid buys or having big guest opportunities or doing PR outreach. There's not really a wrong way to go about this. There's just more and less effective ways to do it.
- [58:08]
B
Well, to put a fine point on what we were just talking about, if I'm an independent podcaster and I'm willing to allocate some budget, but I can't do all of the pre roll, mid roll, feed drop, introcast pod rolls. Yeah. Which of these things would you recommend? We start with the limited budget we have.
- [58:27]
A
You can always purchase audio ads at scale or not. AdvertiseCast, which is owned by Libsyn, is actually a great platform where you can buy a La carte advertising across, like, 70,000 shows. And some of them are fairly small. And that does not necessarily mean that they're less effective. So you can probably get in the door at a lower price point with a platform like that. You can also buy ads. I don't recommend this because I just haven't really seen, like, the data come through in a positive way yet. But you can do the same thing at very low price points on Spotify advertising. You can purchase ads on Spotify podcasts at scale to push to your show. But one thing I didn't really touch on, that I think is better if you have a low budget, is looking at platform ads on, like, Overcast or Podcast Addict, which are often lower price points. So Overcast FM ads, podcastaddict.com ads. Check me on this, but I think it's pocketcast.com ads. Those are three platforms that have advertising rates that are anywhere from, like, you know, 100 bucks to, like, $5,000. And they all actually do give you, like, fairly accurate ranges of what you can expect if you were to purchase these ads in terms of number of impressions and, like, conversions to subscribers.
- [59:51]
B
Okay, well, I underestimated just how much we had to cover. So what I want listeners to do at this point is if you want us to do a second episode on monetization, leave a comment on Spotify or tag me on social media, let me know on the growth front. Jeff, is there anything that you are just screaming, I wish I would have said this that we didn't get to.
- [60:11]
A
I think the key is just really going back to the first thing that we talked about and understanding what you're hoping to achieve. And every day or every week or every month, just go back to your guiding light and just say, did I do something today that pushes me a little bit closer towards what I'm hoping to get out of this? Because as you know from this conversation, there can be a lot of noise in this space. And it's just really important that, like, you're having fun doing it and you're getting something out of it, and that's going to look different to everybody who does it.
- [60:44]
B
And if people want to get in touch with you, how should they do?
- [60:46]
A
So listen@thepugglomerate.com you can head to thepugglomerate.com, we have a great blog and newsletter that has tips like this in there every day. And I have a podcast, of course, called Podcast Perspectives, where I geek out over this stuff every day. And I have really amazing guests on there from the podcast industry.
- [61:12]
B
If you enjoyed this episode and you're listening on Spotify, please leave a comment down below. Let me know what you think. Otherwise, consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts because it helps helps a long way in growing this show. If you want to learn more about Jeff, visit his website@podglomerate.com there's a link in the Show Notes. And if you want to keep going down the rabbit hole of podcast growth and strategy, check out my episodes with Chris Hutchins and Dan Misner. Both are listener favorites, and they're linked in the show notes as well. Thank you for listening and I'll talk to you next.
- [61:49]
A
Sam.