Kevin Schmidlin (0:00)

Your favorite podcaster is probably just as frustrated with their podcast as you are. I hear from podcasters all the time, big and small, some of whom's names you know, with huge online followings and established brands. And many of them are frustrated by their podcast's growth. No matter where they are right now, they're like, why the heck can't I get this thing to grow, Kevin? Why is my show stuck? And a lot of these people are people who on paper have made it. And in fact, they're the podcasters that you look up to, but they are just as frustrated with their lack of podcast growth as you are. Why is this? Well, the truth is, podcasting doesn't work like other platforms. Growth here looks different. And without understanding the unique ways that podcast audiences grow and how it's measured or hint, hint, not measured, many of us are left feeling completely disheartened and discouraged when we're actually making progress that we just can't see. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidlin, and in this episode, I'm going to break down why your show is likely doing far better than you realize and how understanding the realities of this weird content niche called podcasting can help you keep pushing forward with more confidence. We're going to dive into the three unique challenges of podcasting that leave us all feeling stuck. The then I'm going to show you why each of these is actually a sign that you are on the right track and how to leverage these insights to see your show's success more clearly. Let's dig into it. Okay, so this episode of Grow the Show is inspired by three different text messages that I got over the past month from three different podcasters. One of them is a brand new podcaster who is just getting started. Another one is a podcaster with a big personal brand who is celebrated for podcast growth. And the third one is a podcaster that has been around for 15 years, an OG in the space. Now, I'm not going to name names, but what struck me was all three of those people reached out to me because they were saying that their podcast is stuck and they're stumped. They don't know how to grow it. They don't know how to get their downloads to go up. And I took a moment to be like, man, this is crazy. Like, if everybody knew that these people were struggling and were as frustrated as they actually are, they would feel way less bad about where they're at with their show. Now, you might not Be that frustrated with your podcast. If that's you, awesome. Don't let me speak frustration on you. But more often than not, you're feeling stuck, you're feeling not good enough. You're wondering if all the effort is worth it. You're wondering where that breakthrough is, and you're comparing yourself to all these other podcasters that you think are doing super well. So this episode is actually going to be a little less tactical than my usual episodes here on Grow the Show, but it actually might be the most impactful because over the past five years of my life, I have literally done three things. Number one, I've gone to music festivals. Number two, I've moved across the country multiple times. And number three, I have worked on Growing podcasts. The growing the podcast part took way more time. And if I'm being honest, it was a little trippy that these people who many of us admire reached out to me to ask what the deal is about podcast growth. I'm like, that's crazy. That's really cool. But again, after helping more than 400 folks individually serving several tens of thousands of podcasters via Grow the Show, I've learned that there are three weird things about the podcast world that trip us up as podcasters and I think are a huge driver to how many people quit. And so these are the three unique realities of podcast growth, where if you can identify them, if you can see them to be true, I think you're going to be a happier podcaster, which is going to make it easier to grow your show because you're going to be less. What the heck? Why is this growing? And you can actually see your show for how it actually stacks up. So the first reality of podcasting that is different than all of the other types of media that you could publish content on is this. Podcast downloads is a completely private metric. There is no public growth metric that podcasts have. And what I mean by that is, on YouTube, YouTubers can see how many subscribers they have, and everybody can see how many subscribers the YouTuber has and how many views each video gets. Same thing on Instagram. You can see how many followers somebody has. You can see how many likes. On reels and on TikToks, you can see how many views a video gets. Podcasting doesn't have that. You can't see how many emails are on an email list. Which is why people don't talk about having a huge email list as some sexy form of being an online creator. Right? It is being an influencer, being a YouTuber, and literally what makes that so sexy is the public ability for other people to see how successful you are and how much attention you're getting. Podcasting does not have that. So podcast ads are completely private. You can only see your own podcast downloads now because that is the case. And you can't actually see the number of downloads that another podcaster gets. You can't compare yourself to them. But here's the problem. You still do. You see, you think that other podcasts have way more downloads than they actually do, and you think that your show is the only one that only has 50 or 100 or sometimes even a thousand. I had somebody reach out to me and say, my show sucks. I only get a thousand downloads per episode. And I was like, you do not understand that that is an upper echelon of podcasting. If you get more than just a thousand downloads per episode. And some of the other realities that I'm going to walk through here will help explain why that is. But this is the first thing. You can only see how many downloads you get. You can't see how many other downloads the shows that you compare yourself to get. You assume that they have much, much more than they actually do. And so you think that you are doing much worse than you actually are. And this is true even with the big shows. Again, they come to me and they're like, I'm stuck. Here's where I am at. And I'm like, you are doing better than the people that you think are doing better than you are. So that is reality number one. Understand that most podcasts don't get as many downloads as you think. The exception to these are the really, really, really big name shows. The top 0.0001%. Yes. They get several hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions of downloads per episode. That's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking about everybody else. There's one other place where I've seen this manifest, by the way, and that is this. If you have podcast guested on a bunch of shows and you have gotten no results from those podcast guest appearances, it's probably because you guessed it on shows that have no listenership. I was recently chatting with somebody. I was telling her she should do a podcast guesting tour to get the word out about her show. She said, I did that already. I've been on 30 shows in the last year. I fired up Refonic, which is an excellent podcast database that makes a guess on how many downloads per episode podcasts get. It is a guess. However, what I have found is that it is a fairly accurate guess. And so I pulled up all of the shows that this person has guested on, and it was 50 listeners, 20 listeners, 100 listeners, 50 listeners. So we added up all of the shows that this person guested on over the course of a year, 30 shows, and it came to 2,000 listeners. I was like, do you realize that if you spent 30 hours, you could get on a show that has 200,000 listeners, probably literally a hundred X your reach, just by picking the right shows to be on and in less time? Okay, so that's number one, Podcasting is private, which causes huge problems with your psyche. Reality number two is that not only is podcasting private, but podcast audience growth is not cumulative. What do I mean by that? Well, before I mentioned YouTube, I mentioned Instagram, I mentioned all these other platforms. These are all centralized platforms that are owned by one company. And podcasting is not like that. Podcasting is a decentralized platform. People consume on Apple, they consume on Spotify, they consume on a hundred other listening apps. And now some of people are consuming on YouTube. Why does that matter? Well, if you are a YouTuber, as you go, you get this nice, sexy subscribers number on the top of your YouTube channel, and you can see how many people over time have opted into receiving your content as a part of their feed. And that's what a YouTube subscriber is. That's what a TikTok follower is. That's what an Instagram follower is. These are people who have opted in and said, yes, I like this, I want to get more of your content. Same thing with email list, too. Like an email newsletter, someone opts into your email list, they're like, yes, I want to receive this on a regular basis. Now with all of those, the longer you do one thing, the longer you have a newsletter, the longer you have a YouTube channel, the longer you have an Instagram, the bigger your account grows because the more people with time have opted in and subscribed or followed. Podcasting does not have that. My favorite example of this was recently I was doing some competitor research on YouTube and I came across a guy who does similar stuff than I do. He helps business owners with content. And I had never heard of this guy, but he had over a million subscribers on YouTube. I'm like, whoa, this is crazy. But then I looked at his videos, and his videos get like 2,000 views per video. He publishes a video every single week. They get about 2,000 views. Oh, and I looked at his oldest video, and it was 12 years old. So this guy's been making videos for 12 years now. He's got a million subscribers. However, when he publishes a new video, he does not get a million views. He gets 2000 views. 2000 views is 0.2% of his audience. Now, again, when you pull up this YouTube channel, what is the first thing you do? You're like, wow, this guy's got a million subs. That's crazy. What a famous, awesome dude. But if this guy was a podcaster, he would be coming to me and he would say, dude, I've been doing this for 12 years. Why am I stuck at 2000 views per video? It's the same thing when I come across a podcaster who's been podcasting for 15 years, and they're like, why am I still stuck at 2,000 downloads an episode after 15 years? I'm like, your last episode got 2,000 downloads. Yes, but do you realize how many people you have accumulated over the life of this podcast who are fans? They know the show, they know your name. They are a fan. They would say, yes, I am a listener of that podcast. If that podcaster who's been stuck for 15 years had this nice cumulative number that grew with time, of all the people over the time of the content who opted in and said, yes, I like this, they would feel a lot better about themselves and they would care a lot less about how many downloads their last episode got. And that is the fallacy with the metric that is downloads. When you measure your success by downloads, you are measuring success only by how many downloads your last episode got. What was the performance of your most recent episode? It does not take into account all of the work that you have done leading into this episode. Now, I know some people are like, yeah, but I just want my downloads to go up anyway. I don't care. Like, if I was making a podcast for 15 years and I was only getting $2,000 per episode, I wouldn't. But whatever. My point to you is this. We as podcasters do not have that nice subscriber or follower metric that we can measure with time. Like an email newsletter has, like a YouTuber has, like an Instagrammer has. That makes us feel better. We only can see how many downloads our last episode got. And so your total audience is hidden. The amount of people that you have cumulatively reached over the course of your podcast, you cannot see, but they are still there. So this means that there's a lot of people who think that their show is stuck because their show only gets 2,000 downloads per episode, and it has only gotten $2,000 per episode for a whole year. But what they don't see is that it's possible that that show has reached 15,000 people in a year and has grown by 15,000 people in a year. It's just people don't subscribe to a podcast and then immediately listen to every single episode for the rest of time. It doesn't build like that. That's not how it works. And that leads us to the third reality of podcast growth, which is podcast audience behavior is very different than the same humans consuming content on other platforms. Why is that? Well, podcast listenership is an extremely companion medium. It is weirdly specific when people listen to podcasts. And in fact, yesterday I was on a call with somebody who told me that they listen to my podcast while they are swimming. They literally have a waterproof Bluetooth headset that they use to listen to podcasts, and it is the only time that they listen to podcasts. And so if that guy's not swimming, he's not hearing me. This is not true for video content or for text content like email or social media. In fact, what's important to understand is that the supply of attention, what I mean by that is the amount of time that people spend in their week listening to podcasts has not changed, and I call that the supply of attention. You can also call that the demand for audio episodes. Right? The demand for audio content in terms of time has not changed recently, and in fact, it's probably dropped a little bit. That would be my guess. It's probably dropped a little bit since COVID That is a guess. That is a hypothesis. I don't have data to back that up. If anybody has data, send it to me. Let me know. True or false. But I believe that podcast listenership has, if anything, dropped a little bit since COVID because people spend less time in transit now than they did. A lot of people are working from home. I know for me, I used to, before COVID when I was walking around the city of Philadelphia all the time, I listened to probably 8 to 12 hours of podcasts a week. Now I'm back in Philly, and I still don't bop around the city as much as I used to. And I probably listen to maybe three or four episodes of podcasts a week. So the demand for audio content has not changed. If anything, it's gone down a little bit. The supply of audio content has gone up and has gotten more competitive, which are two different things. The supply of audio content hasn't gone up as much as you think it has because most people who have launched podcasts have quit. There are probably about 300 to 400,000 active podcasts right now, and that's based off of a Twitter exchange I had with the founder of Refonic within the last year, who said refonic clocks about 300 to 400,000 active shows that have actually published an episode in the last 60 days. There's about 4 million podcasts available on Apple Podcasts. Almost 4 million of them are not podcasting anymore. So there's actually less competition in terms of the number of shows. But the shows that are out there are better. This is important to understand. Podcasting has evolved. Podcasting has gotten better. There are shows that have unbelievably high budgets that make amazing shows that you are competing with. And so here's the third reality of podcasting Other mediums. Video content, Text content. The demand for that content has gone up. And if you want to see that evident in your life, just look at your screen time and compare it to what your screen time was in 2018. Maybe don't do that. This episode's here to make you happier, so maybe don't look at that. But the reality is watching videos, whether short form, mostly short form or long form, and reading stuff, which is reading tweets, reading articles, reading stuff on your phone. The demand for that content has gone up. We are spending so much time consuming visual content. What hasn't changed as much is how much time people are spending listening because the time that they're doing something else has gone down or stayed the same. Here's why this is important for you. We'll get back to the show in one second, but real quick. I am sharing everything I'm learning about how to use a podcast to grow a business here on the audio feed, and you are more than welcome to continue using this show as a resource in your podcast and business growth journey. But it can be hard to sift through all of these episodes to find that one piece of knowledge you need in order to achieve a breakthrough with your show. If you'd rather have a roadmap, expert guidance, and several tools to help you achieve growth even faster, then I invite you to join us in the Grow the Show Academy. The Academy is my online community where I've gathered all the tools, templates, and training that you need to take your podcast to the next level. You'll gain access to strategies that are working today, along with live coaching from me, a community of podcasters who have joined 40 to grow together. All of my AI chatbots and tools that power the production and promotion of my show, and regular community events like masterclasses and Expert Q&As. So if you're ready to take our relationship to the next level, work with me directly and speed up your podcast's growth and monetization. Join us in the Grow the Show Academy. You can join month to month and cancel anytime. To get more details and hop in, you can go to growtheshowacademy.com or just click the link in the Show Notes. I'll see you on the inside. All right, back to the show. You need to understand how a podcast listener behaves. And the best way to understand that is to think about how you behave as a podcast listener. You have a couple of hours a week that you listen to podcasts. You're doing something else while you're listening to them, and that time doesn't really change. Some weeks you might get so busy and not listen to any podcasts, but there aren't weeks where at least I don't have weeks where I listen to 25 hours of podcasts. Like, you can only listen to so much. You can only walk so far. You can only commute so much, you can only work out so much. So there's only so much shelf space that a listener has for what shows to listen to. Meanwhile, audio podcasts are long. They're the shorter ones are 15 minutes. The longer ones are 2, 3 hours. So if a podcast listener only has on average four to six hours a week to listen to content, and they listen to a certain set of shows that put out hour long episodes, that means that they've only got room, max, for like, maybe five podcasts that they can listen to on a weekly basis. And here's the thing. There's new podcasts that they're discovering all the time. So every single time they discover a new show that they get really into, that means one of the shows that they were listening to every single week falls off the shelf and they stop listening to that show. That show is freaking out as to why their show isn't growing because they lost that listener. That listener still loves that podcast and is gonna come back. I can speak to me like I listen to a show, I'll get really into it and I'll binge the crap out of it. And then, you know, I'll kind of get sick of it. I'll discover a new podc. I listened to that. And then a couple of months later, I'm like, oh, yeah, let me go back to this other show. Oh, look at this stuff. To catch up on. That's how podcast listeners behave. So what does this mean for you as the podcaster? Understand that if you have 2,000 downloads per episode, or a thousand or even 500 or more, it is not the same people every single time. And it's not like Your audience is 2,000 people. It's 2,000 people downloaded that last episode. Probably 80% of your total audience didn't listen to this one. And that's what I always say. I'm like 10 to 20% of your audience is going to tune in on a regular basis. So if you get 2,000 downloads per episode, your audience is probably something like around 20,000 people. But you can't see that. And so you feel like crap because there isn't this place where you can like, hey, everyone, Look, I have 20,000 listeners, right? You're just like, Ugh, I'm stuck at 2,000. So this is a reality. It's a reality to understand and to embrace. Now, what do we do about these realities? The reality that, number one, podcast metrics are private, so you're comparing yourself to other shows that aren't doing as well as you think. Number two, that podcast audience growth is not cumulative, so you can't see how much your audience has grown. You don't know what that number is. You only know how many people downloaded the last episode. And reality number three is that the demand for audio content has not grown like the other stuff, which is what makes it harder to get people to download your stuff on a regular basis. There's far more supply of audio content now that audio content supply is higher quality. It is a harder fight for people's attention than any other platform. And by the way, there are tons of podcasters who were really successful in 2018. It was kind of easy for their show to grow in 2018, 2015. This happens all the time. People reach out to me. They're like, my show was really, really big in, like, 2015, 2018. Since then, it really hasn't grown much. It's smaller than it was. And so, you know, and they're reaching out to get me to help them to regrow their show. What I have discovered is that those folks are in tough shape because they're looking for a strategy that is as easy as it was for them to grow their podcast in 2015 or 2018, and that doesn't exist anymore. It's just not as easy as it used to be. So those people are kind of doomed, because whenever I show them the strategies that actually grow shows now they don't do it because they're like, eh, I don't really know. I think there's probably something else I can do. Because again, they're searching for the old days when it was they just put episodes out. They weren't super specific, it wasn't heavily edited, they didn't have to put a lot of effort in and they got tons and tons of attention. The landscape has changed. That doesn't work anymore. That was 10 years ago. Anyway, the three realities of podcast growth that I want you to keep in mind. Number one, podcast metrics are private. So you are comparing yourself to other podcasters who aren't doing as well as you think they are. So you're doing better compared to them than you think. Number two, podcast audience growth is not cumulative. So you can't see how much your audience has grown. You can only see how many people consumed your last thing and you feel stuck. Which you can't see is that you have collected people along the way. And then reality number three is that the demand for audio content has not changed. The supply has gotten more competitive. So a podcast listener is the most valuable because your podcast listeners connect to you more so than any other platform. And they buy stuff more so than any other platform. But it is the hardest thought. One, it is genuinely harder to get people to tune into a podcast audio podcast than anything else. So what does this all mean? What is the goal and why did I do this? Why did I spend your time sharing these things with you? Well, my goal is to just give you the truth and give you what this actually is like and show you that you have a lot of negative feelings about this because of just how our brains work as humans. Our brains like to see progress. You can't see progress as well. Our brains love to compare ourselves to others. The comparison is false, it is misleading. And our brain searches for things that are easy. And there is not an easy way to grow a podcast audience. Like there are easy ways to grow a YouTube or an Instagram audience or even an email list. It's just not easy. So what can you do? Well, there's one thing that I can recommend that can help address these things, and that is this. Track your total audience size, not your downloads, or I should say in addition to your downloads. So folks that are in the Grow the Show academy or the Grow the Show accelerator, as soon as they join, the first thing I do is I give them a spreadsheet that's called the Total Audience Growth Tracker. And what that does is it gives you a space to put how many podcast downloads you got last month, but also how many Instagram followers you have. YouTube subscribers, email list subscribers, TikTok. Every platform that you're on, you add all of those metrics into one spreadsheet. And then what the spreadsheet does is it calculates your total audience size based on all of your metrics. And what I see happen a lot is that a podcaster's downloads didn't change, but their audience grew, sometimes by 10 or 20%. So it's someone who has still 2,000 downloads per episode, but they can see that their total audience has grown 10 to 20% in one month. A lot of times it can be imperceptible how much your audience actually grew because that audience growth is spread among a bunch of of platforms and you don't really notice it, you don't really feel it, because there wasn't a huge explosion of like a thousand new subscribers on one platform or something like that. So when you add up your total audience growth once a month, just once a month, you will be able to see your audience growth much more clearly for what it actually is. And so if you want to get that spreadsheet, join us in the Grow the Show Academy. It's just 99 bucks a month. There's way more than a spreadsheet. Hop in. Would love to help you grow. In summation, if you are going to be a podcaster, you have to make peace with these three realities that I have outlined. They don't look like they're going to change anytime soon. Maybe they will. Maybe some tech company is going to solve the problem of seeing how many subscribers you actually have. But for now, these are the three realities of what it is like to be a podcaster. It's going to be a lot easier to change your mindset than it will be to change these realities. So just keep that in mind. You're doing better than you think, I promise you. So that's going to do it for this episode. My name is Kevin. I am your podcast growth coach. I hope this was enjoyable for you. I'm going to be doing more audio only episodes like this in the future. And I'm also going to share on this feed what I have learned about the difference between audio content and YouTube content. And while for a while I was all in on just making everything a YouTube video, what I have found is that my best content is this. It's the audio only stuff that is talking to you, sharing what I learned with you. Documenting in real time. So if you like this, let me know. And if you didn't, why are you still here? All right, I'll see you next week. That is going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. Now, I have a quick favor to ask you. If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast and you haven't already, please leave us a five star rating. And if you're feeling generous, a review in the app that you're using. To hear my voice right now, it just takes a couple seconds, but it really goes a long way in helping us to share even more valuable growth and monetization tactics here on the show because it helps us land bigger guests and it helps show the world that what we're doing here is actually valuable. So once again, if you've ever gotten any value from the show and you haven't already, please just take a moment, leave us a five star rating, maybe a brief review on what type of value you've gotten, and I will be eternally grateful. This episode was produced by me with post production by Podcast Boutique. And if you want your show to be post produced with quality, really freaking fast. And if you want to save yourself and your team tons of time working on your podcast, you should chat with Podcast Boutique. Just head to podcastboutique.com or click the link in the show notes and set up time with them. Because I spent no time editing this episode and neither should you. All right, that's going to do it for Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Svidlin. I'll see you next time.