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This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidlin. I am your podcast growth coach. And today we are going to talk about dynamic ads. So if you have been podcasting for even a little bit of time, you have probably come across the option to add dynamic ads into your podcast. And basically, dynamic ads are. Are when an online platform, like your host platform, or sometimes some other company will say that they will automatically put ads into your podcast. You don't even have to read the ads. They just get automatically injected into your show. And the promise is that you will make money off of these ads and you'll essentially get a small payout from the ads that run on your show without having to do anything at all. The Spotify Ad Network is one of the places that you might have come across this. I think Red Circle offers ads of this type. And I'm pretty sure there's a couple other platforms that do it as well. And in today's episode, I'm going to tell you why I strongly recommend that you don't do this. This quick hit episode is inspired by a conversation that I had last week with a former client of the Grow the Show accelerator. So this is a show that worked with us a couple years ago. Their show grew a lot in the time that they worked with us, and it kept growing after they stopped working with us, which is awesome. All credit to them for keeping it going. But I heard from this podcaster who said that things had not only plateaued, but his show began to shrink. And we're talking multiple thousands of downloads per episode, that the show was just tanking like it was. It was in free fall almost. He shared some details with me. I was able to look at his numbers. And anytime a show is not performing well, I always look at a few things. First, I look at the show's completion rate, I look at the show's titles. So are the titles good? Number one, has anything changed about the show's promo strategy? Because that happens a lot, too. Like a podcaster changes the way that they promote new episode. More accurately, they lower the amount of promo that they do for a new episode and their downloads drop. And they don't immediately make the connection that that was the case. So I dug in, I looked at their promo. It was exactly the same. I looked at their titles. They were the same as they were when the show was doing really well. They hadn't changed at all. Then I said, okay, now let's look at your completion rates. We want to see, 65%, ideally more of completion rates per episode. And this is a show that I remember having really high completion rates. So we loaded up the Apple Podcast Connect dashboard, and sure enough, completion rates had taken a huge nosedive. Now, this is major because this is a business owner who has a podcast, and that podcast was getting tons of reach. And this is important. Like, that podcast was a key part of this person's business. So I dug in and I looked at the episodes and I said, you know, I said, what has changed? Your show started tanking in July. What changed in July? And he kind of paused for a minute and he said, the ads. And I was like, what ads? So this podcaster essentially uses a host platform that says they will add automatically ads to your podcast for you. You don't have to do anything. And he just simply toggled it on. He pressed the on button and gave the host platform permission to inject ads into his podcast. And that is when things started to plummet. Now, this is an extreme scenario. This podcaster not only added these dynamic ads in July, but this person also started adding other ads as well. Tons of host red ads, too. So this podcaster went from almost no ads on their show to five ads per episode very, very quickly. And so basically, once I saw this, I was like, okay, what needs to happen here is we have to dial back the ads. Ideally, if you want to get your show growing again, or at least get it back to baseline, let's put as many things that we changed in July back to the way that they were as possible so that we can try and stabilize and then we can assess from there. He has a few agreements with sponsors that he got on his own, and he's going to fulfill those agreements. But the key, the biggest thing was as soon as you pressed play on his podcast, you heard like, two or three dynamically inserted ads. So that's the second thing that happened that really harmed the show, which was this podcaster added ads right at the very beginning of the episode. My recommendation is, unless your show is massive and you get tons of volume and you're doing tons of promo, you really don't want to put ads as the very, very first thing in your podcast. Because when somebody clicks on a podcast and the first thing that they hear is an advertisement, a lot of times if it's somebody's first time hearing the show, they'll turn it off because they read the title and they're like, oh, that sounds interesting. And they press play, and the first thing that they hear is an advertisement. Now, that's not to say that you can't put ads at the beginning of your show, but they absolutely harm your completion rates. They make people turn it off. So not only was it bad that we had a bunch of ads right at the beginning of the show, but what made it worse was that it was these dynamically inserted ads. And so why are they? Why are they so bad? Why are they so harmful? 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 forces 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. I want you to think back to a time when you were listening to a big, major podcast and suddenly you heard an ad that was not coming from the voice of the show. It was not a host read ad. It was just some radio ad. And it was something completely unrelated to the topic of the podcast. So I remember I actually tried dynamically inserted ads once for my own show for Philly, who way back in the day, because that show was hosted on Megaphone. And Megaphone had this new thing where it said, hey, if you want, we can add ads on your podcast and you'll get paid. And I was like, of, of Course, I'll get paid for doing nothing. I turned it on, and the next day I listened to my most recent episode and I pressed play. And what was the first thing I heard all this week? 50% off Big Macs. It was literally an ad for McDonald's and why the Big Mac is an amazing sandwich, right? So I was like, what is this? An ad for Big Macs on a Philly show? And sure enough, I looked at my completion rates and they had suffered. So what this podcaster was experiencing is this platform was adding these super irrelevant ads onto their show. Completely irrelevant. Not in his voice, not anything related to the topic of his show. And it was really turning people off. And so that is the number one reason I don't recommend using dynamically inserted ads. It's because the ads are almost always really, really not relevant to your topic. They're going to be ads for really big companies, really broad things. So like Coca Cola, Nissan. And what these companies are doing is they're buying ad space on podcasts in massive books. So they'll buy ads from one of these companies who'll say, we'll get you a million impressions. And they get those impressions by injecting those ads into a bunch of smaller podcasts. And so what happens is the experience that the listeners of those smaller podcasts get is really irrelevant. Because here's the thing, this is not a message to say you should not run ads on your podcast. People do love ads when they are relevant. Just think about it. You love finding out about new products and services that are actually super relevant to you, where you're like, oh my God, I'm so glad that I found out about that. Right? We love buying stuff, so we actually love ads. What we hate are ads that are super irrelevant to us. And here's the kicker behind all this. Those dynamically inserted ads don't pay you that much anyway. They're going to pay you maybe a couple bucks per thousand downloads. And sure, if your podcast gets a million downloads per episode, that could be pretty freaking significant. But for most of us where we're hovering in the 100 to maybe max a couple of thousand downloads per episode range, your payout is going to be minuscule, but the impact on your show is going to be massive. So if you are a podcaster who currently has dynamic ads on and it's not making a significant financial difference for you, I would consider not using them. Because like I said, it really creates a jarring experience for your listenership at virtually no benefit to you. If you want to get ads and sponsorships for your podcast. It's going to take a little bit more effort than just clicking a button in your hosting platform. But that effort will be worth it because you'll be able to reach out and connect and collaborate with brands that actually align with the stuff that you're talking about and actually align with the interests of your audience. When you do it that way, that's when you make meaningful connections. You can make meaningful money through the sponsorships, and it actually is a value add to the show. And so I'll close with a quick story from a much, much bigger podcaster that illustrates that ads themselves are not the problem. It's irrelevant ads. So way back in 2020, one of the biggest podcasters around, one of the OGs, quote unquote in the space, Tim Ferriss, ran an experiment. He decided that for the first six months of 2020, he would remove all ads from his podcast and switch to a listener supported model. So he essentially launched a Patreon. It wasn't on Patreon, but it was a listener support model where you could optionally join a support tier, pledge a certain amount monthly, and based on how much you pledged monthly, you would get different perks. You might get to attend events with Tim Ferriss, whatever it might be. And it was a huge success. And in fact, he began making more money off of his podcast than when he sold ads, which is a big deal because that dude makes millions of dollars from his podcast just from the ads. But guess what? He ended the experiment early. He did not go the full six months of the listener supported experience. Why? It was because so many of his listeners reached out to him telling them that they missed the ads. If you don't listen to Tim Ferriss, all you basically need to know is he's a guy that does a lot of optimization stuff. So he originally wrote a book called the four Hour Workweek, which is all about like hacks and tricks and tips to optimize yourself. And so that's what he is. He's the, he, he's the self ordained human guinea pig. And basically he finds a bunch of products and services that help life hackers hack their life. And he's so good at finding and vetting and recommending products that his listeners eventually love that the ads actually became a value ad on the show. His listeners missed it because they missed finding out about amazing, cool products that they could use to hack their life even further. So there you have a case where a podcaster removed the ads from his shows and the listeners were bummed. Compare that to the podcaster I was speaking about earlier in this episode who added a bunch of ads all at once, and because they weren't relevant, it actually harmed the experience of a show and listeners began to leave and his show began to shrink. So, like I said, that's a little bit of an extreme example, I'll tell you that. I know of tons of shows who add dynamic ads into their show and it doesn't hurt their audience. But again, my point is it doesn't really help the podcaster. It really doesn't bring them a lot of money. So my quick piece of advice for you today is to avoid using dynamically inserted ads, and instead, if you're going to monetize your show with sponsorships or affiliates, make sure that you are picking products that a fit the audience that you have built and b are ideally somewhat related to the topic that you cover. The products and services that you recommend in your advertisements should somehow be related to the topic of your show, to the mission of your show. So that'll do it for this quick hit episode. My name is Kevin Schmidlin and I will see you in the next one.