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The Big Impression
Goalhanger’s Tony Pastor on building a global podcast brand
00:22:44
Goalhanger's Tony Pastor explores building the U.K.’s leading independent podcast production company which includes shows like The Rest is History, The Rest is Politics and The Rest is Football.
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- [00:01]
A
I'm Damian Fowler and welcome to this edition of the current podcast. This week we sit down with Tony Pastor, the co founder of Goal Hanger, the UK's leading independent podcast production company. After a career as a TV producer, first at the BBC and then at ITV in the sports department, Tony teamed up with Gary Lineker, the former international football star turned broadcaster, to create the company. It launched its podcast hub in 2019 and in just a few years, Goal Hanger has gone from strength to strength with hit podcast shows like the Rest Is Football and the Rest Is History, which apparently clock up 42 million downloads a month and counting. We'll get into the creative process in a minute about what makes these shows so successful, but first I wanted to ask Tony about how Goal Hanger was created.
- [01:04]
B
I set up Goal Hanger with my co host, Gary Lineker, who in the UK is a well known media figure and former footballer. Back in 2014, I'd been a producer at ITV, a big TV company in the UK, and then left to set up my own production company. We concentrated largely on making sports documentaries. And then slowly the business changed and by 2019 we were launching our own podcasts. And in the last couple of years it's become the main part of our business.
- [01:34]
A
You know, the podcast hub was launched, I know, more recently than the actual whole production company and it's now like hosting some of the UK's most popular podcasts. I know that the company's just reported record audience figures for the May July period. This 2024 big hit shows like the Rest Is Football, which is co hosted by Gary Lineker and the Rest Is Politics and several others. You know, I'm kind of curious to how you achieved in a world with let's say tens of thousands of podcasts.
- [02:07]
B
Well, it's a good question. And the big challenge in the world of podcasting is discoverability. It's not easy for audiences, listeners to find new content. There's an awful lot of really good podcasts out there, but unfortunately they're not easy to find. We have had a bit of luck on that front because once you build a successful podcast, you can then tell people about anything new that you do. And there's no doubt that the number one way you can make sure that people know about a new podcast is if they're already listening to a podcast because they're on the right platform, they're enjoying the right form of medium. Once we had the Rest Is History at a super successful level. It made the launch of political shows and our entertainment shows and our sports shows that bit easier.
- [02:53]
A
So the Rest is History was the kind of vehicle, was the kind of prototype, as it were. Is that fair?
- [02:59]
B
Well, actually, we launched a podcast that was a real niche podcast in 2019. It's called we have ways of making you talk. And it's all about the history of the second World War. And I did it really almost as a hobby. It was great fun. I launched it with a great historian called James Holland and a comedian called Al Murray, both of whom are real aficionados of the period. It quite quickly became a bit of a cult. No doubt lockdown during the COVID period helped in a way because it meant people were stuck at home seeking content. Content podcasts are producible remotely. We were able to really up the amount of content we produced. Suddenly it went from being very niche to sudden to having quite a significant audience. And then the next iteration really was to say, we've got a successful podcast that is doing north of a million downloads a month. It's making some money. And what would happen if we did a podcast about more than just six years of history? In fact, let's do the whole of history. And that's how the rest of his history was born. And it broke out, became a super success and it really showed us that the format of intelligent people talking in an entertaining way about something they know a great deal about really could work.
- [04:08]
A
That's pretty ambitious, the idea of doing the whole of history. And I've got to say, I am an avid listener to the Rest is History. Absolutely fantastic show with the two co hosts, Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, who've got this brilliant rapport between them. I wonder if you could sort of, like for people who haven't heard it, just give a kind of distillation of the tone and style of that podcast.
- [04:32]
B
Sure. It's a history podcast. It tells narrative stories, fabulous stories from history, be that the story of Napoleon or the French Revolution or the sinking of the Titanic, the rise of the Nazis. These are all subjects that have been covered extensively in the last 12 months, for example. But what it really does is it's two people who know an awful lot about the subject. New research it really, really, but then have a fairly light conversation in a very entertaining, witty, well informed way. The best way I can describe the tone of voice of the Rest is History is if you could imagine being sat in a bar or a cafe and hearing two people who know each other really well and are good mates chatting about something they're fascinated by in A very entertaining way. That's the Rest is History.
- [05:19]
A
And that formula also carries over into the other podcasts, like, for instance, the Rest is Football. Similarly, it's like three guys having an elevated, smart, funny conversation about what's just happened in the week, the week in, whether it be the Premier League or international football or what have you. Is that fair?
- [05:38]
B
Yes, I think that is fair. I mean, we don't create relationships on air with our podcasters. We basically listen in on relationships that already exist. So Gary Lineker, Micah Richards and Alan Shearer, all great soccer players in their own right, but more important than that, they're mates. And you get a real strong sense of that when you listen to them talking. They love their football, they watch it endlessly. They have a WhatsApp group that, frankly, you could publish and probably get 100,000 subscribers to. It's so entertaining. It's all about what's going on in football constantly. And they basically bring that conversational style, that very matey, friendly, but intelligent and analytical style to their conversations. Three times a week. On a Monday, they look back over the weekend's action. On a Wednesday, they try and answer as many of the audience's questions as they can. And on Friday, Friday, they review the midweek and look forward to the weekend. So it's an ongoing conversation between three guys who, frankly, if we weren't recording it, would be having the same conversations.
- [06:36]
A
Anyway, I love that insight. So I want to shift a little bit to ask you about the business perspective. On what need, as it were, did you tap in the UK market, which obviously has a wide variety and diversity of broadcast options? Because the BBC is there. So how did you. How did you get that market?
- [06:56]
B
Well, I think, first of all, I would say that the BBC does a brilliant, brilliant job. It's a wonderful broadcaster that makes an incredible amount of diverse content, but it has to. It has to serve an awful lot of people, so it can find itself spread a little thin. One of the great attributes of podcasting, as we discovered with our Second World War history pod, is that you can super serve a group of people who want something very specific. So the Second World War pod is listened to by about 80 to 100,000 people, but it's listened to it by them religiously twice a week. And that means we get 1.2 million downloads a month. That audience is not being served anywhere else. So that was our first insight. We then looked at kind of the broader history offering in traditional radio, and it was all slightly stale. It had been the same for A long time. And we wanted to have a slightly fresher, newer, more entertainment focused approach. And I'd like to tell you it was super planned, but in fact it was about getting two great talent to have good conversations and we spent nothing on marketing the entire growth of that podcast. The question I get asked most, which is really insightful in many ways, I think was why wasn't history taught like this at school? If it had been taught like this at school, I would never have dropped it as a subject. I've always loved history, but it was always done in such a dry way. Why couldn't it have been taught in this entertaining fashion at school? I hope that's what we're actually providing for all those millions of people who love their history. We're giving them a new access point to it.
- [08:26]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I just listened to the five part series on Martin Luther and I remember going back to my history A level where hopefully she's not listening, but a pretty dull history teacher. But I learn everything about Martin Luther now all these years later from that podcast. Absolutely brilliant, with all its logical references.
- [08:48]
B
Absolutely. So there's one other thing I'm going to say to you, which is I think the commissioning model is slightly broken. I think the traditional model whereby somebody in their broadcast ivory tower decides whether or not a pitch, a content pitch, will be the right thing for their audience, I think it just doesn't work anymore. We've got to a point now where commissioners are trying to satisfy too many things at once, whereas we can just say, this is what we want to do. We don't need a commissioner, we don't need the finances of a traditional broadcaster. We'll self fund this, we believe in it, we can experiment, we can try stuff. And it's been liberating for us creatively because we can decide we want to do a podcast on Martin Luther, which frankly, nobody would ever commission, and we can do it. And lo and behold, it found a terrific audience. Likewise, we did four parts on the Falklands War, we did an extended season on Custer, we did a long series on the Nazis. Now, the Nazis will always get covered in traditional media, but we were able to do, for example, this year we took the guys to Sarajevo to talk about the start of the First World War and the first shot that was fired, the assassination of Hartschute, Franz Ferdinand. You know, that's the kind of thing I just don't think traditional broadcasters are going to commission. But we're able to do it and find an audience with it.
- [10:11]
A
Yeah, I want to Ask you a little bit about the revenue model from a business perspective. You know, a little bit we keep hearing in the US about the ad opportunity, especially in podcast. I'm curious, from your perspective, what's that opportunity like in the uk?
- [10:28]
B
Well, the ad part of it is challenging. The UK is not a very big market. It is nothing like the US market. For example, the advertising slash sponsorship market in the US around podcasting is something like $4 billion a year. In the UK, it's more like 100 million podcasts dollars a year. It's a pretty small pizza that needs slicing up between all the commercial players in the uk. And frankly, if the BBC enter into this market, as they're threatening to do, it'll be even more challenging for us. We've had to be pretty creative around the commercial side of it. So yes, we're absolutely fishing in the advertising and sponsorship pond. But we're also looking at subscription models. In fact, we've got six very successful subscription clubs for our podcasts. This is where audiences who super fans who really love the pod can get access early, can get it ad free, can get bonus content, can get live show tickets early, etc. And that's proved very successful. We also do live shows and the live shows do very well. The rest is history. Last night we did it live in Cambridge, in the university town of Cambridge, in front of more than a thousand people. The rest is politics is going on a nationwide tour. We're doing seven cities. We've sold 30,000 tickets across that tour. So yes, we've had to be quite smart, frankly, and see disparate potential financial models for our podcast so that they can really function well.
- [11:54]
A
Yeah, makes sense. I know people talk a lot about the kind of the special relationship that podcast hosts have with their audience and sort of ipso facto that kind of translates a little bit into advertising and how advertising works, whether it be host read or whether it comes in thanks to the algorithm. Programmatically. Yeah, that's the word. I'm kind of curious to hear what response you you've had from advertisers in terms of what's your pitch to them.
- [12:22]
B
Yeah, I mean, our pitch to them is relatively straightforward, unlike nearly all other forms of media. Currently we're growing the traditional TV and radio, commercial radio models are shrinking. They're struggling. It's not easy for them. The streamers, Netflix and Apple and all the usual customers are now causing traditional TV to have to be very inventive and work with smaller budgets. We're the opposite. We know the podcast market is growing every year. Our audience is very young, so we skew much younger than all of the other mediums. So 48% of our listeners are under 34. So half of our audience is effectively in their teens, 20s, and early 30s, which is attractive to commercial partners. And we have very, very long listen times. People find the content compelling and engaging. So the rest of history's average listen time is 41 minutes. Now this is great news. I'm always very reassured by this because people have told me for a long time that young audiences want only bite sized content that they can swipe through and everything has to be a minute or less. What we might call the TikTok generation. Well, we're discovering that's not true. People in their 20s and 30s want long form, intelligent, entertaining conversations. They want, they want to hear content that entertains them, that informs them, that educates them. I'm starting to sound positively BBC Reef here. But you know, they basically, yeah, they basically do want long form. People are commuting, they're exercising, they're walking dogs, they're cooking. They want to have something that entertains them that, that informs them. And a lot of people we know listen to our podcast while they're doing something else. So I think the sell to commercial partners really is that our listeners are super engaged, they're young, they're highly educated, and by and large, we've done surveys, by the way, large scale surveys of over 20,000 of our listeners. They earn really good salaries. They're usually executive and managerial levels in their businesses. These are the, the movers and shakers, the people who inform the way that are moving. So they're a really, really interesting and valuable audience.
- [14:29]
A
Yeah, it's such a cliche now to say that young people have no attention. Clearly that's not the case. If you giving.
- [14:35]
B
It's not true.
- [14:37]
A
Yeah, it really is. And it's reassuring to hear that too. You know, in terms of the. You mentioned it's growing. How far can it grow? What's the sort of. When you think about like, I think the statistic I read was that 20% of UK listeners listen to a podcast every week. That's a lot of headroom, right, you've got left.
- [14:56]
B
Oh, it's super exciting on that score. We are definitely nowhere near peak podcasting. I can tell you why. Because Nobody over about 55 is listening to podcasts because they, they didn't do growing up. They, you know, the older generations, the people who were perhaps retired and who would enjoy our podcast most are just not listening that perhaps didn't grow up with the technology. They're not quite as comfortable, you know, opening an app and downloading audio content. I think that as people age with that native ability to use the technology and enj the content, there's a whole generation of people we will add, between say 55 and 80, whatever, who will suddenly become listeners. You know, there's probably 30% upside just when we start being listened to and enjoyed by an older generation, which is not happening at the moment.
- [15:45]
A
That's a great point. Yeah, I think as people, you know, get used to the tech, that's it. And then I don't, who knows what's coming up. You also have talked about pushing podcasts into video as well. I mean, you and I are talking right now on Zoom, but people listening are just listening to this, you know, with their AirPods or what have you. What's the benefit in a way of pushing podcasts onto video? Is it to see those, those hosts sparring with each other? People are curious.
- [16:15]
B
This is the area that intrigues us most about what we do. The, the advent of video really came from the US we started to hear prominent podcasters talk about watching PODC rather than listening to podcasts. And we started to ask ourselves, why are they doing that? What is the gain? Surely it's not just for the programmatic ads on YouTube or Facebook. We were determined to trial it and see what the benefits were by practice, by actually trying it out. And what we discovered was this was an entirely different audience. So for example, during the Euros, As I mentioned, 9.7 million audio downloads and 10 million video downloads, they're not the same people with that. This was entirely additional audience. The other thing about it is, but, well, there's a couple of things. One is that it helps with cross promotion. We can cut this content up, push it out on social, on Insta and Tick tock and Twitter, etc, but also when it comes to having partnerships, you know, with some of the bigger brands, there's that, that hundred million dollar UK podcast market is suddenly much greater. If you're talking to brands about partnerships that include video and social, there's a whole extra set of people you're in conversation with. And so you can effectively turn a podcast back into a show, a 360 show, which frankly we don't mind where people encounter, we don't mind whether you watch, you listen, you see the clips on your social media feeds. As long as you're encountering our content, we're happy. And that's really? Why? We've pushed so heavily into video, so we take the opposite position of the walled garden. We're not a walled garden. We're not going to tell you to come over to our place and enjoy our content. We're going to say, where are you comfortable? Where do you want to be?
- [17:56]
A
Yeah, love that, love that thought. Is podcast growth dependent to a certain extent on those different platforms and platform growth? You know, if people listen through Spotify or Apple, what have you?
- [18:09]
B
Well, I don't know whether it's dependent on that growth. It's an interesting question. What I can say is that we're agnostic, we don't mind where you are. We have a really, really good relationship with Spotify, who are our ad and sponsorship sales partner. But similarly, you know, we have a great relationship with Apple too, who handle a lot of our subscription clubs. And frankly, as I say, you know, if you're there on YouTube or if you're there on Apple or Spotify, that's all fine. Yes, it does require people to be digitally native and comfortable with the digital platforms. But increasingly, as I say, apart from perhaps my father's generation, who I still have to download podcasts, you know, apart from his generation, I think most people now are pretty comfortable with the media.
- [18:53]
A
So one of the great advantages of, of podcast production is that you have a very close relationship with your audience. Could you give me some insight into how that breaks down in terms of subscribers and people who listen for free? What are you seeing?
- [19:07]
B
Sure. What we're seeing is that unlike the traditional media relationship whereby a production company like us, we're at goal hanger, we would go in to see the commissioner at the BBC or Channel 4 or ITV or NBC and we' pitch them our idea and they would either say yes or no, usually no. But if they did commission it, we'd make it for them. We hopefully keep a 10% production fee. They would then put it out, they would sell the ad slots to commercial partners and ultimately the relationship between the production company and the final audience is really remote. So ours is really close. When we put our pods out free to air, the audience listens to them, they contact us, we incorporate their questions. We have a very good relationship, very close relationship, but not nearly as close as we do with our subscribers. We've got about 90,000 subscribers across our various podcasts and what they get is a direct personal relationship with us. There's no advertising, there's no sponsorship, they don't have to wait for a podcast. So, for example, we'll Do a six part series on the sinking of the Titanic. You can listen to that content spread out over three weeks for free with ads Monday, Thursday, Monday, Thursday, Monday, Thursday. Or if you're a subscriber on that first Monday, you can have all six episodes immediately as a box set. That kind of a relationship is, I think, unique to podcasting where you love the content. You decide that for the cost of an oat milk latte, you can basically get all six episodes immediately. And many of our listeners now are just saying, you know what, I want my content clean. I'd like to just come to you direct. I'll have it immediately. By the way, I'd love to get prioritized for the live tickets for the show in New York. I'd like to get them ahead of the rest of the public. And so you develop this fantastic relationship with your listeners and your fans.
- [20:48]
A
There seems to be a kind of recognition that staying authentic is the way to scale. I was reading some comments by Netflix boss Ted Sarandos at the RTS conference, Royal Television Society conference. He was saying one of the big hits this year for them was Baby Reindeer, which is a very UK British sensibility, but yet it's done really well. They didn't pander to a global audience. They kept it authentic. It seems like that is the same formula that's having success for you.
- [21:16]
B
Well, it's really interesting this, isn't it? Because I've got three sons, two teenagers and a 20 year old and they're watching tons of content on Netflix and the variety of the streamers. And they're very happy watching, for example, Korean TV with subtitles. They'll watch dramas from Scandinavia with subtitles. They're very comfortable watching authentic drama and cultural content from other nations. I don't know whether the kind of globalization of content has finally happened. The days when if a movie didn't have an American star could never be watched around the world. I think it's gone. I think people are much more comfortable enjoying content from a variety of nations.
- [21:55]
A
Well, Tony, thank you so much for these insights. Great talking with you.
- [21:59]
B
An absolute pleasure. Thanks very much for having me on.
- [22:07]
A
And that's it for this edition of the Current Podcast. We'll be back next week, so stay tuned. The current podcast theme is by Loving Caliber. The current team includes Cat Vesse and Sydney Kearns.
- [22:18]
B
And remember, we're not a walled garden. We're not going to tell you to come over to our place and enjoy our content. We're going to say, where are you comfortable? Where do you want to be?
- [22:26]
A
I'm Damian, and we'll see you next time. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave us a review. Also, tune into our other podcast, the Current Report.