100. Podcasts

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things: Episode 100 - "Podcasts"

Release Date: July 21, 2025
Host: Zachary Crockett
Produced by: Freakonomics Network & Zachary Crockett

---

Introduction: Listener Engagement and Milestone Celebration

In the 100th episode of The Economics of Everyday Things, host Zachary Crockett celebrates the milestone by responding to the most frequent listener request: an episode about podcasts themselves. Listeners from various locations express their enthusiasm for the show, prompting Crockett and his team to provide an insider's look into the podcasting process.

Notable Quote:

"Episode about podcast, podcast, podcast." — Listener Todd, Phillipsburg, New Jersey [00:41]

---

Understanding Podcast Production

Crockett delves into the intricate process of producing a professional podcast, contrasting it with the stereotypical image of two individuals casually recording in a garage. He emphasizes that creating a high-quality, scripted, and edited podcast is a meticulous endeavor requiring coordination and expertise.

Key Points:

• Production Timeline: Each episode takes approximately six weeks to produce, with six episodes concurrently in various stages of development to maintain a weekly release schedule.
• Team Coordination: Crockett collaborates closely with Sarah Lilly, the senior producer, despite being based in different cities (San Francisco and New York).
• Production Stages: The process encompasses researching topics, booking and conducting interviews, scripting, editing, fact-checking, and audio mixing.

Notable Quote:

"We take about six weeks to do it. So in order to put out a new episode every week, we're always working on six episodes at a time." — Sarah Lilly [03:36]

---

Research and Topic Selection

The show thrives on exploring an extensive array of everyday topics, maintaining a repository of over 500 potential subjects. Ideas often originate from listeners, personal curiosities, or the creative insights of the production team.

Key Points:

• Source of Ideas: Listener suggestions, personal interests of the team, and identifying unique angles on commonplace items.
• Selection Criteria: Topics are typically everyday, recognizable, and economically relevant, though occasionally broader subjects are explored.
• Avoiding Redundancy: The team strives to select diverse topics to prevent repetitive storytelling.

Notable Quote:

"Every now and then, we break that rule for something we just can't resist." — Gabe Tartaglia [06:56]

---

Interview Process and Guest Selection

Securing insightful and relevant guests is pivotal. The team prioritizes practitioners—those actively involved in the subject matter—over external experts to provide authentic perspectives.

Key Points:

• Guest Engagement: Often involves extensive communication (up to 15 emails/calls) to secure interviews.
• Interview Logistics: Interviews are typically lengthy (60-90 minutes) but are distilled into concise segments for the episode.
• Technical Setup: Utilizes high-quality audio equipment and remote recording technologies to facilitate interviews across various locations.

Notable Quote:

"We're collecting four hours of guest tape that we're going to boil down into an episode that's roughly 20 minutes." — Sarah Lilly [09:04]

---

Scriptwriting and Editing

Post-interview, Crockett synthesizes research and transcript material into a coherent script, followed by a rigorous editing and fact-checking process to ensure accuracy and clarity.

Key Points:

• Script Development: Takes 4-5 days to organize interview clips and write narration, resulting in a 3500-word script.
• Editing: Gabe Tartaglia refines the script to enhance conversational flow, removing overly formal or written elements.
• Fact-Checking: Daniel Moritz Rabson meticulously verifies all data and claims, often requiring additional research.

Notable Quote:

"Sometimes the transition between those cuts doesn't sound very natural, so we need to smoothen that out." — Jeremy Johnston [13:43]

---

Audio Engineering and Mixing

Quality audio is paramount. The engineering team ensures that recordings are seamless and professionally mixed, incorporating appropriate musical elements to enhance storytelling.

Key Points:

• Recording Infrastructure: Utilizes Pro Tools and relies on a network of over 100 studios worldwide for high-quality audio capture.
• Dynamic Mixing: Selects and integrates music from APM Music to complement the episode's mood and structure.
• Finalization: The mixed episode undergoes final reviews before being scheduled for release.

Notable Quote:

"Maybe we're moving into a new mini chapter of an episode where we're going from meeting some protagonist in our story to talking about the history of a topic." — Sarah Lilly [15:00]

---

Monetization Through Advertising

To sustain the podcast, advertisements play a critical role. The Freakonomics Radio Network collaborates with SiriusXM to manage ad sales, employing strategies to maximize revenue while maintaining listener experience.

Key Points:

• Ad Types: Includes host-read ads, network ads, and dynamically inserted advertisements tailored to individual listeners.
• CPM Model: Advertising costs are based on Cost Per Thousand (CPM), varying between $5 to $100 depending on the ad type and placement.
• Ad Placement: Ads are strategically placed at pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll positions, with pre-roll being 20% cheaper than mid-roll.
• Dynamic Ad Insertion: Allows for personalized ads based on listener demographics, enhancing relevance and effectiveness.
• Revenue Management: SiriusXM manages ad placements and dynamically adjusts revenue based on real-time data.

Notable Quotes:

"CPM stands for cost per thousand and Roman numeral M of thousand." — Gabe Tartaglia [20:04]

"We know by certain identifiers who the device owner is and we'd say, okay, this is Zach's phone or this is Gabe's computer." — Justin Tartaglia [19:35]

---

Ad Impact and Listener Experience

While ads are essential for financial viability, the team is conscious of maintaining a balance to ensure a pleasant listening experience.

Key Points:

• Ad Load Management: Limits the number of ads to prevent listener fatigue, typically featuring six to eight ads per episode.
• Success Metrics: Brands measure ad effectiveness through website traffic, promo codes, and advanced tracking mechanisms like tracking pixels.
• Listener Engagement: Despite the ads, the primary goal remains to engage listeners by making everyday things interesting.

Notable Quote:

"If that conceit gets into your head, then you start being interested in stuff that you might not have noticed before." — Gabe Tartaglia [24:52]

---

Conclusion: Celebrating Success and Future Directions

As the episode concludes, the team reflects on their journey, acknowledging the collaborative efforts that have propelled the podcast to its 100th episode. They express gratitude to listeners and contributors, reinforcing their commitment to uncovering the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Notable Quote:

"Our conceit is that anything you see is interesting." — Gabe Tartaglia [24:52]

---

Acknowledgments

• Production Team: Zachary Crockett, Sarah Lilly, Gabe Tartaglia, Jeremy Johnston, Daniel Moritz Rabson
• Contributors: Morgan Levy, Dalvin Abawadji, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger
• Leadership: Stephen Dubner

For more insights and to explore everyday economics, listeners are encouraged to reach out with topic suggestions at [e-mail].

---

This summary provides a comprehensive overview of Episode 100, capturing the essence of podcast production, monetization strategies, and the collaborative spirit that drives The Economics of Everyday Things. Whether you're a curious listener or an aspiring podcaster, this episode offers valuable insights into the behind-the-scenes workings of a successful podcast.

Transcript

[Zachary Crockett]

At the end of our show, we often ask you, our listeners, to send in topics you'd like to hear about. Every week we get a ton of suggestions in our inbox, ranging from clothes hangers to model airplanes to mechanical bulls at dive bars. But there's one request we get more than any other.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

Hi, this is Greg from Long Grove, Illinois.

[Justin]

Hi, my name is Justin from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

Hello, this is Anne Hodgis calling from Kings, Jamaica.

[Zachary Crockett]

This is James Cage from Duluth, Georgia. My name is Winnie, I live in Dallas, Texas.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

My name is Todd and I am from Phillipsburg, New Jersey. And I would love to hear an.

[Zachary Crockett]

Episode about podcast, podcast, podcast.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

Thanks very much. And I can't believe you're on 100th episode already.

[Zachary Crockett]

This is our 100th episode of the Economics of Everyday Things. And for the occasion, we're going to take the advice of Todd, Winnie, James, Ann, Justin, Greg, and many more of you and turn the mic on ourselves. We'll tell you about what goes into making an episode of this podcast. How we explore ideas, find experts to talk to, check our facts, make the results sound good, and most importantly, how we keep the lights on.

[Justin]

If we had our choice of no ads versus ads, we would take no ads. All of us would. But there is this implicit trade off. Content doesn't just just come to you for free. There's a cost.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, podcasts, particularly the one you're listening to right now, these days it seems like everyone has a podcast. There are more than 6.5 million of them, and they reach nearly 600 million listeners worldwide.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

There's a gajillion podcasts out there, and they're all made slightly differently.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Gabe Roth. He's the executive director at Freakonomics Radio Network and one of his many duties is to serve as the editor of the Economics of Everyday Things.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

There's the stereotypical podcast of like two dudes in their garage recording and then uploading the unedited recording. But professional podcasting is not like that and there are different models for doing it. What we are doing, making a scripted, properly edited, high quality podcast that comes out every week. That is a lot of work.

[Zachary Crockett]

When we debuted this show in 2023, the idea was simple. Everything you encounter in daily life, no matter how small or commonplace, be it a traffic light, a tube of toothpaste, or a hamburger at a fast food restaurant, everything is interesting when you look at it closely. At the start we decided on a few basic guidelines. The episodes would be published weekly and around 20 minutes in length.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

The point of this show is not to be exhaustive. The point of this show is to give people something that fits into smaller increments in their day. This is not a symphony. This is a pop song would be one way of thinking about it.

[Zachary Crockett]

But even orchestrating a pop song is a lot of work.

[Sarah Lilly]

We can't produce an episode of this show in the course of literally one week. We take about six weeks to do it. So in order to put out a new episode every week, we're always working on six episodes at a time, each of them in a different stage of the process.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Sarah Lilly.

[Sarah Lilly]

I am the senior producer of the Economics of Everyday Things.

[Zachary Crockett]

Sarah is my creative partner. We work together on each episode of the Economics of Everyday Things from start to finish. She lives in New York and I live in San Francisco, but we're in constant communication through slack channels, phone calls, and Google Doc comments. Now, six weeks might sound like a lot to produce a single 20 minute podcast episode, but each one has a lot of moving parts.

[Sarah Lilly]

The production stages are essentially one researching ideas and committing to a topic, two, booking guests three, conducting interviews, four, writing the script, which means choosing the right clips from the interviews and writing the narration. Five, editing that script and fact checking, and six, creating the audio mix.

[Zachary Crockett]

Now, remember that we're making six episodes at a time, each one in a different part of this process. Sarah's the person who has to keep track of the whole thing. For that, she created an impressive and formidable spreadsheet we call the Grid. It always stresses me out a little bit to open this document.

[Sarah Lilly]

I don't know. You know, this document gives me. I mean, it really gives me calm. I feel like if I remember nothing, if I woke up tomorrow with amnesia, please don't. No, I'm going to try not to. But I could open this document and know where each episode is on that path to being completed.

[Zachary Crockett]

One great thing about this show is that there is an infinite number of everyday things to explore. I have a list of probably 500 potential topics that caught my eye at some point. On the weekends, I'll spend some time reading about red light cameras, divorce lawyers, or used tires. I set up calls with truck drivers, send Facebook messages to party clowns, and ask utility workers on the street about the cost of stop signs.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

The ideas that are the most exciting for the show are often the ones where you'll pipe up with like, you know, I've been noodling around on this. And it turns out there's a really interesting thing about this or that.

[Zachary Crockett]

But a lot of our episode ideas also come from you, our listeners.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

We get a ton of great emails from people.

[Zachary Crockett]

Yeah, it's like someone will see a cell phone tower on top of their aunt's apartment building in Florida and think to themselves, how does this thing make money?

[Gabe Tartaglia]

Yeah. And then they'll think, I should email Zach Crockett and ask.

[Zachary Crockett]

Every Wednesday afternoon, our team meets to talk over new ideas. There might be about 30 or so each week. And we make decisions pretty quickly.

[Sarah Lilly]

We'll each identify the ideas that intrigue us, and then we hash them out, which means we go down a bunch of rabbit holes, sift through what's in there, argue about it. I mean, there are a lot of topics that start falling into familiar buckets, like, this industry has been completely overhauled by the Internet, or this one by private equity, and we just. We don't want to tell that same story every week.

[Zachary Crockett]

A few things go into making this determination. For starters, it usually has to be something commonplace and recognizable. A cemetery, a houseplant, or junk mail. But every now and then, we break that rule for something we just can't resist.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

People got mad when we did an episode on Stradivarius violins because they were like, this is not an everyday thing. This is a very rarefied, unusual thing. Which, yes, that is true.

[Zachary Crockett]

We also usually veto ideas that are too big for our show or involve more policy than economics. It's hard to do justice to something like rocket launches or birth control in 20 minutes. Every now and then, we do something extra ambitious, like our episode on prison labor. It required flying across the country to a correctional institution, interviewing nearly a dozen people and reading through a bunch of policy briefs. But we can't do that every week.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

There's times when we realize a bit too late that we've bitten off a little more than we expected. And then we have to do some triage. You and me and Sarah will talk through, like, what are the angles that we absolutely need to cover? Who are the people who can cover that for us? What can we do in narration? What can we leave out entirely.

[Zachary Crockett]

When we've settled on a topic? We have to find the right people to interview. We try to focus on practitioners rather than people looking at an industry from the outside.

[Sarah Lilly]

We absolutely want to talk to whoever is actually driving the tow truck or writing the romance novel. It's only afterward that we might interview an expert who has a view on the big picture. But everything hinges on securing that first person, the one who's, you know, elbow deep in it every day.

[Zachary Crockett]

That means a lot of people we interview have never been interviewed before.

[Sarah Lilly]

If you're a pistachio farmer, maybe you're not used to all of a sudden being put in front of a microphone, and it can be intimidating. It's a strange thing to ask normal people to do.

[Zachary Crockett]

Getting people on board can be a long process. In some cases, it's 15 emails and phone calls back and forth before someone agrees to be interviewed. A typical episode includes recorded interviews with two or three different people. And each one of those interviews might be 60 to 90 minutes long.

[Sarah Lilly]

So if you think about it, we're collecting four hours of guest tape that we're going to boil down into an episode that's roughly 20 minutes most of the time.

[Zachary Crockett]

I'm conducting these interviews from my apartment in California. I'm sitting in a tiny closet surrounded by my wife's clothes. I have a Shure SM7B microphone set up on top of a dresser, and I'm talking to someone in, say, Bowling Green, Kentucky. I'm able to do that thanks to our engineering team.

[Jeremy Johnston]

I'm Jeremy Johnston and I'm an audio engineer at the Freakonomics radio network.

[Zachary Crockett]

Jeremy helps us find recording studios for guests wherever they live, and he's able to patch me in remotely using a software program called Riverside. It's like a fancy version of Zoom for high quality audio.

[Jeremy Johnston]

We have a list of our go to studios that we've worked with before, and there's over 100 studios on that list. They're all around the world. The average rate, I would say, is about $150 an hour.

[Zachary Crockett]

If a studio isn't an option, we do what's called a tape sync. That might cost 300 or 400 bucks.

[Jeremy Johnston]

That is an audio engineer that will travel to the guest and they'll bring all the gear needed in order to connect to us for the interview. And there's a whole network of people out there that are focused on doing that.

[Zachary Crockett]

We've had to arrange some pretty complicated interviews. Early on, we did an episode on people who dig up and sell T. Rex fossils.

[Sarah Lilly]

We were talking to swashbucklers out in the hills of Montana who were nowhere near any city. A professional recordist had to drive for like four hours with their equipment to get to the guest.

[Zachary Crockett]

There was also the time we interviewed someone who works with goat herders. For an episode on Kashmir, we booked.

[Sarah Lilly]

People in Mongolia, which is where the best cashmere originates. But it has a 12 hour time difference from New York. Plus we needed interpreters and a local studio in Ulaanbaatar. It was a lot.

[Zachary Crockett]

When the interviews are done and transcribed, I take all of this material along with my research notes and spend around four or five days writing a script. I'm organizing selections of tape from these interviews into a structure that makes sense. And I'm writing chunks of narration between the cracks to help tell the story. A 20 minute episode usually works out to around 3500 words or 10 pages in a Google Doc. Then it goes off to Gabe for an edit.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

A big part of what I'm looking for when I'm doing the edit is, is the narration gonna sound right when you're saying it out loud? Like, you started in this business as a writer, you wrote for the web and for newsletters, and you wrote to be read. And as you know, writing to be spoken out loud is a completely different process. And so some of what I'm doing in that edit stage is taking out some of your writerly touches and trying to make them more conversational and more written for the ear.

[Zachary Crockett]

During this stage, the script also goes to another very scrupulous person, our fact checker, Daniel Moritz Rabson.

[Jeremy Johnston]

His job, at the highest, most basic level, it is to make sure that everything that we put out is correct.

[Zachary Crockett]

Daniel is a trained journalist and he goes through pretty much every script I write with a fine tooth comb. He checks out any claims our sources make and verifies that my citations, facts and figures are accurate. There's often not a definitive source of revenue figures for, say, wine corks, tattoo parlors, or strip clubs. So Daniel has to do some sleuthing.

[Jeremy Johnston]

For any given story, I will reach out to probably a minimum of four think tanks or subject area experts or government agencies. I want to get two people, at minimum, saying, here's what the situation is.

[Zachary Crockett]

It might take Daniel anywhere from three to six hours to fact check a script. Once the script is finalized, I record my narration and Jeremy cuts the tape. That's a term from the days when audio was recorded onto magnetic tape and editors had to cut it with a razor blade. But today it means he's going through big digital files in an audio editing program called Pro Tools, and he's carving them down to just the parts we want.

[Jeremy Johnston]

Sometimes the transition between those cuts doesn't sound very natural, so we need to smoothen that out.

[Zachary Crockett]

Take, for instance, the following clip.

[Jeremy Johnston]

So a lot of the times in an interview, it's really easy to go off on tangents. And, you know, we want to kind of get to the point and cut things down to a concise episode. And it's so funny, I can hear myself doing it right now while I'm talking and I'm imagining all of these cuts that I'm going to have to do on my voice.

[Zachary Crockett]

Jeremy will take that and turn it into something like this in an interview.

[Jeremy Johnston]

It's really easy to go off on tangents. We want to get to the point and cut things down to a concise episode.

[Zachary Crockett]

Another part of the production process is selecting the music that gets interspersed throughout the episode.

[Sarah Lilly]

All of our music, including our theme music, even, is licensed from a massive digital library called APM Music. You can pay per use or get a blanket arrangement if you use a lot. So I dig around their site and collect a whole bunch of music that I think might work for us at some point.

[Zachary Crockett]

A lot of work goes into finding the right spots in the episode for music and making sure that music complements the mood of the content.

[Sarah Lilly]

I read through the script and I'll kind of hear where I think music wants to come in and what it should feel like. Maybe we're moving into a new mini chapter of an episode where we're going from meeting some protagonist in our story to talking about the history of a topic. Or maybe we're tabulating a bunch of costs, and that requires a different type of listening.

[Zachary Crockett]

When all of the ingredients come together, Jeremy sends out a rough mix for us to listen to. We make final edits, and the episode is scheduled to publish across all of the podcast platforms at 8pm Eastern Time on Sunday night. If you consider the cost of studio time, music licenses, and the many hours of labor that go into the creative process, producing an episode of the Economics of Everyday Things can be expensive. In order to make money back and hopefully turn a profit, we run ads like the ones you're about to hear. So how exactly does the ad side of the podcasting business work? That's coming up. Our show is owned and paid for by the Freakonomics Radio Network. We're mostly a bunch of journalists and audio nerds, and when it comes to monetizing the show, we get some help from a much bigger company, SiriusXM. They run hundreds of satellite and online radio stations. They own the streaming music service Pandora, and they make podcasts.

[Justin]

My name is Gabe Tartaglia and I'm the vice president of Podcast and Satellite Monetization, which is a fancy title for ad sales.

[Zachary Crockett]

Tartaglia oversees a team of salespeople who sell ads on around 500 podcasts.

[Justin]

The goal of our sales team is not to pitch and sell everything to every client. We need to understand what their goals are, who their consumer is, and then, most importantly, for both us and for you, the ad that runs on your show works. They get the results that they want and they renew. And they can stay with a given show for years at a time if it's successful.

[Zachary Crockett]

Tartaglia has been in the audio business for more than 30 years. He started in traditional radio and later shifted his focus to podcasts when they first became popular in the early 2000s. In the old days, podcasters taped ads and content together and published them as a single continuous piece of audio. Technology now lets us tape the ads separately and serve different ads to different listeners.

[Justin]

What happened about five years ago was dynamic ad insertion became more prominent, which allows us to be able to insert a specific ad based on the show that an advertiser wants to buy, or even an audience that they want to reach. It allowed for more brand advertisers to come into the space and make it a lot more lucrative for podcasters to bring in more ad dollars.

[Zachary Crockett]

There are a few different types of ads on this show. For starters, there are host red ads. An advertiser contacts Sirius and says, I want to run an ad on the economics of everyday things, and I'd like Zachary Crockett to read it. There are some things I might refuse to do an ad for, like a cryptocurrency scam or something political, but if I approve the request, I get a script of the ad, I record it, and it runs in a designated episode.

[Justin]

Or series of episodes that is extremely valuable to clients. They want the host to be able to speak on behalf of the brand because you've got credibility with your audience and they want to tap into that organically.

[Zachary Crockett]

There are network ads which aren't specifically designed for my show and run across a variety of podcasts.

[Justin]

Network based buying allows for advertisers to buy a certain audience segment across any of the 500 shows in our network. So they might not have bought Economics of Everyday Things specifically, but that ad runs and finds a home there because your audience is the right audience to match that advertiser.

[Zachary Crockett]

Tartaglia's team has data that shows our audience skews a little more male, generally in the 35 to 64 age range and higher than average income for a.

[Justin]

Lot of different brands out there. It becomes a really compelling seller.

[Zachary Crockett]

And these ads can even be served at an individual level. If you and your spouse each download this episode on a different device. You might be served different network ads based on your demographics.

[Justin]

We know by certain identifiers who the device owner is and we'd say, okay, this is Zach's phone or this is Gabe's computer. And we serve ads thinking that that's the person who's actually going to be consuming the podcast. You click download, those ads get prefixed and shipped to you and you never knew that it was dynamically inserted.

[Zachary Crockett]

So how much do advertisers pay for these ads? Well, the industry measures the cost in something called cpm.

[Justin]

CPM stands for cost per thousand and Roman numeral M of thousand. So that's where it came from. And that's been a stalwart in the industry for decades and decades. That's what TV is bought on, digital media is bought on, et cetera.

[Zachary Crockett]

Lets say a podcast episode has 100,000 downloads. If the CPM is $25, the cost to run an ad would be $2,500. Now, if the show has a million downloads per episode, that same ad costs $25,000. Tartaglia says he's seen CPMs from $5 to $100 per 1,000 downloads.

[Justin]

You could have one show that's in a genre that's hard to sell, that has the same size audience as a very well regarded show. That' and you know the ad revenue will be different on the two shows.

[Zachary Crockett]

But even within the same show, the rate varies based on the type of ad.

[Justin]

Typically, network buys, where they don't buy a specific show, Those are lower CPMs. We could run that ad anywhere. So we're just kind of filling the basement, if you will, of our supply.

[Zachary Crockett]

For advertisers. The cost of an ad also depends on where it is in the podcast. You may have noticed that there are three different spots in our podcast where ads run the beginning, middle and end. These slots are called pre roll, mid roll and post roll. And the first two categories are the most desirable and most expensive.

[Justin]

Pre roll is typically about 20% cheaper than mid roll. And then post roll is very nominal because there's no guarantee that someone's going to be listening and staying on at the very end of the podcast.

[Zachary Crockett]

Sirius often sells multiple ads in each of these slots. Let's say a 20 minute show with 100,000 downloads has five 60 second ads, two pre rolls, two mid rolls and a post roll. If you average a $25 CPM across those ads, that's $12,500 in revenue. But because of the last minute nature of how network ads work. It can be hard to reliably predict the income a podcast can generate.

[Justin]

The ads that are running on that show specifically get placed first by the ad server and then anything else. Any open inventory that's left over the second tier of those network ads can run in those open slots. The network delivery happens daily. We can't predict even tomorrow how much network revenue your show will get versus the next show, because it's literally dynamically inserted in real time. So every single day, the system updates to say, okay, this show got, you know, $10,000 worth of network ads ran yesterday and that show had $20,000. And it accrues and actualizes on a daily basis all the way through a quarter or a year.

[Zachary Crockett]

In exchange for facilitating all of these ad deals, Sirius XM gets a cut of the revenue. They have an incentive to sell as many ads as they can on the podcast they work with. But of course, there's a ceiling to how many ads people will listen to.

[Justin]

Typically, you might hear six to eight ads that might take four to six minutes. That's probably getting towards max capacity for what's comfortable in a listening experience.

[Zachary Crockett]

Brands have different ways to measure the success of the podcast ads they run. Some include a website or promo code that listeners can use.

[Justin]

And then in the next several days, you look at, okay, how much traction to that website or visitors did we get? And, okay, the ad either worked or it did not.

[Zachary Crockett]

Podcast ads also often have less visible tracking tools at play.

[Justin]

A lot of digital ads have a tracking pixel running in the background where as long as you accept all cookies and, you know, agree to privacy compliance, that pixel will live behind the ad. You hear that ad for Wendy's, and then your phone shows up in a Wendy's. That content gets credit for helping drive your phone into a Wendy's. So it can get pretty sophisticated and to the point of almost creepy on the back end.

[Zachary Crockett]

These improved tracking capabilities have boosted demand. Podcast ad revenue was up 26% last year, more than three times the growth for the digital audio industry at large. But while Gabe Tartaglia and his team are selling those ads, we're working on telling good stories. Our editor, Gabe Roth, hates it when I end an episode by saying, at the end of the day. So this will probably get edited out. But at the end of the day, we're in the business of helping people appreciate the ordinary things in life. Whether it's a plate of food on an airplane, a stock photo, or a.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

Porta Potty, the conceit of this show is that anything you see is interesting. And if that conceit gets into your head, then you start being interested in stuff that you might not have noticed before. You start paying attention in a different way to the world around you. And if we're doing that, then that feels like a real success.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Economics of Everyday Things I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson. There are other people here at Freakonomics Radio Network who often contribute to this show. Morgan Levy has written and co produced several episodes for us and is in our editorial meetings every week pitching in ideas. Dalvin Abawadji helps us do research and publish all of our transcripts online. Greg Rippon and Jasmine Klinger often sit in on our recording sessions and always make sure my peas don't pop. And of course, Stephen Dubner runs the whole shebang. Without him, this show would not exist. Thanks to everyone who's been listening to the Economics of Everyday Things over our first hundred episodes, and especially the dozens of our listeners who suggested this topic. I'm sorry we can't name you all here, but I hope this answers some of your questions. If you've got an idea of your own, feel free to send us a Note@everyday thingsreakonomics.com we'll catch you next week.

[Gabe Tartaglia]

Let's say we're doing an episode on Weasels. Here's a weasel salesman and he knows all the ins and outs of weasel distribution and weasel promotion and weasel manufacturing and everything there is to know, and he's willing to open up his books and say, here's what I pay per weasel, and here's what I take in per weasel, and here's how much goes to overhead and here's what my profit margins are on every weasel. And if I sell weasels in bulk and it looks like this, are you.

[Zachary Crockett]

Lobbying for a weasel episode here?

[Sarah Lilly]

The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side of Everything Stitcher.