In mid-January, a chart showing an 80% drop in new podcasts was circulating around social media. Podnews has pushed back on those claims and showed the podcast industry is in fact nicely growing if you look at the right data.

In fact, whenever I talk to podcast listeners and podcast creators alike they all seem to believe there are too many podcasts already. Avid podcast listeners see too many choices, creators feel like it is getting much harder to build an audience.

There are many more TikTok or YouTube channels out there, but I don’t hear anyone complaining about that. When I set out to start building a podcast network with my partner Matej Ohrablo, this was something we heard a lot.

Previously, we had helped build the podcast network of Denník SME in Slovakia, which crossed 50 million downloads last year across more than a dozen shows. This time we started without the backing of a large newsroom and its resources, very much from scratch.

Luckily, if you look at the data, podcast listenership is rising across the board (just look at the results in the 2022 Digital News Report). And good podcasts have always found their audience. They might need more push nowadays than they used to, but still.

This is the first instalment in a series I want to document how we are building a podcast network and what strategies are working. In short, my aim is to share the lessons learned.

Step 1: Idea

The idea to start building a podcast network was born more than a year ago, but first put on paper in Perugia, at the Journalism Festival in 2022 during a business lunch. For a while, we have been running a small production agency that has helped with podcasts for various subjects – newsrooms, companies, and nonprofits.

To get to the next level, we knew we had to diversify. We looked at other similar outlets as ours and found they all produce their own podcasts and have a network which brings in ad revenue.

The difference was that their other outlets started as podcast networks first. Well, they usually started as a single podcast and grew, learned how to build audiences, and what they wanted, introduced new podcasts and in turn were able to monetize better.

And after they had a podcast network and know-how in podcasting, they started offering production services, courses and consultations.

We started at the other end. We have both been working for big newsrooms, so we knew a lot of content creators. The disadvantage was they were all tied up in contracts.

Luckily, journalists tend to leave the media space and take up different, better-paid jobs. I will get to that in a minute.

Having podcasts of our own meant adding a new revenue stream. Well, so far it has been an investment into future revenue (we hope). Again, I will get back to this in the last chapter.

Step 2: Strategy

I believe that setting a clear strategy of such a project in the beginning is crucial for its future success. After we agreed on the idea, looked around and found examples of smaller networks run independently (outside a bigger organisation), we had to come up with a strategy.

The Harvard Business School defines strategy as the company’s distinctive approach to competing and the competitive advantages on which it will be based. Adding also that good competitive strategy is one that creates unique value for a particular set of customers.

This requires knowledge of the market, biggest players and also understanding the broader landscape to identify what works elsewhere and is perhaps missing or underrepresented on the market you want to operate on.

For example, in Slovakia, where we wanted to operate, the market is pretty saturated with news, comedy and true crime.

Unfortunately, we don’t have great data for Europe when it comes to podcasting and many podcasters rely on US-based sources like Edison Research which publishes a quarterly ranking of top podcast genres. Top 5 genres: Comedy; News; Society & Culture; True Crime and Sports.

Hosting companies like Buzzsprout can also provide limited views that can help. Top 5 genres: Comedy; News; True Crime; Sports, Health & Fitness.

Education and business or finance are both in the top 10 albeit not the biggest genres out there. Nonetheless, education was the choice for us to be a centrepiece of the strategy.

It might seem a weird choice: why not go for something more popular? Because education sits right in the middle of the main reasons why people choose to listen to podcasts: to learn new things, be entertained and to keep up to date.

Also, it does not strictly have to be education per se, but can mean explainer type of podcasts in different areas, even news or true crime down the line. It also meant we could narrow down the pool of creators we were looking for.

And another benefit – it would allow us to create a nice back catalogue of longtail content that can live much longer than news or sports content. Plus, the market is not overstuffed with this type of shows.

Step 3: Creators

As I mentioned above, we are lucky in a way because we have been working in an industry full of creators – journalists. Still, it took several months from the idea to its real world manifestation.

We were thinking of different colleagues and friends from the industry that left the media for other jobs and would probably agree to start a side hustle. Some months earlier I had mentioned the idea to start doing podcasts of our own to an ex-colleague from the newsroom who became an analyst and started a YouTube channel that grew fairly popular.

Meanwhile we started working on branding, commissioned podcast logo visuals and ordered equipment (we knew our podcast hosts would probably not have their own setup as they were used to using the one in the newsrooms given by their employer).

At this point we had three ideas for podcasts with one connected to a YouTube channel and two others that needed hosts.

I really wanted to launch with at least three podcasts, but very soon found out – and had to be pushed to rethink (thanks Matej) – that maybe doing it step by step and starting with one was a better approach. Otherwise all would still be in a preparation phase. To put it bluntly, something is better than nothing and the sooner we start with at least one, the sooner we can work with real numbers and test out assumptions.

The first podcast – Ekonómia ľudskou rečou (Economics, explained) launched in the beginning of October.

We convinced an ex-host of a business podcast who left her newsroom to pair up with the YouTube guy to create a podcast of the same name as the channel. A simple talk show which would alternate between them talking about a topic from the YouTube video and with outside guests.

The other one launched a month later, and we ended up creating a feed with audio articles from the website on podcasting that we run. The audio articles are being read by a neural voice, which does a good enough job so someone who is not listening super carefully won’t even notice.

The third podcast has yet to be brought to life and again will be an audio version of a newsletter that already has an audience and, again, we want to use the same neural voice to read it out loud.

After that one I plan to write another dispatch to confirm whether we were wrong to do that or whether the content in an audio form was valuable enough for it to gain a significant audience.

Next steps in getting more podcasts on board are reaching out to existing smaller podcasters to join the network and looking for other YouTubers without a podcast that would sign with us.

For existing podcasts, the selling point, I believe, should be that getting ads for a network is easier and makes more sense for advertisers than for a single small show.

Step 4: Audience

Unsurprisingly, the two biggest drivers of listeners were YouTube and social media, especially Instagram. Early on I created unique smart links using Spotify’s Chartable for each person involved in the podcast creation and promotion. Everyone got several links to also distinguish between channels.

60% of the first listeners came via YouTube, the biggest channel being the link in the description of the video of the YouTuber, one of the hosts of the podcast (side note: it’s good to start building with someone who already has an audience). Shorts also performed very well; also, you can link in the comments, and community posts had also high click-through rate.

Interesting observation: when the podcast was mentioned in the YouTube video only by showing off its logo and the host not saying the promotional part out loud, the conversion was much smaller than at times the host said “I have a podcast, go listen to it” out loud.

Instagram proved to be the second strongest channel with linking the podcast in stories and using images and audiograms.

For now, we have been using the very basic audiograms with a static image in the background, dynamic captions and audiowave. At the moment we are testing slightly higher production short videos and experimenting also with publishing them on TikTok. Will write more about it once I have more results.

The overall audience feedback so far has been positive. Of course, a good part of the audience at the moment is friends and family. You might sigh over this, but some of the biggest newsletters and podcasts in the world have started this way and I would recommend it to everyone. Also, no one will be as sincere in their criticism as your family and friends.

Step 5: Monetisation

As I mentioned above, the whole project is in the investment phase. We hope to end this stage soon and get advertisers on board.

So yes, ads we think are going to be the biggest part of the revenue of the network. We also have already prepared a subscription strategy that will rely on ad-free content, early access and exclusives.

At the moment, everything is hosted on Anchor, Spotify-owned free hosting service (I would recommend starting on any free platform). The reason is that we didn’t necessarily want to pay for a better service with advanced monetisation features until the network grew to a certain point. Nowadays it is very easy to change podcast hosting without your listeners noticing it.

There are two options we have in front of us – sell ads directly and use a programmatic ad network. The first one means going from door to door and looking for a sponsor, which we started doing. The second is more tricky, in part of our location. If we were in the US, we could jump on a Spotify-owned platform and use their Audience Network. But we are not. We are based in Eastern Europe.

Last year, Google finally launched their audio ads out of beta. Now, as this is new and using YouTube ads to fill the ad slots, it is still fairly uncertain, and I’m still waiting on confirmation on fill rates.

Acast is also offering a similar service, but I suspect they too don’t specialise in Eastern Europe. I want to dive deep into this in one of my future pieces more.

We are also in the process of building our own podcast studio in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, as we see growing demand. The network would have its home and also serve as a promotion for the studio.

One last monetisable feature of the whole project is know-how we can give future clients. We have had a lot of ideas for testing when it comes to podcast growth, and your own content is always the best testing field, especially when you are not very sure of the results.

First results

After the first three months we got 30,000 plays/downloads on the economics podcast, averaging 2,000 per episode on podcast platforms and another 15,000 on YouTube where we post each episode as an audiogram with transcribed subtitles. Adding that would mean on average 3,000 plays/downloads per episode.

In 2019, Libsyn mentioned that only 7% of podcasts hosted on their service get 5,000 downloads per episode. That stat has been used ever since and I would like to see a more recent number. I suspect that because there are more podcasts and more podcast listeners, that percentage decreased.

Reaching 2,000 on average was one of your goals for 2022, we reached that in January 2023. Almost on schedule.

On YouTube, an interesting thing happened. One of the episodes went viral and is responsible for 10,000 plays. It made us realise the power of its algorithm also in regard to podcasts and using just simple audiograms. A well timed topic with the right keywords can bring your show to large audiences.

Next steps are reaching out to advertisers, putting together a nice pitch deck and getting the third show off the ground. Oh yeah, almost forgot – there is still a chance this will not work out, so stay tuned to find out.

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