Terms

Before founding Big IP, a content studio which manages podcasts as well as YouTube channels including The John Campea Show, Pop Apologists and Kempire, Scott Porch was an attorney as well as a journalist. "The most important thing I covered during my time as a full-time reporter was TV and film. I was a writer for the New York Times and Fast Company as well as Wired and Decider and some other publications," he starts.

One of the topics he explored was how podcast and YouTube is transforming the culture in relation to television and film. He wrote a piece about Game of Thrones recappers for the New York Times and spent more and more time around the subject and meeting with professionals in the field, before deciding to produce programs with Starburns Audio in 2019. "I went out on my own and have grown from a handful of YouTube channels and podcasts to 14 or 15," He adds.

Scott believes there are two factors that make a podcast successful in terms of creativity and audience reach. "There's a relationship between those two elements," he says. "It's hard to expand a podcast that's not very good, but it's also difficult to get a good excellent podcast and maintain it for a long period of time."

He believes that you need to have both elements in place. "You have to make an idea that people would like to hear, and then you need to be able to go out and locate that group of people to encourage them to be interested in it at all." According to what Scott discussed the topic with Brian Morrissey when he made an appearance for The Rebooting podcast sometimes the podcast is part of the business, while other times it's the marketing of the business.

Milestones

The success of a podcast also comes down to the scale of the host - this has become more important in launches. The most popular podcasts like The Movie Podcast and How Did This Get Made have been around long enough that the hosts are well-known because of their podcasts, however this is an extremely crowded market. "It's becoming difficult to cut through all the noise. Much depends on who it is," says Scott. "If Taylor Swift started a podcast on the horizon, she may make money from it the first day. If I launched an audio show tomorrow, it would have a completely different tone."

Monetizing depends on different thresholds of listenership. "At 50k downloads per episode, you'll have a more extensive range of host-read advertisers that are likely to want to make an initial commitment to the program where they'll achieve a certain amount of money. But even for shows with more than 10,000 or 5,000 downloads per episode, you can start earning money through the programmatic and membership revenue" he explains.

Pop Apologists One of the series Scott is a part of, has more than 2,000 paid subscribers between Patreon as well as Apple Podcast subscriptions. They've managed to expand this membership through having it on for a long time, and they've been consistent in releasing one episode per week for members and one episode per week exclusively for subscribers. Scott explains that, importantly the episodes have the same qualities. "If you like one episode and you like it, then you'll love the next one."

Getting started with membership

In terms of membership specifically, how do you begin? "A lot of shows on YouTube are familiar with YouTube's members program - there's a general awareness out there however in most cases, they haven't done this due to it being a task on their list they didn't get to yet, or they're not aware of the best way to go about the task," Scott says.

Maybe the creator is making so much content that they're not sure if have the time and resources to create more episodes for a premium platform and or if they'll be able bring in enough money and if the premium platform is going to cannibalize the public platform.

"A large portion of that can be a source of confusion or in a state that they aren't yet at and need guidance," Scott says. "They need someone to say, 'There's money there should you decide to take it and explore that'. If you're in the business of creating a company, you're wearing many hats and have lots to accomplish. There will be people and or, at the very least, tools and services to help you build your business," he continues.

If so what are you going to do when choosing which tools and services will help you run your company, especially to join? "A couple of things seem to have been fairly consistent across the market over the last few years," starts Scott. "Number one: those who consume podcasts or view YouTube videos, have an emotional connection with the creators. They are willing to pay creators with recurring revenues such as $4 per monthly, $6,000 a month, perhaps $10 or so a month. This isn't only because they're looking for an extra benefit from the creator, but because they want to support the creator in the course of their career, not just as side hustle."

Another trend Scott has noticed is that the consumers have a preference for a particular platform. "When Pop Apologists started discussing Apple Podcasts subscriptions the company was already performing very good on Patreon. One of the concerns they had about Apple Podcasts is the possibility of it consuming Patreon"We may have to pull the plug in the event of a huge increase in the amount of money flowing of Patreon to Apple however that's not exactly what transpired. What actually happened was that Patreon continued to grow and Apple Podcasts has grown every month since we launched."

Scott is familiar with this issue on various other shows and learned about this issue from others. "If consumers are on Apple Podcasts, they might be listening to 4 or 6 or 10 podcasts. But this is the only place they'll go to listen to them. They're not going to Patreon or YouTube. If you place it in front of people via Apple then they'll be able to subscribe to it."

Direct connection with your viewers

Scott believes it's essential that creators have the ability to communicate directly with their customers with a podcast, and has cited a startup named Luminary to provide a cautionary story. "It was an approach similar to Netflix in which they licensed different creators to do programs. The user would sign up to the platform and pay."

Scott recalls that Luminary didn't succeed because people don't want an intermediary. "Consumers need to be aware that they're directly donating to the show and that the $7 they pay per month, or the $50 they pay annually is going to that individual creator and not to Luminary or Netflix or someone else. The direct connection is crucial to creators, too. It made good consumer as well as financial sense to create Pop Apologists podcasts on the Apple platform to go after that audience However, Scott and his team don't know who those people are. "We don't have their email addresses. There's no way to have an online forum on Zoom each month, with those people. We aren't able to let them know that we'll be in another podcast, or when we're going to perform a live event. We have no information about those people," he explains.

Scott thinks that if you would like to earn money from your business, choose the platform that allows you to be in direct contact with. "If your business is growing slowly, you might want to introduce iTunes Podcasts subscriptions, or Spotify subscriptions. However, I would much rather have that person's direct information rather than having them just sort of 'out there'," Scott says.

Focus on the near future

For budding podcasters, Scott offers advice about how to prepare for the future: "Don't get insular with your viewers. Create your podcast for the next 1,000 subscribers, not the first 1,000. Every day someone new listens to your podcast, but doesn't yet know about what format your show follows."

Scott says to focus on the initial 30 seconds of your program. Scott asks: "Are you introducing yourself to someone who's not a regular listener? Do you say 'This is the popular table and you're not a fan of our humor; you may prefer to listen to something else as the group is already in place'.

He recognizes that it's possible to make a mistake because of the aforementioned directly-to-consumer relationship "You definitely want it to be a club. You just don't want it to become a club that has no doors. The number of people you have is all you're ever gonna be able to have," he explains. "You've got to find that equilibrium between offering your viewers the content they want, yet not being too exclusive that a new person listens to it and says, 'They've already done their thing. I'm not interested in being engaged.' If every single episode isn't as good in the same way as the very first one, then you're telling that prospective listener that the show is not appropriate for them."

Scott gets podcast suggestions every day and is able to discern the recommendations within 10 seconds. "Give me ten seconds the person you're talking to and what this podcast is about as well as what it will be talking about today. If I don't, I'll think that 'I'm not in this group. I've been missing it for a while and there's too much history and 'in' vocabulary. This can be fatal podcasts."

The same applies to pre-roll ads. "Some shows I work with feature pre-roll advertisements and we make money from that," says Scott. "If they did not do that and did not, they'd make less income. Who wants to be the first thing listeners to the first time they tune in to your show to be an advertisement for Volkswagen? I would like the first thing viewers hear be the voice of the host."

To conclude, Scott offers a tip to help new podcasters stay resilient. "You'll find many creators create five or more episodes. They're not seeing the growth which is why they quit. If you really want to use this for business development purposes or just as a way of expressing your creative side it's going to be necessary take longer than you imagine before it feels like it's working.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing: "You're gonna get a greater proficiency during those first 25, 35 episodes. You're going to get feedback. It's important to take the time since you love it and know it's going to be an incremental success. There are many shows that expand from 300th-400th episode. Are you truly committed? It's unlikely that you'll get the 25,000 downloads you want right out the beginning unless you're famous.

Which show would listen to? What episode do you see more lengthy playthroughs of? If it's something you really would like to pursue, then you'll have to be patient to figure it out creatively."