Monetisation secrets: When brands actually want your show

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[00:00:27] That's Sam Sethi, CEO at Truefans, who'll be sharing more words of wisdom in a bit. Hello and welcome to The Podcast Advice Show, your go-to place for the latest tips and takeaways. Whether you're a seasoned pro hitting a plateau or just starting your journey, The Podcast Advice Show talks to industry leaders who've managed to crack the code to podcasting success. Mastering audio quality to growing your audience will uncover techniques that actually work.

[00:00:55] I'm Damien St. John. He is Ant McGinley. Together we'll be sharing battle-tested insight to help power your show up the charts. As always, you can find out more at getpodcastadvice.com. Am I a seasoned pro or an industry expert? If you have to ask. Ha ha ha ha ha. Monetization secrets and brands actually want your show. Do you feel that this is something podcasters are secretly wanting to know the answer to?

[00:01:23] Because they see, you know, maybe top level celebrities doing podcasts and they think, well, how are they making a full-time living out of that? I think for a lot of people, it's a dirty word as well. Like they hear that and they go, oh no. But yeah, I think there is that thing when the podcasters that people know about that your mom and dad and people at work will be able to tell you about, they're all the podcasters that are making lots of money that have got millions of subscribers. And I think the reality for most people is they're not making money.

[00:01:52] They don't have millions of subscribers. And the important thing is, is they don't know how to get there. Well, I mean, that's true. Actually, the podcast monetization landscape is a minefield of misconceptions, broken dreams and untapped potential. While countless creators fantasize about sponsorship deals and passive income, the average podcast, are you ready for this, earns less than £200 a month. I mean, I'm going to stick my neck out there and say for some people that sounds like a lot compared

[00:02:21] to what they are getting. I think a lot of people would be like, if I could make £200 a month from this, I would be really happy. What would the return on investment be in terms of effort? So like that to my view would be that £200 isn't just one episode. If you're an indie podcaster, you probably had to flog your episode to death each week everywhere to hustle quite hard. I think a lot of it comes down to how you're actually making the money,

[00:02:49] because if you're making the money from sort of dynamic ad insertion, that's quite a low return. If you've got a sponsorship, that's different because you're potentially you've negotiated with somebody directly and you've got a better rate for you. Can we get some kind of jargon alarm? Just because I'm aware that some people will be listening to this who are at the very beginning of their podcast journey, that people might not know what a dynamic ad insertion is. Yeah, go on then.

[00:03:16] So a dynamic ad insertion basically means when you upload your episode, you mark, you put little markers in the file when it's uploaded. And that means adverts can be put in that are changed all the time. A bit like when you look on YouTube. So you can watch the same video over a period of time and get different adverts in that. And that's what a dynamic ad insertion is effectively. It just means that even on an old episode, you can get a new advert put in it. The traditional way would be you would

[00:03:43] record everything together. You would have the advert in the MP3 file, and that's often called baked in, hard baked. What's the term? Baked in. Baked in, which means it's much more difficult to add other adverts to it and those kinds of things. So that's what a dynamic ad insertion is. If you think about how radio advertising is, all of that is recall. And I think one of the reasons why podcasting, and if you are listening to this as a podcaster looking to grow your sort of

[00:04:12] advertising opportunities, that call to action from a radio sense is don't forget to pick up a voucher in store or don't forget to visit our website. Actually with your website, your social media, your show description, you can put in a lot of links that people can just click. So it's actually not difficult to put in a CTA or a call to action in your podcast real estate whatsoever.

[00:04:37] Um, successful podcast monetization isn't just about traditional sponsorships. It's about creating a comprehensive revenue ecosystem that leverages your content and audience in multiple strategic ways. I suppose one question I would open up would be how would podcasters go about securing sponsorship if they're not part of a network or they don't have a big podcasting machine behind them? So I would say the first thing is to go to where your audience are. So give me,

[00:05:06] give me a topic for a podcast. Let me just brainstorm this. Uh, oh no, I'll do it. Um, meat. Meat. All right. Okay. So I like to, I, what I like to do is go to different supermarkets every week and review the meat that's available in their stores. Challenging me as a vegan here, like it. So I think that the thing with this is whatever the field is, there is going to be groups of these people working together. So there will be some kind of meat association.

[00:05:33] It was not a phrase I was expecting to hear today or ever. Meat association. Go on. I think I know where you're going with this though. Go on. So there will be a group of different meat businesses that will work together, that will share ideas, that will support each other. The thing I would say is if that's what your podcast is, if that's what you're doing is I would go out and meet these people and go to these events. Literally meet them. Uh, when you're at these events, you are going to meet people that run their own businesses,

[00:06:00] um, that have similar values aligned to what you are doing in your podcast. And you're going to make connections now on a very simple level. Uh, it's going to give you a great resource. One for topics to talk about things that are important things that are happening. Uh, two guests, people that want to come on and talk about it. And three businesses, people that really want to get their message out and understand that you are talking to exactly their type of audience.

[00:06:24] The revenue that you can get from a direct sponsorship like that is 10, maybe 50 times what you would be getting per listen, uh, in terms of the standard, uh, dynamic ad insertion that you'll get on your network. Networking is a good way of doing it. I would also suggest create a one pager or, um, a two pager, if you're feeling brave, which is basically one or a one or two page document in marketing jargon

[00:06:53] that sums up title of your show, what your show is really about, what's the type of topics you cover, what your listening numbers are, uh, go into your analytics and list out maybe where your countries or your main cities are. And actually then if you apply that, uh, sort of, uh, meet association, um, nearby, you can start to actually go, well, it would be this business in this city that would probably be interested. So, and those one pages, by the way, I mean, you've got a lot of AI that will

[00:07:21] help you create these, um, sit down of an evening, put the kettle on, turn the telly off and really focus for an hour and write yourself, you know, a sheet of A4 that explains honestly and openly what your podcast is and why you think your listeners care about it. Don't make it about you as much as why your audience are engaged with it, because that is the crucial piece of information that will translate into return on investment for a sponsor. Yeah. The meat association network,

[00:07:49] man, that's the way forward. I think we need to set it up, um, after, after this, um, affiliate marketing. That's one thing we haven't particularly talked about. Although at the beginning of this podcast, you might've heard a nod for one or two of our affiliates. Um, it helps us make a tiny bit of money. So you may not generate a pound upfront from affiliate marketing, but if you went to, let me, let's, let's stick with the beef thing. If you went to like milk or milk and more like a milk

[00:08:16] subscription dairy service to your house, if they've got an affiliate sign up, get yourself a voucher, you get a voucher or you get discount on your next thing. You can use that too. It doesn't have to necessarily be like hard cash return. Anything that you think is going to help you offset your investment into your own podcast in terms of time and money is fine. You know, and again, you can put that link in your bio. You can read out that code. Um, it's absolutely fine to do affiliate marketing. Your podcast is paying for itself, which is a great first step to get along

[00:08:45] that way when actually it's not costing you money to make it. It's just costing you time. You put it in the notes, you put it in your social media. Don't need to think about it much after that. Before we get to our guest, who is Sam Sethi from True Fans, I want to ask you about monetization through subscription, things like Patreon. Is that the toughest journey for a podcaster? And when maybe should they think that there is the right time to put energy into making

[00:09:15] that work? So it's a very attractive way of raising more money. So the idea is simply is you have a, some, some kind of subscription model where people pay another very basic level is they would pay, say for example, $5 a month and they get a feed of your podcast, which doesn't contain any ads, which for some people is perfect. That's all they want. It's very valuable. Other people just want to get involved because they just want to support you. They just want it. They love what you're doing. They want you to keep on doing what you're doing and making more stuff. So they'll happily do that.

[00:09:44] Early access to episodes. You offer merchandise at a discount. You also offer chance to meet people. Now, the issue that you have with Patreon is it's more hurdles for people to go through. Now, they've been doing it for a long time that they're good at what they do, but you have to jump through certain hoops to get there. It's a really great idea, but it does ask a lot of your listener. Just be aware of that. Not only are you asking for their money, you're asking for them to take

[00:10:10] additional steps, create another account with Patreon, put in the credit card details, put bank details, whatever it is again as well. My advice on how do you know when that's the right time or which levers to pull is, like Anne said, look at where there's any kind of traction or any kind of motion in your data. And if not, just try some stuff. Don't feel like you've got to do a merchandise range and you've got

[00:10:36] to offer multiple tiers of show. You'll see shows that are doing that, but guess what? They learned that that was the right thing to do. They didn't start it and it worked for them. They pulled a few levers. Things worked. Things didn't work. It's time to press play on everybody's favorite, the answering machine. And I'm expecting a couple of replies from Sam Sethi, the CEO at True France. Yeah. That's the podcasting marketplace where listeners discover the podcast they love,

[00:11:05] but only pay the price they want for the value they receive. So really useful guest on a monetization episode of the podcast of Ice Show. But what are the questions? So the first thing I asked him was, are download and streaming numbers the most important thing for potential sponsors or advertisers? So first of all, downloads has been the traditional metric that we've used to measure the value of a

[00:11:29] podcast to sponsors stroke advertisers. That has become less important now because a download doesn't equal a listen. So what we're saying to people now is that you want to have what we call time listened percent completed and potentially in the future value paid. So what's the most important is first party data, which is what Spotify, Apple, True Fans and YouTube and other apps have.

[00:11:58] It's the ability for you to be able to say, yes, this person listened to this podcast and they listened for this long and that's how much they completed. Advertisers want to know that people actually listen to their ads. They don't want to know that somebody just downloaded a podcast and never played it. There's more from Sam Sethi, CEO at True Fans and the podcast advice show after this.

[00:12:32] We're back on the podcast advice show. Guest on the answering machine is Sam Sethi, CEO at True Fans. Question number two. So Sam, as podcasters, we get a lot of raw listener data. Aside from the headline figure of streams, what should we really be paying attention to in those stats? So what should we be looking at? Again, there are three metrics that the whole industry is now

[00:12:57] focused on. Time listened and that's the critical part. So if you've got a 60 minute podcast, how long did that person listen to it? Percent completed. Now, somebody like James Cridland has a three minute podcast. So if all you said was that the person listened to two minutes, it wouldn't sound very much. But if you said that is 80% of the percent completed, then that is the most important element when you combine the two together. The third part of that is going to be value paid.

[00:13:25] When we move into the model where people are starting to tip podcasters with micro payments, then again, it's an indication of value that the listener has given to the podcast creator. I've given you 50p or 50 cents or $1, or I might give you in micropayment sats, it might be a thousand sats. That again, when you add money to the equation is a higher indicator of value.

[00:13:54] Besides just getting sponsors or running ads, what other ways are there now or on the horizon for podcasters to generate an income? Well, sponsors and ads are the normal way of doing it. As you say, I think the way that we are looking at in the podcasting 2.0 community is now for people to have a wallet to put money into that wallet. So they can put dollars, pounds, euros, convert that into

[00:14:20] micropayments if they want. So Bitcoin sats and either pay in the fiat currency or pay in the micropayment currency. Actually being able to pay directly on a peer-to-peer wallet-to-wallet basis is again, something that we're beginning to see adopted. It's slowly happening. You'll see it accelerate, I think, in 2025 as more people become aware of how they can pay the favourite creators with more

[00:14:50] than just simply a thumbs up or a like. They can actually give them real value in terms of payment. The other thing that can happen is it's not just the fan paying the creator, but the creator can actually now pay the fan. So for example, you might have a new podcast with a trailer. You want to get it discovered by a number of people. You can attach a micropayment to that

[00:15:14] podcast trailer. So you might say, I'm willing to pay you 100 sats for a three-minute podcast trailer. If you listen to it, then by giving me your time and attention, I will give you that money as a creator. And that's one way that you can incentivize users to listen to a podcast trailer and they earn some money in their wallet, but they might then use word of mouth to tell their friends,

[00:15:39] or they might become a fan by subscribing to your podcast. So again, the flows of digital money can be both fan to creator or creator to fan. And finally, I asked Sam from True Fans what, in terms of the evolution of podcast monetization, he is looking forward to most. One of the things that I am very wedded to, and it's something that you'll see very much from True

[00:16:04] Fans in the next three, six months, hopefully less, is the ability for advertisers to pay fans to listen to their adverts. Now, why would they do that? One of the things we've learned is that advertisers want to reach the fan, that's the ultimate goal. But what we're finding is that people are skipping across ads because they're not relevant to the listener, or they're not valuing

[00:16:30] the listener's time and attention. So why should I listen to your ad? Yes, the creator of the podcast gets paid by the advertiser, so they're very happy. But there's no metric right now that tells the advertiser that you listen to the ad, or even how long you listen to the ad. So time, listen, percent completed. None of that metric goes back to the advertiser. So True Fans has created

[00:16:56] a model where what happens is when I'm listening to, let's say, your podcast, and there's an advert. Now we can switch the payments from the fan paying the creator to the advertiser paying the fan. And that means that the advertiser then starts to pay me maybe, I don't know, 100 sats per minute for a three minute ad. And I'm earning money while listening to the ad. If I skip forward,

[00:17:22] I stop being paid. But equally, if I listen to the whole ad, then I get the whole amount of money. Now what does this mean? It means one, the creator knows that you did listen to the ad. Two, they know how long you listen to the ad. And three, they stop paying you when you don't listen to the ad. So they have no wasted budget. And this is the way that I see advertisers wanting to be

[00:17:47] able to directly pay the user for listening to their ad. And the relevancy of that ad is then determined by the user by saying, no, this is a mattress ad. I'm not interested. Skip. Or no, this is an ad about some technology that I'm really interested in. And I listen to it. What this means is the advertiser then gets detailed metrics on who listened to their ad, how long they listened, and then they can do a

[00:18:12] follow up. Ant listened to 60% of the ad. Sam listened to 10% of the ad. So I'll send a follow up email to Ant. And that's the way that micro payments really will be used to change the way that advertising is done within the industry. And because you have the ability to split the monies using digital payments, the creator can say, right, I'm going to keep 80% of the value from the advertiser

[00:18:38] for myself because it's my podcast. But 20% of the value can go to the fan who's listening to the ad. And again, that means that the fan feels engaged. They are rewarded for their time and attention. The creator is given money for playing the ad. And the advertiser is happy that their ad was listened to and they know exactly how long it was listened to and by whom. So that's the end goal. So I think

[00:19:03] going back over it, downloads mean nothing really much. It's a nice metric, but it's dated and dead. Streaming is the way forward, but it is linked to listen time and percent completed. And again, having a real listener rather than just a download number is what people want. The raw data is first party data is really what I guess advertisers and creators want. As a creator,

[00:19:29] I want to know how many people listen to my podcast. How long did they listen to it? At which point did they drop off? What was the average time that was listened? Who listened the most? Who listened the least? All of those bits of data are valuable to creators. And then finally, the advertising part, as I said, the advertiser paying the listener and therefore getting first party data as well, which means that they can know when their ad was heard, how long it was heard and by whom.

[00:19:56] Our thanks for the insight, Sam Sethi, CEO at True Fans, the podcasting marketplace, where listeners discover the podcast they love, but only pay the price they want for the value they receive. You should definitely go and check it out. No affiliate link for this one, just goodwill. Go and have a look at truefans.fm. Make sure you get that domain right, truefans.fm. So something we didn't touch on in the first half of the podcast, but I think everyone is familiar

[00:20:21] with terminology. And this might be a deep dive for those that are pretty comfortable producing and managing their podcast as a brand. They've got their feet under the table and they know sort of roughly where they want to go next. Basically, whatever you have to offer the world in terms of professional services, a podcast is also very good. I bumped into a guy in Madrid.

[00:20:46] I was at a conference and he is kind of like, really, he's not Tony Robbins motivational speaker and he's not like a Simon Sinek kind of guy. But he traveled the world for 10 years talking about the things that he knows in business and how to motivate teams and how to work with teams to unlock their growth potential. And I was like, have you thought about a podcast? And he's like, huh? I explained to him, you could just record half an hour of

[00:21:14] knowledgeable stuff and it will work for you in your sleep while you're out there. So actually, if your business model is, I need to be booked to do professional engagements and they need to fly me out all the time. Yes, you're doing a ton of travel, but why not have a podcast that works to aid your discovery? And without necessarily identifying yourself as an influencer, you are seen as somebody who has influences. It's like, oh, you've got a podcast, especially if it's an area where

[00:21:39] there aren't many podcasts in that area already. And you can find yourself actually not generating an income directly through the podcast, but through a secondary stream in terms of because of your profile of the podcast, because of the connections that you made through the podcast, as Damien said, being recruited or being invited to be a speaker or to deliver a workshop.

[00:22:03] Negotiation. So let's say you've got this far and you are, you've got your one pager and you're ready to approach the meat association. I mean, this analogy is adding no credibility to this podcast, but it's the one, it's the one we're going with. You're going to approach the meat association who have never advertised or sponsored anything before. How do you know how to set your numbers? How do you go in with a negotiation strategy? Because you're armed with, aren't we good? And they'll turn around

[00:22:32] and go, how much do you want for it? How do you begin to work out what those numbers should look like without being laughed out of the building or underselling yourself? Go big or go home. Just say, it's a million, no questions. And then just leave a business card, walk out. This show is available for sponsorship at a much more competitive rate. My suggestion in terms of how to pitch that number, right? Might be, this is a bit sneaky. So don't tell anyone that

[00:23:02] you're doing it, but have two or three potential sponsors in mind and then give each one a different number. I mean, why not? So if you said, how much is it to, let's say you've got a podcast and you do an episode every week and you've got 500 to a thousand listeners. Why would you not, you know, pitch one number to one, one number to one and just see which one bites. And then you'll know what your value is in the market. Okay. So, so right now there could be three advertisers listening.

[00:23:30] So if advertisers two and three just stop listening for 30 seconds, what are you pitching to advertiser number one for this show? We're going to do sealed bids. When this show takes off, we will do sealed bids. But I think people are just looking for a bit of certainty. And if we're trying to get grassroots, independent podcasters to make a bit of money, there is an opportunity there to, you know, do a bit of business. I mean, business operates like that. Everyone's negotiation, right? So if you are going to go down the route of getting corporate sponsorship

[00:23:58] and you're approaching from that, one of the things I'm aware of is people will do due diligence at some stage. And so what are you going to do in terms of like, say you've got a different background before, maybe very political, social media, other certain things you need to do to clean that up? Or do you just create a new account and then risk the fact that them looking at you going, well, you've set up this brand, but you only have 15 followers.

[00:24:24] Our thanks to special guests this week, Sam Sethi, CEO of True Fans. I really appreciate your time. I'm Damien St. John. He's Ant McGinley from the podcast advice show. You can check us out anytime for more episodes and you can leave us a voice note as well. I didn't mention this before. If you want to record us a little question to ask us, you can do that. Go to getpodcastadvice.com. It'll take you through to SpeakPipe and you can record us a little message for a future episode. And if you are wondering how much I charge to be in a podcast, as a rule,

[00:24:54] I only charge for charity events. Until next week, get podcasting!

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