The Hidden Value Of A Small Podcast

Small podcasts are often treated like smaller versions of big podcasts, but a niche audience is not just a tiny audience. It can be a more focused, more trusting, and more valuable audience.

Inspired by an article in Podnews, we talk about why download numbers do not tell the full story of a podcast’s value. 

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The Hidden Value of a Small Podcast

Jordan 0:00

All right. So I want to talk about an article, well, more of like a concept from an article that I really enjoyed. So this was a guest post from Losh Moodaley. I hope I'm saying that correctly. And this is in Pod news. And she really leans into the fact that small niche podcasts are actually much more valuable than larger scale podcasts. And a lot of times in the industry, they're not really given that respect or given that weight of value. She says smaller shows are undervalued. 50,000 downloads are assumed to carry more value than 5,000. But that assumption distorts podcast economics. It treats all attention as equal when the value of that attention is fundamentally different. A listener who is actively trying to solve a problem is not the same as a listener passively filling time. So one is in a state of attent, the other is not. And yet, in most media plans, they're priced exactly the same. And I really love this because, you know, we put a lot of weight in the industry on like listener demographics, like, you know, age and gender and like how many downloads you're getting. But really, what's the most valuable is why these listeners are tuning into your podcast in the first place. And that's something that you need to pay attention to.

Alban 1:15

Yeah. And this is pretty obvious when you think about it in the type of advertising you see in lots of different areas. So I mean, think of shoes. If you see a Nike commercial just randomly on TV, you have a slight positive association with Nike. You kind of think I am the kind of person who would wear those shoes, but you didn't make a purchase. And they may know you're about in the age demographics that you'd be interested in buying these shoes, and we think you're male. And so we think we probably it makes sense. That's different from advertising on a podcast that teaches you how to run marathons. Then they're talking about the benefits of these specific shoes and why you should be wearing them and how they help you with injury prevention. That's much more targeted. Even more targeted than that is when somebody types into Google how to buy marathon shoes or best Nike marathon shoes and they serve up an ad, then you're you know this person's like got a credit card out, they're ready to swipe, and you're hitting them at the exact right time. All three of those are maybe targeting the same person, and the same person may have the same problem, but they're very different mindsets. One is I'm just watching TV and I don't really have an interest in making a purchase. One's I'm learning, and the other is all the way at the bottom of the funnel. I'm ready to buy right now. Somebody show me the very best shoes. And the argument from this article that you sent us is yeah, you have podcasts at all different levels of the funnel, and niche podcasts are more often lower, and they're so thus their stronger intent. And we should be targeting those shows because the audiences are much more likely to make specific types of purchases.

Kevin 2:55

All sorts of things are valued at different uh levels to all sorts of different people, and this is no different. I didn't read the article. You guys probably knew that going into this conversation.

Speaker 3 3:06

Shocking.

Kevin 3:08

But it's it feels like something that's targeted, like maybe one media buyer or somebody in the industry trying to talk to other like-minded people in the industry.

Jordan 3:16

And and yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, okay.

Kevin 3:19

There's a million analogies, and I won't bore you with my my take on this. But simply said, everything has a different value depending on the audience in which you're serving it to. So there are baseball card collectors that will look at a specific card and say, I will give you $10,000 for that baseball card. And yet you take that same card and show it to my wife, and she would be like, I wouldn't like you couldn't pay me. She's like, I threw that card away already. And so this to me sort of falls in that category. And I I understand why you want to talk about it, Jordan, because podcasters see stuff like this and like they're trying to figure out like which bucket to put it in. And I don't think you should put it in any bucket. I think as an independent podcaster, you should just ignore stuff like this and you should just figure out where does my podcast like what's the value that my podcast is serving? What's the problem that I'm solving? Who am I talking to? And then if I want to try to monetize or sell ads around that, how do I talk to people who want to talk to the people that I'm connecting to that I'm providing value to and you overlap with? And then I should market my show in that direction. The the challenge, of course, with niche podcasts and extracting the most value from them is that that doesn't scale well to media buyers who are trying to buy at scale hundreds of thousands of downloads across what would most likely be if they're targeting niche podcasts, would be thousands and thousands of shows. It's very hard for them to do. And the the whole programmatic side of the podcasting industry hasn't really solved that well yet at scale for lots of media buyers. There are some solutions. They're just they're hard to audit and all this other kind of stuff and all this mess that goes along with it. And so what happens is that you you end up in a situation where you have to go find your own sponsors and sell your own ads yourself, or you end up opting into programmatic where you're, you know, running ads for Rocket Mortgage and Casper Mattresses. And people don't love that either. They're like, my podcast is more valuable than that.

Jordan 5:03

Yeah. I think you're bringing up a really good point. And I agree with you. It feels very clearly written for the podcasting industry and for the people like buying these ads and trying trying to change their minds about like niche shows. But I also want to flip this a little bit for our indie podcasters on the side of like, yeah, I think this is geared towards like ad buys and sponsorships and stuff like that. And sure, this does provide a really good insight for how to explain the value of your niche podcast to a potential sponsor if you're pitching to them. But this also carries into promoting your podcast to certain groups and kind of taking a step back and like really assessing what is it that my podcast is filling? Like what kind of need is my podcast providing to these listeners? Why are they returning to me every single week? And I think that that can inform a lot of decisions around your podcast monetization, whether that be, you know, what kind of like affiliate marketing you do or sponsorships or what kind of like subscription model you provide to them. And even, I mean, this ties into our last episode about repurposing content and like figuring out what kind of extra content or extra value you can provide to them.

Alban 6:16

Yeah, the the main takeaway I got was a niche podcast is not just a small version of a big podcast. The idea is not this podcast is just the same as big podcasts, but it's 5% of the size. It wants it 20x's, then it's more valuable. They're fundamentally different things. And the value is not in those numbers. And yes, there's an article written by somebody who's doing media buys to other people who are writing and doing media buys saying, hey, maybe you shouldn't just look around and say, oh, I'm looking for 50,000 ad impressions. Oh, here's a podcast that does 50,000 downloads per episode. Perfect. That's what I wanted. Instead, you should try to find shows that even if they're smaller and they're, you know, when they think smaller, it may be still outside of you know the range of our show or a lot of our audience's shows, but the smaller shows are going to have much more of intent behind them. I was thinking about us. You know, if we do one to two thousand downloads in an episode, that may not be a very big audience, but the audience are almost all people who use Buzzsprout. They're almost all indie podcasters. They're mostly people who trust us to answer questions about the podcasting industry. It's helpful to us because we get to shape our messaging and we get to think more about what we want to build for Buzzsprout and how we answer questions and how we position ourselves in the market. And so we're getting a ton of value from our audience, even though it's quote unquote, you know, a small podcast, one to two thousand downloads an episode.

Speaker 3 7:51

Yeah.

Alban 7:51

So I I wouldn't think randomly going out to the world and sponsoring a show that did one to two thousand downloads would do a whole lot of good if I wrote even a great ad about why you should sign up for Buzz Browl. But it does me, it does Kevin, it does Jordan a ton of value to get on behind the mic every single week and do this show because there's so much intent in our audience.

Jordan 8:14

Yeah. I love that. Yeah, it it provides more motivation for us to keep podcasting ultimately when we keep that in mind that we are providing something to our listeners. I love that.

Alban 8:28

So I think we're this is I actually wrote this. Uh Jordan pitched this to us, and then I my response was okay, this is relevant. It's also like something that we're kind of have talked about 30 other times. So we need to be intentional about how to talk about it differently.

Speaker 3 8:47

Yeah.

Alban 8:47

We all know, and you, our audience, know that indie podcasts are different than big podcasts. But then I started kind of sketching it out, and I was like, it's nice one for somebody who's working in media saying, hey, this actually is a problem we should try to solve it. I don't know much about their business or how they're gonna try to do this. But I I started sketching out some applications for how can buzzcast listeners start pitching their show in a way that will be a bit more effective.

Jordan 9:19

What are they?

Kevin 9:22

Don't make us beg for it, Alban.

Alban 9:25

You have to leave a little bit of a pause there to get everybody excited. Oh, what are they?

Jordan 9:30

Anticipation.

Alban 9:34

All right. So the first is ask yourself, what problems does my audience trust me to solve? So if you're listening to Buzzcast, you probably trust our opinion on podcasting. You don't trust our opinion on shoes. So I'm not gonna go work go to a shoe. I was gonna say, actually, let's go really good, but you might have found a sock segment at some point interesting, but you're probably not going like, oh, we got to make big purchasing decisions based on sock reviews from the Buzzcast team.

Jordan 10:03

That's true.

Alban 10:04

But what do you trust us for? It's probably stuff around podcasting and especially for an indie audience. So we could be thinking, okay, so what's what products, what services, what people, what companies do we trust? Those are the ones that we want to partner with. Our audience trusts us to answer these questions and what solutions do we think are really good. So our next episode, we all talked about uh we want to do how to get booked on podcasts. And that's gonna be our next big one. If I wanted to sell a sponsorship for that podcast, I would go to the person who we are actually already invited for free onto this podcast, Alex San filippo, and I'd say, Alex, we are doing an episode about how to get booked on podcasts. Our audience listens to us because they want to know about how to get really good guests or how to get themselves on podcasts. They are all indie podcasters, they all are probably doing this mostly as a hobby. About half of them are doing interview shows and they're trying to learn more about how to get booked on podcasts. And when I talked to Kevin, when I talked to Jordan, we all said Podmatch is the best solution here. We really like it. Jordan used it for a long time. So I want to bring you onto the podcast, and I want you to sponsor it to the tune of $1,000. Come on the show, and we will incorporate your segment into the entire episode.

Jordan 11:31

Yeah.

Alban 11:32

Now, nobody in their right mind is gonna give us a $500 CPM because we get $2,000 downloads and $1,000.

Jordan 11:38

I was gonna say, let's be clear that he's not actually doing this, right?

Alban 11:41

He's not. Yeah, this is we're not actually selling it. But like that's not unreasonable.

Jordan 11:46

No, yeah.

Alban 11:47

If we were to go to Alex and say, we're doing this episode, we've never done this episode before. We think you're a great solution. Here's the price. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody in his position goes, yeah, that actually sounds like a pretty sweet deal for me because I'm reaching the exact right audience at the exact right time. And the people vouching for me, they're in a position to trust to answer this question.

Kevin 12:09

Yeah, I mean, there are other opportunities in the same space. Like uh, I don't know, we all use roadcasters. We like, um, we got friends at Podpage that build podcast websites. Like any of them would probably be happy to sponsor any episode that we do at any given time, regardless of the topic, because our audience is the same. We're just talking about different aspects of podcasting. Yeah. So looking for the same type of people, people who are interested in having those problems solved and they solve a similar aspect or a different aspect of that problem, those are great sponsorship opportunities for you to approach. I think there's a challenge that exists in the niche podcast space is that at scale, media buyers have struggled to figure out tools that allow people who want to buy advertising or sponsor a thousand niche shows to be able to find those shows and then effectively buy them. And everybody from Buzz Sprout to the big podcast ad networks have tried to solve it various different ways. And the only place that's sort of gained traction are the platforms. So, like kind of YouTube's figured it out for YouTube and Facebook's figured it out for Facebook. If you're a small brand and you want to target specific individuals, Facebook has a lot of those individuals and they built a lot of ad tech to be able to find them on their platform. But podcasting is open and you can appear at this app or this app or this app, and you have tons of different podcasts, and some of them are good and some of them are not, and media buyers are just reluctant. And so the challenges in solving that in the open world are different than the platform world. And so it works on platforms, it doesn't work in open, which means that there's opportunities for individuals to go out and sell their show one-on-one, like one-to-one, with people who are selling products and services in the space that aligns with whatever they're talking about. And so I think that oftentimes podcasters feel like, oh, I do this podcast that talks about running and I love these shoes. Who am I to reach out to Mizuno and the media team and try to convince them to run a small ad on my show to the 200 runners that listen to my show every week? But they're, I'm telling you, they're diehard Mizuno fans. That's all we talk about. Everyone who writes in on my Facebook community group when we're talking about these shoes are so great and they, you know, I'm running faster than ever, and my legs feel better than ever. We're all Mizuno fans. Why are you not advertising on my podcast? I think an opportunity exists. Maybe Mizuno ignores you, but maybe there's a certain sweatband that you use or a certain, who knows? Like we're all on the Strava app. Why aren't we advertising Strava or something like that?

Jordan 14:28

Yeah.

Kevin 14:28

Um, there's opportunities, and we feel like who are we to reach out to them? And I'm telling you, they have no solution to come by your show. They don't know you exist. And so, unless you do a little legwork, unless you put yourself out there, unless you take those swings, they're never going to reach out to you. It's not going to come from the other direction.

Alban 14:45

You know, I've had times where I've reached out to a creator, somebody who's creating podcasting content, and said, I'd love to do you to do a video about Buzz Brow or I'd love to sponsor your podcast. And multiple times people have said, Oh my gosh, you're the brand. Like one said, I wrote down at the beginning of this year my goals, and one of the goals was to get sponsored. My goal company was you.

Jordan 15:08

Wow.

Alban 15:08

And I was like, Oh, then you should have reached out because then I would have been like, awesome. We're a good fit.

Jordan 15:14

Yeah.

Alban 15:15

It it's quite possible. You know, Mizuno is pretty big, but there's so many. I mean, there's local companies. You know, there's a run club that I go run in sometimes that's nearby, but there's also a local running store. Like they would be a great, they could reach out and say, Hey, do you want to sponsor us? And I've seen they've done that before. You could reach out to races and say, Hey, do you want to come talk about you know the race you're putting together and sponsor coffee for the run club in the morning? Because a lot of the people who are here would be interested in your race. Right. They've done that. Your audience is more valuable than you think, not just based on identity. And there's some quote in this the article, and I don't have it in front of me, but it was like in media buying, we often use identity, like the actual person and demographics is a proxy for intent. And that's kind of a flaw. Like you can't just say, we think Alban Brooke fits into this group of 35 to 45-year-old males who might run. So let's just target him.

Speaker 3 16:13

Yeah.

Alban 16:14

You want to target people at the right time and have the right messenger. You are the right messenger for some particular set of problems. And so if you can identify them, then you are like the perfect person for some companies to use to reach your audience.

Kevin 16:31

Yeah. And just to be clear, like a lot a lot of podcasters would say something like this to themselves or to others that I just want to get big enough where I can be represented by somebody who can help me get ads for my show. Well, the value equation doesn't exist until you're pretty big. They're only interested in buying the shows that are doing, you know, the 25, 50,000 downloads.

Speaker 3 16:49

Yeah.

Kevin 16:49

But they're not doing anything that you couldn't do. If monetization of your podcast is something that you really want to do on a small scale, you can totally do it. It's not super complicated. It is a little bit time intensive, but if you're delivering the value, it is a little bit evergreen. Yeah. And that, oh, I've got a relationship. Uh, Todd Cochran, famous podcaster, podcast hall of famer, he used to talk about all the time that he was uh like GoDaddy was a sponsor of his for 20-something years. Yeah.

Jordan 17:14

That's crazy.

Kevin 17:15

That is something that he invested some time in up front to pitch himself to GoDaddy. He started delivering value back to them, and he carried that on for 20-something years of podcasting.

Speaker 3 17:25

Wow.

Kevin 17:25

And just maintained the relationship. And so I think it works. I do think you invest a little bit more up front. You do a good job, you finally land a sponsor, you deliver value for them, they're delivering value for you. And then that cycle can pay out. And it may not pay out for the first year or two until you start making money back on your initial investment, but you build a couple of those over time and you have very successfully monetized your show.

Alban 17:47

Do you remember uh John Boy, Kevin, who did all those baseball videos? I love John Boy. Yeah. So when they were pretty new, they reached out to SeatGeek and were like, hey, can we get a promo code? And they're like, Oh, you're not that big. And they're like, just give us a promo code. And they're like, fine, here's what you can have. They gave them code John Boy. The intent was so high, and the integration of the ad was so good that SeatGeek goes, okay, we'll keep doing it. And also, this promo code works all the time now. Like it's not a one-time, like 10% off your first purchase ever, and we're gonna make sure you never ever get another discount. It was like they gave them some $20 off, and they're just like, that's good now, forever for your audience because they're so high intent. The first time SeatGeek didn't believe it was gonna be a big deal, and then it became a huge channel for them. So there is really some benefit here. And the last thing I wrote down was ads typically work by the content is just so good. You can't leave, even though they put an interruption in there and there's this terrible ad in the middle. You stick around to see what happened, you know, to your favorite characters. You know, that's how TV ads work. And podcast ads are better when they're host read because you're like, oh, the host is still here. Even better is an ad read that is integrated somewhat into the content.

Speaker 3 19:07

Yeah.

Alban 19:08

If you can integrate content, it doesn't feel as weird and thus it's a better ad.

Fan Mail

Jordan 19:15

All right. We actually got a bunch of fan mail messages from listeners about repurposing their content. So I thought we'd quickly go through those too. So Colette for Misbehavior, the cast for college student conduct administrators, wrote in and said for repurposing misbehavior is going to host an ongoing virtual book club featuring members' dissertations. Big nerd fun.

Alban 19:35

Yeah, I think it's great because this is something that only works for a niche podcast. And I love that they're leaning into that.

Jordan 19:41

All right, and Alessandra had an idea for me. She said, Edit all your dreamful episodes down by 50% and release them as a new podcast called Napful.

Kevin 19:53

Pretty good. I saw that come in and it sent me on a weird spiral because I was like, you know, a a nap is not a short version of a dream. A nap is a short version of a sleep and it's not called sleepful. So what's the short version of a dream? And I looked that up. There was no good, catchy words that are a short version of a dream. That was one of the suggestions I found. Yeah.

Jordan 20:13

This one I thought was a good idea for you guys. Uh Josh from The Mental Golf Show said they created a themed mental game scorecard for each episode. And instead of tracking your golf score, listeners would rate themselves on something mental game related, like confidence, freedom, trust, or commitment based on the episode's theme. That's kind of cool.

Kevin 20:33

That is, I wish I had I was mindful enough to think about more than one thing at a time on a golf course, but my brain is all over the place. I have no mental game.

Jordan 20:41

It makes me wonder if those are like uh downloadables that they can get from like the website or something.

Alban 20:46

Resilience development and action uh wrote in. They're testing audio versus video engagement with their anniversary episode. And they mentioned the Apple Podcast video in the episode. They asked listeners to identify the color of hat and a Yeti cup shown on video for a chance to win them. And it's a simple way to see whether or not audio listeners will jump over to the video.

Jordan 21:07

Why didn't we do that?

Alban 21:10

What's the brand of Kevin's uh printer in the background?

Jordan 21:16

All right, we got another message from Remy Roy from Podground, and she said, please make the podcast trivia cards. I would buy them. In January, we hosted a podcast trivia night over Zoom for podcast hosts, and it was amazing, but I had to scour the internet for podcast-related questions. People were nervous, they wouldn't know the answers, but ended up being really fun. And I would definitely use the podcast trivia cards for our community events. Actually, that's not a bad idea because now I kind of want to do that for our like Facebook group too.

Kevin 21:46

Yeah. We did, do you remember two years ago we did a meetup, like a team meetup, and Alban and John ran Family Feud, but it was all podcast trivia questions? That was very fun. And it was surprising on both sides. It was surprising that some people on our team. didn't know what were seemingly easy questions. And then it also was surprising at some of the like really tough questions. Some people really knew, like I didn't necessarily know that like somebody who does programming or design for our team would know as much as they know about podcasting. So it cut it was both ways. It was fun.

Jordan 22:13

Yeah, maybe we need to see if we can find that version. It was years ago, but that'd be cool. Send it over to Remy and she can do a F only Feud Night.

unknown 22:21

Yep.

Alban 22:22

And Abby from Talk Your Abs off wrote in and said, Alban, please put the phone number of whoever tried to steal your identity into every annoying inquiry form, health insurance, car sales, real estate, and they'll receive spam calls forever. I think that's fair justice. So smart. I'm still not 100% sure if the person whose info was tied to this fraudulent account that used my social and stuff. I don't know if that's the person who like tried to do the identity theft. Oh if you're a smart identity thiever or thief, then you're probably not going to put your own email and phone number on there. That's true. I am planning to reach out and call them and just see what happens. So maybe I'll have to follow up.

Jordan 23:04

Yeah. Thanks everyone for writing in. It was really fun to see what kind of uh ideas you had. And we'll be recording with Alex San Filippo next episode to talk about getting booked on podcasts. So until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.