Welcome to Help Me Podcast, a show designed to help you launch and grow your podcast. I am your host, Gino, and twice a week, I will release a new episode with different tips and tricks for launching and growing your podcast. From audio engineering to planning intentionally to growth tactics, each episode will be a bite sized tip to help you podcast.
Hey. Welcome back to help me. Podcast. This is episode 68, and in today's episode, I want to talk about something that I heard recently in the podcasting news realm. So there's this comedian that I like and I listen to. His name is Theo Vaughn, very popular comedian, very funny. And he has a podcast called this past weekend. And it's a very popular podcast, not just within the comedy world, but also just in overall podcasts. I think he's like kind of around near number
five most popular. So it's a very big podcast. And recently he had an episode come out this week where he exploited a situation that has been happening to him. And I guess based off of what he said, he has a company called Cast Media that helps him fill his ads and then owes him the money for those ads based off of what he said. Again, this is just his side of the story that they haven't been paying him in a year or something like that. So they basically just stole a bunch of money from him. And
he wasn't that upset about it. He was mostly talking about this because I guess this Cast Media has been doing this to a bunch of other people. And a bunch of other people don't necessarily have the luxury to talk about that or to exploit them on their show. But since Theo, he
also has his comedy and a bunch of other things. He kind of came forward and talked about this, but it just kind of got me thinking about how even a show that's very independent and he makes his own stuff, but something like the ad buys is something that he doesn't do and he doesn't sell ads and doesn't do the ad placement or anything like that. And that's mostly how he makes
money with his podcast. He also has a merchandise line. It just kind of got me thinking about the idea of getting paid ads on your show and especially any of the popular ads that you hear. I don't know. I think a lot of times some podcasters who start out dream of that when they can start making money and put these ads on their shows. But I don't know, I guess I'm questioning whether
that should be a goal or not. It certainly isn't fair the way that they place these ads and the agencies that you need in order to be placing these ads. I'm actually kind of going through something a little similar, not necessarily as much fraud as what happened to Theo, but I do have a client that hasn't been getting paid for ads recently on their podcast. And we put ad markers in the show and the people that we are associated with just haven't been filling the ads.
And it's kind of a sketchy thing. It's like, well, we're doing this. We were told we were going to get paid for ads and now we're not. But technically there's no ads on the show. So it's like a weird situation of, yeah, I guess you aren't stealing from me because you aren't putting any ads on, but you're also not paying for the ads that we said that we were going to put on. So now we're moving to a different agency and they want all these different
kinds of rules in order to just put these ads on. And it's interesting the amount of effort, I guess that it is to try to get paid for these ads. And at the end of the day, it's like you're pushing products that maybe sometimes you don't have a say in and it could be a product that you don't like or don't enjoy and I don't know. It makes me ask, is there a better way to monetize your podcast? Right? And there are certainly other ways to monetize your
podcast. You can do merch, you can have your own products, you can have your own services, you can have your own communities. So I don't really know what the conclusion of this podcast is going to be. I think it's more so just kind of asking, is the end goal really trying to get with agencies that can fill ad spots on my show, to basically exploit my show for its listeners, and is that what I want to do to my listeners? And is that how I want to
make money with my listeners? And I think that there's just a better way to be able to make money off of what you're doing, but also not in such a crude way of just forcing these ads of these large companies down people's throats. And most of us might not even be in
a position where we even have enough listens to get to that point. But I think there's other ways of doing it and hey, I'll be honest, I haven't been successful in making money in my podcast, so maybe I'm not the person to speak about this, but I do think that it is worth discussing and it is worth trying to think of a better way to do things. And some things that I've thought about recently with my own podcast is like, okay, sometimes just
brainstorming and spitballing here. Sometimes I have a podcast, I hit record. You usually have a conversation beforehand with a guest because my other podcast, working towards a purpose, is an interview style podcast. I usually have a conversation before with the guest to kind of warm
up, see where they're at. We do the interview and then we usually have some conversation afterwards and sometimes that conversation is really good afterwards and sometimes after the quote unquote record button is off, it loosens up the conversation a little bit more and maybe some more conversation flows. I'm always recording it just because I don't stop until the end, but I don't really do anything with it.
Maybe one way could be to start some sort of patreon or to start some sort of fan group that gets more access to certain parts of your podcast or maybe they get access to the video parts of your podcast or something like that. That in an ideal world it would be nice if you could offer more value to your listeners in exchange for
some money or some subscription service or something like that. Because at the end of the day, if you look at like paid ads, you're not really offering any value to your listener by forcing them to listen to a paid ad. It's like listening to a TV commercial. You're not getting really any value out of listening to a commercial. It's kind of just like, oh, we have to listen to this thing now and maybe you'll find
something you like, but chances are you're just going to be annoyed by it. So I don't know, I think it's a bigger discussion as far as how can we start making a living and making some money off of our podcast without just selling to corporations that want to utilize our listeners. Another idea would be like a newsletter. Maybe you can start a newsletter for your podcast and get your listeners to
transfer over to the newsletter. And maybe your newsletter you have some local sponsors or something like that, something of benefit to your community or to your niche. I don't know. Like I said, I don't have really the answer for this. It's just hearing the story about Theo has really questioned why a lot of people are striving for that, right? Because he got there, he's got the big ads on his show, he makes money on those
ads. But now someone stole all that money because the organization that he was with, that he entrusted to place the ads and pay him for the ads basically didn't do that. And I don't know, it just makes me think about is there a better way to do this or is there a better way to monetize your podcast? And I guess it's going to be an ever growing question and something that I'm just thinking about more often. I would love to further this discussion with somebody. If you want to send me an
email, my email is always in the show notes. If you've ever been able to successfully monetize your podcast without selling big ads, drop me a line and tell me what you did, and I could share that with the community and we can all kind of reach for maybe a little bit more ethical way to start getting some money from your podcast, because I realize that money is important, and money will keep you going. And we all need money to survive. So hopefully there are some better ways out there than just
selling Squarespace ads. So thank you for listening. I hope this maybe sparked a bigger conversation and I will see you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in. We've reached the end of the episode and if you enjoyed this podcast or you got something from it, you might be interested in my weekly newsletter that I send out every Monday morning, full of podcasting tips, tricks and news. So if you like this show, you might like this newsletter. To sign up, just go to the show
notes and click the link. Thanks for listening and happy podcasting. Our channel.