There are actually fewer active shows today than there were in 2018. So you could make the case that there are more shows available for a listener to find in a podcast app, but it's actually less crowded than it was five years ago.
There is limited real estate for a person's time, but your category might have five competitors or three competitors or no good competitors. Podcasting is still easier in terms of competition.
I think when we think about, like, what's working now, what's the opportunity right now, this is one of those evergreen things is So I was listening to an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show a while back. This was probably from sometime in 2024 that he recorded it. He was talking about how he was thinking about what his future was in podcasting. And he was kind of like, you know, I've been at this a long time. It used to be super easy to get you know, be in the top 10 of all shows.
First world problems for Tim there. And now it was getting harder. He's in, you know, the top 50, top 100, but just how much harder podcasting has got. And it had got him thinking about, like, do I wanna continue putting in the effort that I'm putting into this? And then more recently, I saw that Amy Porterfield, another early podcaster who got a lot of people into podcasting, is doing a big pivot and rebrand of her show.
It's not shutting it down, but it's a big shift. And I thought these two things were really interesting from these long running shows that are kind of talking about how it's harder to podcast and how what used to work isn't really working anymore. And so I figured it might be worth digging into, is it actually harder to grow now?
I mean, the funny thing about this question is people have been saying this as long as I've been in podcasting. Back in 02/2008, people were like, you know, it's too late. We missed the boat. It was easier before. This question is as old as podcasting, but it is relevant right now.
Yeah. And, you know, it strikes me that you're actually the perfect case study here because your first show launched in what year?
Two thousand eight.
Okay. So first show 02/2008. You have just launched a new show in 2025. So you've been producing podcasts, and there's, I think, been several in between there for a long time. And so I'm curious about your personal experience launching shows, gaining traction, building an audience. How is it different now than it was back then?
There are definitely things that were maybe easier back then. For example, back then, the biggest podcasting platform was Apple Podcasts. And if you got in new and noteworthy, you really could grow your show fast. One of the shows that I did back then, I think it was my second podcast I launched. I learned all the tricks how to get into new and noteworthy.
And there's a few things you could do. And got it into new and noteworthy. And the Apple charts were really important. All of that's probably harder now, and also less true now. Apple's just not as important as it was.
And it's harder to get into new and noteworthy, and to chart in Apple Podcasts. More competition from celebrities and big name Conan O'Brien's and all them coming in. On the other hand, it just feels kind of the same to me. My new show, I don't know what's it doing. We only do an episode every two weeks. And it looks like every episode in the first thirty days, episodes are getting about six eighty five downloads.
So Okay.
I feel like in some ways, I feel like that's more than I would have had at this point. Especially only being seven episodes in or something. Generally, if you're publishing more episodes, like if you're publishing weekly, you probably grow a bit faster. But yeah, I feel like it's about the same. Lot of this is dependent on a bunch of factors that I'm sure we'll get into. I don't know if it's any harder now. In some ways, might be even easier as well. And maybe we can talk about that.
Yeah. And, you know, actually, some of the data that came up in the 2024 podcast marketing trends report kinda speaks to both sides of this, where it seems like it both speaks to the fact that it is harder for many shows to grow, but also that it is either easier or there is more potential upside for shows that do figure out how to grow. And so going through some of the results from the survey here, one of the big ones here was the year over year and month over month growth rates. And so this was the second year of the report, we actually had something to compare to the previous year. And there's a huge massive caveat to this data in that the Apple iOS changes happened over the span.
And so just shows across the podcast industry declined in the number of downloads, but that I adjusted for that, and this is still well beyond what the Apple iOS changes would account for. And so looking at the, year over year annual growth rate in the from the calendar year of 2023 was 1.3%. So, basically, shows who submitted to the survey almost did not grow whatsoever. And so, yes, part of this was that they were getting lower downloads reported from Apple Podcasts. But in general, this was a 94% decrease in annual growth rate from the year before.
So it seems to say like, oh, growth is getting way harder just from one year to the next. Like, there's been a huge drop in the, you know, growth of, you know, a pretty significant sample size of podcasts. So but then we actually have this other side that is based on the median annual growth rate. If you look at the average, the average annual growth rate was actually 97.3%. And so the average show almost doubled in size over the year.
And so if you start to think about how medians and averages work, it's like, oh, clearly, there are some huge outlier shows that are just pulling up. If we go by average, they're pulling up the whole dataset, and these shows grew a crazy amount. And so this is something where I think, you know, it gets that way where you're talking to here is like, perhaps for the typical average middle of the road show, it is much harder to grow now. But if you have a certain type of show and you know how to market it effectively and create a certain type of content, perhaps there is a way higher ceiling than there was previously.
The other thing this is making me think of is the difference between an established show and a new show. And so, the show that I just started, it's growing fast right now. Like month over month. Yep. The growth rate is high because we're actively promoting it.
We're actively accumulating new listeners because we're growing from zero. Whereas one of my older shows is very flat. And Yep. Podcasts generally, almost any type of media, you will kind of gradually rise until you hit a plateau. And sometimes it's possible to break through those plateaus.
But most shows, newsletters, websites, any kind of YouTube channel, whatever you create, most of them have kind of a natural plateau that you'll hit. Yeah. And so, we might be seeing some of that here as well. There might be an existing show that broke through a plateau and is bringing up the average. Or there could have just been a number of new shows that just year over year have really increased their growth rate. So keeping all of that in mind, that's kind of the context for this.
There's actually some other kind of contributing factors that could lead to a lower reported download number. And actually so Alyssa Craig, who's the head of marketing at Headliner, is one of these, like, short form audiogram video creator tools that a lot of people have used. Mhmm. She did a guest post for my newsletter a while back after the release of this report, and she contributed this really interesting thought that I was not thinking about before, which is, you know, we've talked previously about how YouTube viewership of podcasts is going up. Those are not being reported as downloads in your podcast hosting platform.
And so when I did this report, I asked people to go to your podcast hosting platform and input how many downloads did you get each month. I asked for, like, total YouTube viewership, but not on a month by month breakdown. And so as we see people starting to post videos on Spotify, those downloads are now not showing up as aggregated in your hosting provider. And so there is this fragmenting of data where it's possible that many shows have actually grown by total viewership or audience size, but the reported downloads in your podcast hosting platform is actually stagnant or even going down even while your audience has grown. And so I think that this is one of the things that, as I started to talk with some people about this, they're actually like they didn't connect the dots.
They're like, oh, yeah. I've been feeling so bad about my podcast, but actually, YouTube has doubled or tripled over the past, six months. Oh, maybe that's what's happening here. Mhmm. And so it could be that you might be like, oh, something's really wrong with my show, and actually it's it's just masking other forms of growth.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point.
So let's maybe look at some of the reasons why it may or may not be harder to grow now. Because it seems like there are certainly opportunities, but there also might be some more headwinds that didn't exist previously. And the way I see it, there's kind of like two factors at play here for why it might be harder for some shows and some niches, and those are increased competition, which may or may not be true, and kind of changing tastes or a kind of like raise up the bar of expected quality from podcasts in general. I think that one's probably pretty clear that that's true. But let's maybe start on the competition side.
And you mentioned, like, when you got into podcasting way back in the day, Conan O'Brien was not podcasting. This was not really a celebrity medium. You could say it was kind of like a backwater content channel, and now it is fully mainstream. And so we have seen Disney is into podcasting. Netflix is into podcasting.
Amazon's into podcasting, and all host of celebrities. So I think there's both a, like, potential density increase of competition where there may be more creators, more shows that you're competing with. But there's also this kind of star power that you're competing with too. What's your take on what a solo creator who's starting a new show is up against nowadays?
Yeah. I mean, we've mentioned in the past that there is limited real estate for a person's time. And so when they open their podcast player, I did this this morning, I have lots of options. And there are shows that would have normally been my first go to, like This American Life. I would listen to every episode.
But now it's like there's just so many good shows. They get bumped down. So, There's more good shows to choose from. This differs depending on your category. But in general, every listener only has so much listening time allocated.
And that might be an hour a day, if you're lucky. Well, if your show is an hour, you're competing with all of those other shows that have hour episodes that day. So I think that has gotten harder. Back in the day, I remember being hungry for like, I need more. Like, I would run out of podcasts to listen to. I haven't had that problem in a long time.
And, you know, this gets into a bit of an interesting dichotomy of how you look at the data. So there are more podcasts that have obviously ever been created. That number is always going up. There are always more new shows being created. They're not going down.
We're not subtracting shows that have we're erasing them from history. You're writing them out of existence. That show never existed. So the total number of shows that are findable online somewhere is going up. If you look at the number of active shows and so this is shows that have been, producing or had published an episode in the last thirty days.
There are actually fewer active shows today than there were in 2018. So this is even before the 2020 boom COVID boom of podcasting. In 2018, there were 525,000 active shows. As of the end of twenty twenty four, there were 332,000. So actually a pretty significant drop.
So you could make the case that there are more shows available for a listener to find in a podcast app. But of the shows that are actively producing episodes, which are generally the shows that new people are subscribing to, it's actually less crowded than it was now over five years ago.
Yeah. And as we've mentioned before, not all of those 332,000 shows are any good. If there was a magical filter we could apply on top of all these things, which is which of these shows are good, which of these shows actually resonate with an audience, and then which of these shows actually are in your category, you can imagine that that group gets even smaller. For some folks listening, your category might have five competitors, or three competitors, or no good competitors. And so Yes.
I think we can be encouraged in the sense that And I think you've got some other stats here. Compared to other mediums, podcasting is still comparatively easier in terms of competition. There's less competition, especially when you compare it to something like YouTube.
Yeah. And this is something that, you know, I see a lot with my clients, and so I'll often do in-depth audits for my clients, and I'll do some competitor research as well. And in most niches, there are a lot of shows on the same topic. And I'll go poke around. I won't listen to all the shows, but I'll poke around.
And the vast majority of them, 98 of them, like, in a niche that might have, like, 25 shows on a topic, there might be two that are, like, interesting that stand out to me. And I'm like, oh, those look like refreshing takes on this topic. And then the rest of them are entirely generic and have almost no shot at growth unless you already know the creator and you're following them and you're a fan of them. But that show is not going to attract new people just based on its own merit. And so Mhmm.
This to me, kind of like you said, I think this is actually really encouraging where there may be a lot of shows in your niche, in your genre, probably very few of them are actually good. And there's a distinction here between competition and noise. And, like, we all kind of are competing with noise, but there are shows that are high quality, they're active, that a listener is actively choosing between. And so they might choose between ours. They might look at one or two other shows that seem interesting to them, and maybe they listen to all of them and test them out.
Maybe they just pick the one that seems like the safest bet. But then there is the competition of a whole bunch of low quality shows that we all need to kind of raise our shows above that kind of base level. And so I think that that is certainly higher and across all content, not just podcasting, like, that is only going up. And so I think that to me, it is a little bit disheartening maybe as a creator to see that how fast AI can both just churn out on its own junk and also how fast people using AI can churn out junk. Just like, maybe they record the podcast, but it's an AI written script, and it just sucks.
And it's like, that makes it harder for the rest of us. But I do think that for people who put in the time and care and craft to make a better than average podcast, there is a huge amount of blue ocean still available.
The other thing that people don't think about is there are people that are not active podcast listeners, but would be brought in to the category if they could find the content that they want. Right? I even think about, like, in the comedy category, you think there's all these juggernauts. Joe Rogan and Mark Marron. And you think, wow.
Like, there's no way that anyone could create a space in there. And then you've got this phenomenon like Kill Tony, which Yeah. That show is just very different and attracts a different audience. I think he brought a lot of new people into podcasting. And that's because people might resonate with a particular host, a particular format, a particular topic.
And they're like, oh, well, if I have to go to podcasts to get that, then I was just talking to somebody outside here in my co working office. And he was talking to a co worker who has just gotten into podcasts because they want to get more into history. And they found this podcast about Napoleon. And so they're listening to 300 episodes on Napoleon. Now Yeah.
That is a perfect example of non podcast listener not showing up in any of our stats. They come in, and now that show has grown because somebody was seeking that content, that format, whatever. They have a job to be done and it's being done.
Mhmm.
So, yeah. I I get encouraged by stuff like that because there's a lot of people not listening to podcasts right now or not listening regularly.
The last thing I'll say on the competition front is there's this concept called the law of shitty click throughs. And this was coined by a guy named Andrew Chen, who I think was at Uber, was one of their marketing guys or head of growth. And the idea is basically that in marketing is obviously his domain here. There is some tactic that will work. And a few people will know about it at the start.
And so at the at the start of the Internet, it was like banner ads were like super cheap and you can get a ton of traffic back to your website. And then word gets out and all of a sudden everybody's doing banner ads. And so the cost per click goes up, the cost per conversion goes up, and eventually becomes not worth doing anymore. Yeah. The same has happened for Facebook in various ways, whether it's groups or pages or ads.
And the same happens to podcasting as well. And so I think about a lot of the people that my agency worked with, they were business owners, And a lot of them signed up to work with me back in, like, 2017, '18, '19 because they had their own coaches or mentors or friends who had started podcasts in twenty thirteen, fourteen, fifteen Mhmm. Had immediately built up big audiences and were like, hey. Here's a tactic that works to grow my audience. I'm gonna launch a podcast.
I'm not gonna put too much thought into the concept development. I'm just gonna host a, you know, a show, have my friends on and interview them, and I'm gonna grow an audience like all those other people. And so you still get this proliferation of shows who a lot of times people have been thinking about doing a show for, like, five years, but they're still anchored in this old world way of of podcasting where it's like, you can just start a show and you'll grow an audience around it. And they're like, five of my friends did it, and so I've just been waiting to pull the trigger, not realizing that actually the bar has shifted quite a bit. Mhmm.
Which I think actually transitions into this kind of next idea around, like, tastes change and expectations change around, you know, a medium as a whole, but then also within any one niche or, you know, content channel, anything like that. And I'm wondering, like, this is maybe something that you can specifically speak to of, like, the type of content you would have created ten years ago within your community versus the type of content you would create now is probably vastly different.
Oh, yeah. I mean, in the business category, the big trend used to be doing these daily interview shows. That was like a way of getting traction because you could If you did them every day, you got way more downloads. And the charts and the algorithms were not super smart. And so they would just interpret like all of these downloads for the show means it's a popular show.
And it would go to the top of the charts. You don't see people doing that as much anymore. You were gonna copy that I mean, maybe you could copy it again for this generation. It would work. But interview shows in general used to be You know, even when I started, it was fairly novel for a founder to get approached and say, hey, do you want to be on my podcast?
Now, people of note that get a lot of requests are kind of like, How many downloads you got? I'm not gonna waste my time. Yeah. And so, the bar has shifted, for sure. There's still ways in. You know? There's still creative ways to do all those formats. There's still green space there. Yeah, it's definitely shifted. The one thing that hasn't shifted is a creator that comes into a space and has an instinct about what might resonate.
And then they pursue that. That's not always going to work. But if you've been in a space for a while, and you're like, Oh, you know what everyone's missing? Everyone's missing this. And then you come out with that, and you execute on it well, that's a strategy that will never go out of style. This space, can I bring here that would resonate that's not being done, that I think would attract an audience?
You know, that I think is you get really into the art side of of this, where it's like this you can bring some strategy to it, but it's kind of comes out of something that you have just been immersed in the space. You have been able to connect the dots in a way that nobody else has. Mhmm. And I I was talking with a a potential client today. They actually have a very successful show already, very long running, and they're doing something like four or 500,000 downloads a month, something like that.
So big show. But they feel they look at some of the shows at the top of the charts, and they say, you know, we're kinda talking about a lot of the same content here.
And it's in the let's call it
the broad self help category. And so shows at the top of the chart are Mel Robbins. So biggest show in the world right now. So Mel Robbins is broad self help. It's, you know, accessible to a lot of people.
And that show is is newer newer than this show from this potential client I've been talking to. And they're kinda wondering, like, what's going on here? And it's like sometimes when you think about self help, a lot of these ideas have been in constant circulation and recirculation for at least a hundred years, if not longer. You can look at, like, Ryan Holiday, the stoicism. He kind of revived that in many ways.
Maybe not entirely single handedly, but did a lot of that. But, like, those ideas, thousands of years old and are now still relevant. Mhmm. And so I think you're right. It's not only that you've seen something that somebody else hasn't seen, but that you're often able to articulate it and package it for the moment.
Mhmm. And I think that this is where a lot of times shows that have been going for a while and feel it's harder now, it's kind of like they've become out of sync with the culture. And I think that this is the natural life cycle of any business creator is if you can get at the point where things start to work and you gain traction, you begin to take your foot off the gas a little bit and are not quite so, like, in the grind doing the research, talking to people because now you're worried about these, like, running the business or whatever it is. And pretty soon you find yourself out of step with where tastes have shifted. And so I think that this is one of those things that is so hard to do because you're juggling so much.
But it's something we all need to be aware of is like, this is happening. We're like in the middle of a river. And if we try to like anchor ourselves down, like everything's gonna go flowing by us, and we're quickly gonna be behind.
The other thing, this is not gonna be a popular take. I'll just Bring
it on.
I'll just say it. And again, I know what it's like to be a creator. I know how hard it is. I think if your show is not growing, that is an opportunity for you to ask some hard questions. And I'll just illustrate this with an example.
There was a show that I really liked because the content was what I wanted to learn about. But the host's voice, their microphone quality, that part always graded on me. They could have probably fixed it with some speech coaching or whatever. But as soon as another show showed up. Yeah. Where the host was just better spoken, more engaging, more entertaining, I switched. And I'm sure that creator was like, what happened? I this show used to be popular. And now Yep. What why what's going on?
And as creators, if it's not resonating, there's got to be a reason. It could be you're not marketing it enough. But there's some other things that I think are worth looking at. Maybe the format of your show isn't quite right. Maybe you need to bring on a co host.
Podcasters that are at the top of their game, and have been doing this for a long time, are constantly reevaluating and adjusting. And so Tim Ferriss might be like, You know what? I've been doing this show for a long time now. Is this still worth doing? And Amy Porterfield's probably saying, Okay.
We've been doing this show a long time. Our goal is to grow. Are we just gonna keep doing the same old thing? Because there's more competition than ever in our What are we gonna do about it? That means taking a hard look at everything. What Yeah. Is potentially not working. And I'll just refer back to our episodes on doing listener research. That's why that's so important. Have a question in there.
A box where people can put unfiltered opinions on your show. It's hard. I've done this. And people have said some things that hurt my feelings. But I want to create things that have resonance. And if I'm doing things that are impeding the show's growth, I want to know about it. So I think that's the other thing that you can look up here is, yeah, competition's better. You know what? Conan O'Brien, he is a practiced, well oiled machine. He is a good entertainer.
And if you're going to head to head with him in the comedy talk space, it's going be tough. What are you going to bring to the table that he's not? And you don't have to be exactly like him, but you've gotta bring some sort of A game that's gonna be able to compete at his level. Stand up comedy is such a good example of this, because there are different types of people that win different ways. Norm MacDonald was one of my favorite comics.
And he was just weird and irreverent and very different than Mark Marron or Joe Rogan or Conan O'Brien. So there's a way to do this. But you gotta bring your A game, whatever that is.
I think there are infinite ways to differentiate yourself, and not all of them are going to be winners. But I think that the hard thing is it's about actually seeing the negative space. I've never taken any art classes, but I've heard that one of the exercises that they get you to do is draw a chair, let's say, not by drawing the chair, but by learning to see the space between the chair legs. And it's like you're learning to see what's not there. Mhmm.
And I think that this is a super valuable skill for any creator to both immerse themselves in their space and be able to objectively you know, it's gonna be painful at the start. When you see all these other shows, most of them are gonna be better than you if you're just starting out. But that's actually the only way to be able to see that negative space and understand, for one, like, what's not in existence right now. But the other thing is the cliches. And so I think that this is, like, one of the easiest ways to stand out is to do this research, to just go read all the descriptions of 25 shows in your space, and you will realize, like, I guarantee it, if there are a significant number of shows in your niche, you will see the same language pop up again and again and again and make a spreadsheet of this.
Appreciate it. Appreciate
it. Probably, there is a good chance that if you have not done this research before, you're gonna have a lot of that same language as well. And this is the only way to find it and then eliminate it and then actually maybe counter position against it. And so I think that doing that kind of research and, like, one of the things that as we're talking about more competition and more, like, low quality competition, high quality competition, a lot of it is just, like, something is popular again, and so people adopt it, and it quickly becomes kind of, like, just ubiquitous and then a bit of cliche, and then it eventually becomes cringe. It, like, moves down this life cycle.
Mhmm. And it's like, you don't wanna find yourself moving down that line. You gotta kinda be, like, updating your messaging. Like, there is no winning messaging or positioning for a show. Yeah.
It's a constant kind of like, hey. We're trying to keep pace with how everything is moving around us, how our audience is moving, how the world is moving. You think about, like, presidential elections can change everything overnight. And now all of a sudden, the whole mood of society has shifted. And now it's like, hey.
If I'm creating within this frame that is society, I need to adjust what I'm doing to fit the moment. We wanna think that there's just, a right answer. Like, found the right show. I found the right way to talk about it. I found the right way to market it. But really, all of this is a constantly shifting kind of, like, Rubik's cube that we're always trying to, like, one phase changes, and then we gotta adjust the other ones to bring it back in alignment.
Yeah. I love when you were talking that the line that came in my head is to continually ask, What resonates now? Like, in this moment, what resonates? And to open your eyes again, maybe for the first time in a while, to look at what's going on. What are other people doing that I'm missing?
What are the listeners feeling now? Are they feeling like, Woah, wait, you're talking about something that happened five years ago. Or you're using language that was like from 2020. You know, how can we update what we're doing? What resonates now?
So we talked a lot about here some of the potential reasons that it might be harder to grow now, more competition. Think certainly higher expectations of what people expect from a podcast. And I think to your point there about, you know, listening to that show that, like, you you would have listened to it in the past. It didn't quite do it for you with the kind of grading vocals, whatever, but then something better comes along, and it's like, yeah. I'm gonna choose that one.
It's easier to get professional equipment. It's easier to use Descript to do studio sound, to remove kind of any, you know, problems with your vocals. And so the general quality for podcasts is undoubtedly higher, and we all need to now conform to Mhmm. That said, we kinda talked about at the start here that there are opportunities and that some shows are growing way faster than they previously had. And so we talked about here the idea of, like, finding the thing that resonates now with your audience.
What else would you add when it comes to opportunities in and around podcasting and maybe content in general?
So maybe one thing I'll say to just frame this is I think about a podcast like Acquired. And if you look at their growth trajectory, it goes like it's very very flat. And then all of a sudden, it starts to curve up. And they started that show in 2015, so they've just celebrated their ten year anniversary. And they said for the first two years, it was just getting a couple hundred downloads per episode.
Like, small. But they enjoyed doing it. They kept trying to get better at it. They were getting good feedback. The way they talk about it is that they just wanted their audience to grow every year.
And every year they did it, you know, they started beginning a hundred downloads per episode. Then by the next year, they were getting 200 downloads per episode. And then the next year, they were getting 400. And over time, that compounding eventually turned into crazy growth. And now they get millions of downloads.
In 2024, they hit 500,000 listeners. So this is a long game. And when we're thinking about growth, one secret is just keep doing it longer than your competition. Keep improving. So compounding happens in different ways.
Compound the quality of the show. The resonance of the show. Just keep doing that, and you'll grow. That is the most underrated growth opportunity is you've started, and now, okay, what are you going to do? And it's just like putting one foot in front of the other, and just improving, improving, improving. And okay, I'm gonna try to grow my audience every year, and that's gonna compound.
I think when we think about like, what's working now? What's the opportunity right now? This is one of those evergreen things is just continuing to do it is the thing that will always work. And we have to put a distinction there. Like, some shows will never gain traction.
Yeah. Just doing the same thing that has shown no signs of promise, that is probably not gonna work. But continuing to iterate and move closer towards your goal and testing out different things, that is a surefire way to almost inevitably lead to success. And, you know, there is a trade off here where it's like, maybe the thing that you start to find traction on is not the thing you wanna create. And so, you know, there are always going to be some trade offs potentially when you're dealing with this kind of creative work.
Nobody is guaranteed an audience. And so we have to find the intersection between the things we want to create and the things that people want to consume. Mhmm. But one of the things, you know, talking about what's resonating now, and also you brought up this point of, like, if you have a show that isn't working, what do you do then? I always think about this, especially if you have low downloads, you have very low risk to do big bold experiments.
And there's one of the most famous copywriters of all time, Eugene Schwartz. He would get hired by companies to come in, and they had an ad running, let's say, in the newspaper, and it was converting at, you know, 1% or something like that. And so he would be brought in to increase the conversion rate by, like, 10% or 20%, which would be great. You know, a big company gets him to come in and increase his profits by 10%. Perfect.
But he was known for actually, like, tripling or quadrupling or quintupling the conversion rates. And basically, his secret was to test big differences is what he called it. And so it's not just iterating on a word here or there in the copy. It's not just tweaking the headline. It's saying, let's just scrap this whole ad that we have and start with a totally different angle and test out this one.
Mhmm. And I think that this is something that more podcasters, if you have been doing your show for a year or two and are just feeling like, man, I have got this out there. I've got this in front of people. I'm proud of the quality of show, and it's just not taking. It could be that this angle to the show does not have the legs that you're looking for, and maybe there is another version of the show, same topic, aimed at the same audience that you're trying to reach right now, but a totally different format, totally different concept that could work.
And so this is something that I think there's a huge opportunity when the stakes are low, when you got, like, a hundred listeners an episode, and it's like, okay. I want more than this, and I don't wanna just, like, get to a 50. I wanna get to 5,000 downloads an episode, And this show format has not proved to me so far that it's capable of getting me there.
Mhmm. Yeah. I was just talking to somebody in Slack about this. His name is Brett. And his existing show is flat. And he's like, what am I going to do about it? And his thought was, wait a second. We've got a bunch of episodes where we talk about AI. But the main focus of the show is not about AI. But what if we repurpose this content for a separate feed?
Let's do a big swing on another show type. But we already have the content. We're gonna just re edit those episodes, put them here, and see if this packaging, which is totally different than this other show, gets more traction. I think it's great. You've already got this existing thing.
It's like, let's try a big swing over here. Let's just try it. See what happens. And my thought because there's some other keywords in this title that I think might even get search traffic. And so it's like, I'd be interested in just switching the title, the keywords, the focus, if that ends up getting more traction. It's a great experiment to try, because he's got a baseline. How fast did this show grow? And then this one over here.
And I think that you don't need to make the full rebrand before you start testing some of these things. And so with the show concept, if you're looking at experimenting with, like, what if we took a totally different approach, a different lens into this topic? You can just write down your show concept. You say, okay. My show name is a show about my topic where in every episode we do x y z.
And that x y z should be something interesting and distinctive and refreshing. And you can just take that sentence and you can start telling that to people. And you can say, hey. It comes up in conversation. They ask, oh, you have a podcast?
You start telling them that. And that's not actually what your current show is, but you start to gauge, like, do I get that eyes light up moment where they're like, oh, that sounds really interesting. And if they say, where do I find that? You say, well, okay. If you can find it here, it's actually under a different name right now.
I'm making some changes. I'm moving to this new format. But now you're like, okay. I've got a data point that people are interested in that. You can, you know, do polls.
You could say to your existing audience, I'm thinking about starting a spin off podcast. I've got these three new ideas I'm thinking about. Which do you like best? And so now you can kind of, like, validate the show concept idea and just see, like, what are people interested in? What are people, like, clicking on when I talk to them?
What are they getting excited about? And then you can do the same thing a little bit within the existing show format. And so without officially changing your concept name, you can just say, hey, let's try some bonus episodes where I'm going to experiment with a different format. And if I get feedback that people like this, if I feel like it's exciting to me, maybe that then kind of subsumes the existing show and I do a proper rebrand. And so you don't need to, like, go all in and pull the trigger on all these changes sight unseen upfront.
You know what that made me think of? Is in the software business, there's this saying that the worst thing that can happen when you launch a new software product is that you get $500 of recurring revenue right away. Because then it's like, oh, I've got customers here. I gotta serve these people. Validates it enough that you're like, okay, there's something here.
But then so many of those businesses don't grow past 500 or a thousand dollars of revenue per month. I think the same thing happens in podcasting. Where people
Yeah.
Put out a show, and all of a sudden they're getting a thousand downloads per month. And they're like, oh, I've got traction here. This is validates that the concept is good. But what they're not seeing is the adjacent possible. I know we have listeners that are working on shows that have had some traction, but aren't achieving the goals that the creator has for that show.
Yep.
And the best thing that they could do is do what you just said. Maybe try a little spin off idea. Just pitch a different idea. It could still even be in the same topic or category. But you give it new packaging.
You give it a new structure. You just try something that's a bigger swing, a different direction, and see what happens. And you might be surprised. And you might just be maintaining this old show just because it's just got the bare minimum of traction. It's like and you think I'll never get more than this.
Like I gotta hold on to this. I gotta try to grow this. Whereas in business and in podcasting and in anything, I think the truth is sometimes you just need to switch it up. You're maintaining something that's actually holding you down.
This reminds me of an anecdote that I've heard about James Clear when he was reformatting and rebranding his newsletter. So now he's got the three two one newsletter. It's been a widely copied format. It's there's a lot that really works about it. He's got, I think, like, 2,000,000, three million, four million subscribers, something like that.
Obviously, his book has played a big role in the newsletter's success, but he used to have a different newsletter format where he published long form essays every week. And he basically put this thought experiment to himself. I believe it was in response to writing the book and realizing that he couldn't spend so much time on the newsletter. And so he asked himself, do I believe that there are infinite possible newsletter variations? There's, like, all these combinations of what could go into a newsletter.
It's like, well, yes, obviously, there are many ways that a newsletter on this topic could exist. If I accept that, how likely do I think it is that I have both the most valuable, highest quality, and least effort combination of those? Mhmm. And it's like, of course not. If there are infinite possible newsletters, there's no way that I have found the perfect version of it.
And so then once you accept that, then it starts to open your eyes to say, okay. Now I know that there are shows that are both probably less effort for me to make, more fun for me to make, easier to grow, more valuable to the listeners. You know, that doesn't give you a road map to how to find them, but it at least opens your mind to saying like, ah, I am not on the best possible version of this thing. There's an easier path. There's something that's better for everybody involved, and maybe I should open my mind to starting to look for potential ideas to chase down or tweaks to make to move towards that.
Yeah. I love that. And it might take a while to test out an idea. That's the hard part about podcasting is, you know, any sort of AB test is gonna take longer. Because it just takes a while to see if a show is resonating. But I think that principle is exactly what people need to be thinking about.
So this is kind of on the podcast specific front. I think the other thing that's interesting is talking to the audience of people who have a podcast for their business. And this is where it gets interesting that we talked a little bit about before how podcasting still has a lot of space when you compare it to other platforms like YouTube, blogging, email. Like podcasting, if you look at some of the data, so we talked about how there were 332,000 active podcasts, and there's a total of maybe, like, three to four to 5,000,000 shows available. But then if you look at YouTube channels, then there are 35 to 40,000,000 active channels.
And so that's, like, 10 times as many active channels as there are total podcasts in existence, so a lot more. Blogs, there are 70 to 80,000,000 active blogs, and that is approximately, from a total pool of 600 plus million total blogs. And so clearly, like, podcasting is not a crowded medium as far as other content creation platforms go. And so I think for people who are creating shows for their businesses, it's like you're looking at what are your other options. If you're creating long form content that is meant to nurture your audience, podcasting is still, I think, a pretty good place to be.
And I think actually what's required is maybe shifting the mentality from this is an audience growth platform where people are going to discover me to one that is more. This is where I'm going to nurture my existing audience and build up that relationship and hopefully kind of accelerate their time to conversion here because they've spent so much time with me and my ideas and my content. Mhmm. That's a bit of a reframe because I think, you know, ten years ago, people started because you could build up a big audience pretty quickly. I don't think that's the case anymore.
But I don't think that that makes podcasting less valuable to your business.
No. No. And I mean, here's the other number we don't know. Is that the conversion rate for listeners to customer might have gone way up in that time. Yep. And so, you know, maybe in the old days, it was easier to build a big audience. Oh, suddenly I've got, you know, 20,000 people listening to the show. But back then, you were converting about, I don't know, let's say a thousand of those to customers every year.
Yep.
And now, you're still doing the show, but now your audience isn't as big as 5,000. So the audience has gone way down. But you're still converting a thousand of those listeners to customers. So, if your goal is, I need to get a thousand customers every year, and the show is still accomplishing that, then you're doing great. Right?
Normally in marketing, you want more traffic at the top of the funnel, ends up giving you more sales. But I just want to point out that that's not necessarily true for every medium. And especially in podcasting, I just have the sense of like Because it's such a long term relationship with the host. I could see Yeah. It's like, yeah.
Maybe you're getting less people at the top of the funnel, but the absolute number of customers that are coming in is the same or growing. And if that's the case, then two thumbs up. It's accomplishing what you want it to.
Yeah. And some of the numbers that I've seen, I've talked to so many people who are, like, coaches, consultants, service providers, where 80 to 90% of their clients listen to the podcast. They may not have discovered them through the podcast, but almost everybody who signs up to work with me listens to the podcast. Often, they're also reading the newsletter, but they do listen to the podcast. They quote it back.
And this is really a small sample size of data, but anecdotally, what I have seen pretty repeatedly is that podcast listeners for those types of businesses convert at, like, four to 8% Mhmm. Which is way higher than the typical like one to 2% in most online marketing platforms.
That, again, if that's your goal, that's the question you should be asking. Is, okay, am I getting enough people converting to customers from this? How often do people mention it when they sign up? If a lot of people are mentioning it, then you're doing great. Like, keep going. Yeah. And don't forget that you might not need as many listeners as you think you do, if your goal is to convert folks to customers.
So kind of like closing out this idea on opportunities. I think we, know, we talked about taking big swings, reinventing things. You know, we have talked about repeatedly throughout this season the opportunity or threat of video. Mhmm. I think there is a countercurrent to ride by doubling down on the craft of creating audio first audio only experiences.
Mhmm. And I think that this is something that it's both blending, becoming a student of the craft of podcasting and the medium of podcasting. What is a great podcast? As well as understanding, like, what is your audience looking for and how can you position create a show that is not trying to compete with YouTube and the type of content that does well on YouTube and offering it a refreshing alternative that is maybe a bit of a reprieve from the noise that exists elsewhere. And so I think that this is one of the opportunities that podcasters have not really taken seriously enough.
I think a certain subset of podcasters takes this really seriously. And I think about, like, the NPRs and the public radio folks, like, this is their bread and butter. But I think there is more opportunity for more, like, indie creators, people who are creating shows for their businesses to really lean into, like, what makes audio special and really double down on that.
Yeah. James Crisland has that quote where he says, Podcasting is something for my ears when my eyes are busy. I think that's great. Was it Michael Osborne that said podcasting is where I go to escape the internet?
Yes.
I love And I think that framing is so great. And again, then as podcast creators, we can lean into that and go, if my competition is this hyperactive, addictive TikTok feed. So people are trying to get, let's say they're trying to get information about the catering business through TikTok and Instagram. Well, what are the disadvantages of that platform? Well, I end up scrolling for hours and hours and hours.
It's very hyper. It's like short form. Those are the disadvantages. Okay. So what can I offer as a podcast creator for people interested in the catering business that they can't get there?
What would the format sound like? And the idea that people are either taking a walk with you, they're taking a drive with you, they're doing some chores with you. That framing, I think, can even help go, okay, what mode are people in right now? And yeah, crafting your show around that. And then putting it right in your podcast marketing.
Hey, if you're tired of bite sized TikTok content, and influencer bros, and you know, all the toxic stuff that's going on over here, this is a reprieve over here. I've designed this show to be a calm place where we can really dig into a topic at length. If that's for you, take a walk with me as we talk about the catering business. You know, that's, I think, an underrated approach.
I think just to bring it back to that idea of, you know, what will resonate now, what will cut through now, what will land with people now. The thing for me is, like, podcasting is many things. It's a a medium that's made up of, like, there's certainly the entertainment aspect. But I also think that maybe more than any short form channel or video channel, like, podcasting is a medium that thrives on ideas and big ideas and discussing big ideas. And I think there is always room.
People are always hungry for the next big idea. And so I think that that's something that always cuts through as well. And Mhmm. That can be something within your micro niche, or that can be something much bigger. But thinking about, like, what is the big idea that this show is built on that nobody else is quite understanding, nobody else is quite articulating in the way that I feel it needs to, and then marrying that with some kind of show format or concept that is listenable, that is attractive, that gets people to notice it.
And I suspect in the next few years, we're gonna see lots more creativity, lots more originality, lots more iterating on what a podcast is and what creators are doing with the medium, and hopefully a lot more listeners along with it.
Yeah. I hope folks had a few moments in here where they were inspired to think about something or go do something. Because the answer to growth, like, how do I grow the show, is creativity. It's like, how can I get creative in the space I'm in?