Last week at Podcast Movement Evolutions 2020, I paid a lot of attention to the conversations regarding podcast advertising as a business model. Mostly because of the new moves in podcast ad tech (something I’ll dig into in future episodes) that are increasingly interesting to my ex-ad-exec brain. But also to better understand where the threshold is today for having a show with an audience size big enough to be attractive to advertisers.

So what’s big enough to be worthy of consideration? For many years, the threshold tossed around the community has been 5,000. No, not 5,000 total downloads over the life of your show. 5,000 downloads of a single episode of your show after it’s been live for 30 days.

But according to the people I spoke with and saw on stage last week, that 5,000 download number is woefully out of date. The new threshold floated around was double that. Or quadruple that. Or in the case of one big direct response advertiser who talked about the success his company is having with podcast advertising, it’s 10x that. His team won’t even consider booking ads with shows that have less 50,000 downloads per episode after 30 days.

So how much money is that? In the episode, I do a basic formula to show that each download of your show can be worth a dime. So if you have 5,000 downloads, that’s $500. And it’s hard to run a commercially viable business with a revenue stream of $500. $5000 is better… but you still need extra revenue sources to make that a going concern.

So here’s a radical thought. Assuming your show is not yet at that level (most aren’t), and further assuming that you aren’t financially ruined if you eschew the $50 or $100 a month of ad revenue you might get from some of the self-service podcast ad providers… 

What if you focused on growing your show through word of mouth? 

 No appeals to donate. No appeals to rate or review. Only a single call-to-action, repeated in every single episode for a year, that sincerely asks the listener to tell one friend about the show each and every time they listen.

So let’s try it. If you got this far, you're either a working podcaster or you know working podcasters. Would you find one of them -- just one -- today and tell them about my show, Podcast Pontifications? Shoot them a text, an email, or send them a DM right now and tell them to listen. Thanks in advance!

----

Share this with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/is-selling-ads-on-your-podcast-worth-a-dime

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is aimed at the working podcaster. The