The Transcript

A Much Better Revenue Model for Podcasting

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Robert Bruce: Jerod, are you there?

Jerod Morris: I am here.

Robert Bruce: The last time you and I met — this was on this show, which is New Rainmaker with Brian Clark — he was not here, and we kind of made a thing of it. So it’s New Rainmaker with Brian Clark, with Robert Bruce, and with Jerod Morris. Now, he’s here. Queue the Empire Strikes Back music, right?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Do we have a license for that because that would be awesome? Every time you introduce me, Imperial March.

Robert Bruce: Yes.

Brian Clark: That would be awesome.

Robert Bruce: Jerod Morris, VP of Rainmaker.FM. Brian Clark, Founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media. I’m Robert Bruce, also VP of Rainmaker.FM. You see, here’s the other thing. I’ve been thinking about titles.

Brian Clark: Yeah, both of your titles are stupid.

Robert Bruce: Well I found something. I don’t know where this came from — Silicon Valley Job Title Generator.

Brian Clark: Oh boy. This is going to get worse, real fast.

Robert Bruce: It’s really something. It’s like ‘Innovation Pioneer.’ Let’s see, ‘Engagement Superintendent,’ ‘Mobile Intimacy Evangelist.’ This is one of my favorites ‘Social Media Commander.’

Brian Clark: Nice.

Jerod Morris: Very nice.

Robert Bruce: ‘In-House Social Media Savant, on and on and on. ‘Reddit Directors.’

Brian Clark: We should make Jerod the ‘Rainmaker Education Savant.’

Jerod Morris: OK.

Robert Bruce: It sounds like he is going for it.

Brian Clark: Give or take the savant part.

Robert Bruce: Alright, gentlemen, we have been called here to discuss something. We’re calling this episode ‘A Way Better Revenue Model for Podcasting.’ Jerod, you have been up to some interesting things in terms of this podcast network. You’re pushing the envelope, sending out the first volley, if you will, for what may be coming for other shows and the network as a whole. Thanks for coming on. Brian and I are just going to grill you for a few minutes if that’s OK with you.

Jerod Morris: Perfect. Nothing I love better.

The Default (yet Difficult) Revenue Model for Podcasts

Robert Bruce: I wanted to frame this conversation around the idea of, when you think about podcast revenue, when you think of how podcasts have been monetized in the past, what’s the first thing that comes up?

Jerod Morris: Ads, sponsorships.

Robert Bruce: How’s that going for folks out there?

Jerod Morris: I think some people are having success with it if they have really big numbers, but for the most part, it’s pretty disappointing. Number one, the metrics haven’t been there to really give advertisers numbers that they can trust, so I think that they’ve been reluctant to pay well without having those metrics. That’s certainly something that, in the podcast industry, we’re looking to improve on. It just hasn’t been there, and I think people have left feeling like they’re not getting the revenue that they feel like they should be getting for what they’re investing — time and energy in producing their podcast.

Robert Bruce: Metrics are really interesting. We’ve had a lot of discussion and reworking of how we’re looking at our own metrics on Rainmaker.FM. Brian, we’ve had a couple of conversations with Chris Garrett about this, and we made the decision early on that we wanted to land on the conservative side of downloads and plays and things like that.

Brian Clark: Yeah, there’s all sorts of intentional and unintentional ways that your download stats can be artificially inflated. For our network itself, Rainmaker.FM, but also for the Rainmaker Platform and how it counts downloads, we wanted to make sure that it was legitimate because there are issues of caching and all sorts of things that can create duplicate downloads that aren’t real.

I had a brief conversation with Tom Webster of Edison Research. They are big, big, big in the podcasting and podcasting metrics. I got him and Chris Garrett together so that Tom could actually informally audit our download procedure. He gave us a thumbs up on how we approached it. So, good news there.

Robert Bruce: Advertising, definitely, like you said, Jerod, it’s the first thing that comes up when we think about money and revenue in relation to podcasting. Frankly, it goes back over a hundred years into radio. In one sense, it can seem like an easy way to get revenue going. Sometimes it can, but it’s really interesting because it’s a little deceptive that way.

There’s a lot of work that goes into developing relationships with advertisers. You’re talking about recurring billing, all kinds of things that add into the mix, which is totally doable. We’ve decided that we’re not going to look at that for the time being. Advertising has definitely been front and center when you think about these things with podcasting and money. Brian, we’ve been talking the last few episodes about something else, and that’s the ‘logged in’ experience.

The Very Profitable Future of Audio Content

Brian Clark: Logged in experience is an overall online marketing trend no matter what your business model is. In this context, especially with the way you led in with the episode with the dream of sponsorship and advertising, how it turns out to be harder and sometimes less lucrative than people were expecting. That takes me right back to 2007 when I was basically making the same argument to bloggers that, instead of relying on AdSense — otherwise known as ‘webmaster welfare’ — that they needed to create something to sell.

Robert Bruce: I don’t think I’ve heard that one yet.

Brian Clark: Oh, really? That s an old one.

Robert Bruce: All these years, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that. Wow.

Brian Clark: Yeah, online courses were the thing that we were teaching people how to do back then. It’s as true today as it was then except more so, because, again, this $107 billion in online education that will get sold this year alone, that’s staggering. That’s all happened in the nine years or so since we said, “Hey, this is what’s coming.” Let’s just cut to the chase. One of the best ways to monetize any content, but especially audio, is an online course.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, we have a real-time case study, Jerod, which is why you are here with us today. That is that you and Jon Nastor, your co-host of The Showrunner podcast, which is at Showrunner.FM if anybody wants to take a look — just launched The Showrunner Podcasting Course. Tell us briefly what that is, and then we’ll get into some nuts and bolts about how you actually built this thing.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, the course — basically, Jon and I have, over the last four or five years, gotten a lot of experience hosting podcasts — developing them, launching them, running them. Obviously, through that experience, we’ve gained a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge.

So as we started talking about putting together The Showrunner podcast — and it seemed like a perfect fit for him to be the co-host of that — creating a course and sharing with people what we’ve learned just seemed like such a natural fit. There are so many people out there who want to start a podcast, and they are maybe hesitant about it for a number of reasons.

Maybe they’re not sure about the future of on-demand audio, or they fear getting behind the microphone, or they fear how they can use it for real business purpose, on and on. They fear that the technical part will be too simple. What we’ve learned just by doing is that none of those are reasons not to start. There are so many reasons to start that if we can, through what we learn, help people just gain more confidence, gain the simple knowledge that they need to just go out there and start, then there are going to be so many benefits that people find from it.

Really, a lot of the early feedback that we’re getting from people is just loving that little push to get into it and realizing that it’s not this really difficult, hard, complicated thing. Obviously, it requires work ethic and commitment and a lot of that stuff, but that’s stuff that anybody can bring to any project. Instead of podcasting being this thing over here that only radio people, or only a certain type of people can do, we really want to show people how anybody can do it and use it as part of an integrated content marketing experience for their audience.

Brian Clark: All right. Jerod, I’ve created a lot of online courses in my day, dating back to 2002, paid and free even before Copyblogger. And quite a few since then. Mr. Bruce has been involved, so naturally, we micromanaged you during the creation of the Showrunner course. Is that correct?

Jerod Morris: No, you didn’t, which was phenomenal. Part of what made this such an energizing and just educational experience for me, and for Jon, was just the freedom to go create it — to really, as podcasters and thinking about what would have helped us when we started, really thinking of it from that perspective and allowing that to inform how we developed it. But, no, in terms of micromanagement, there was absolutely none of that, at all.

Brian Clark: Probably, you might have appreciated some. I don’t know.

Robert Bruce: Maybe a little help, guys.

Brian Clark: The reason why I find this particular episode to be so interesting to me, because we haven’t really got to talk about this much — you were working hard on it. You got it out. It’s in the pilot phase right now. We’ll talk about that a little bit more — but I really want to hear about your experience because you just got thrown out there like anyone else. No more guidance other than what’s been written over the years by us I guess.

You talked to Nastor, I remember you guys had a conversation when you found out he was joining Rainmaker.FM with Hack the Entrepreneur. Start there and talk about how you two decided you wanted to do this course.

How Jerod Built an Online Course from Scratch

Jerod Morris: I think two things happened simultaneously. When we started Rainmaker.FM, I knew that I wanted to do a podcast about podcasting to share what I had learned. That’s how The Showrunner podcast was born. Jon had, had ideas about doing a course. He’d been thinking about it, so when we came together and talked about it, it seemed like the perfect fit. We already knew we were going to have the podcast. We had the seeds of an idea for what to do with a course. It was just the perfect fit.

We knew that we could use the podcast, obviously, to start to build awareness, to build a connection with people, to demonstrate our knowledge and our experience that would then, obviously, lead the way for people getting into the course. That was the idea, and we were extremely excited about it. Then, of course, as soon as we got to go ahead to do the course, there was that moment of, “OK, what do we do next?” Now we’ve got this idea. Now we’ve got to take it forward, but that’s really what happened.

There’s a lot of potential there for it to maybe not work out as well as you hope, working with a new person and that kind of thing. But I think we immediately found out that we had really good chemistry, both in terms of hosting a show together and doing work together — which are two different types of chemistry. Then, also, just that our ideas and philosophies on it were pretty similar. There were some differences that I think are instructive but pretty similar on how we wanted to approach doing it. That really helped us to build that momentum early on.

Brian Clark: What were you thinking about in terms of what you wanted to be in the course. I know you’ve been looking around at other courses, and Jon has as well. But what were some of your ideas in terms of the curriculum, at least to start, because we’ll talk later about how this will grow into other things.

Why Podcasts Are Such a Great Fit with Online Courses

Jerod Morris: There’s a few different ways that you can take a course on podcasting. There are some out there that have focused a lot on the technical side and getting real heavy into the audio and going for that audio file type. We knew right off the bat that we weren’t going to go to that route because neither Jon nor I is that person. Obviously, we understand the importance of having a sound that is good enough. We know the basics of that. I think people need to know those, and we do teach those in the course.

But we also wanted to be much more about the theory of podcasting, the actual execution of it, the planning of it, and how it integrates into a bigger plan, a bigger philosophy. What we’ve both found is that, with any podcast that we’ve created, there always comes that moment — you get maybe 10 episodes in or 15, 20 episodes in — you get to this point where to do the next one, it becomes a little bit more difficult. You hit that dip a little bit.

What we really wanted to do is really teach people how to get over that because you’ve got a bigger goal in mind, because you’ve really learned how to connect with an audience, and they keep you coming back — really try and teach people how to do it over the long term. Not just get set up to produce episode one really well, but get people motivated, excited, and understanding what it takes to do it over the long term.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, you and I talked a couple of weeks ago about your idea for integrating the public show with the course itself. I think that would be useful for people to hear.

Jerod Morris: It’s funny, yeah. I actually just had a conversation today about how we’re going to change up the podcast a little bit more to do that. The whole idea of the public showrunner was obviously, to the podcast The Showrunner, again, is to demonstrate what we know and to give people that free value, and make sure that the podcast itself obviously, not everything is a big call to action for the course. It is valuable in and of itself. Anybody who just wants some really good...