"How does podcasting fit into your content ecosystem?"

Podcasting is near the bottom of my funnel.

I started podcasting in 2018. As a podcast fan, of course I should have my own. And my winning personality would, obviously, attract and grow an audience!

My cohost and I published 219 episodes over three years, and, as far as our hosting provider (Transistor) can tell, we attracted ~145 subscribers.

And I'm sure those 145 subscribers didn't just stumble into our podcast – we probably attracted them with our marketing efforts.

Thankfully, the Creator Science podcast has done much better, with more than 20,000 subscribers and 2 million downloads.

But here's the hard truth about podcasting:

Podcasts don't attract an audience.

There are exceptions, but most of those exceptions started podcasting in the late 2000s or early 2010s when there were FEWER podcasts, and Apple's New & Noteworthy could change a show's trajectory overnight.

Over the last few years, we've seen the first year-over-year decline in new podcasts started. An 80% drop from 2020 to 2022:

It begs the question: Is podcasting declining, or might this be the best opportunity to start podcasting since 2018?

While a podcast won't attract a new audience to you, it is still quite useful.

At the highest level, a chart-topping podcast can make a fortune.

• Joe Rogan: $250M with Spotify
• Alex Cooper: $60M with Spotify and then $125M with SiriusXM
• SmartLess: Est. $100M+ with SiriusXM

That's just on exclusive partnerships. Sponsorship is another story and can be even more profitable.

On Colin & Samir, Scott Galloway said:

"Income inequality is out of control in podcasting...I would bet the top 200 do 95% of the revenue. Once you get into the top 200 or top 100, these become multi-million dollar businesses."

But he's not talking about the top 100 or 200 in a category – he's talking about top 100 or 200 of ALL podcasts.

He went on to say that his own podcasts are a $15-20 million/year business.

But we're talking about celebrities and the top .00033% of podcasts here. From a mathematical perspective, that's statistically unlikely to be you.

I don't want to kill your dreams – you're welcome to prove me wrong. As I said, podcasting is still quite useful — but how it serves our business will likely look different from that of those with top 100 podcasts.

Podcasts deepen relationships.

This is an intimate medium where someone is spending a lot of time with you right in their ears. We can't help but feel more connected with people we engage with in this way, and, over the long term, this builds a lot of trust.

So, to (finally) revisit the original question, podcasting is near the bottom of the funnel in my content ecosystem.

The more someone listens to your show, the more trust you build with them. And the more trust you build with someone, the more likely they'll become a customer or client.

When people apply to join The Lab, I ask them how they heard about it. Most often, they mention the podcast. By that measure, podcasting has a massive impact on my bottom line.

So you want someone to become a podcast listener quickly – but it's a big ask for someone to spend 45-60 minutes engaging with a piece of your content. People won't do that unless they have reason to believe it's worthwhile.

Directing attention from social media to a podcast is challenging.

It's like saying, "Hey, you just consumed a few seconds of my content – how does another hour sound?"

It's not impossible.

I recently posted a carousel on LinkedIn where I shared 9 impactful quotes from the conversation in visual form, and it 4x'd my typical content performance.

Not only that, but that carousel appears to have had a material impact on the number of streams (actual listen time) for the podcast episode, too:

But it's unreliable.

I focus instead on directing social media attention towards email (a newsletter or email-based course). From there, you can develop trust in email and have an open line of communication to continue to try and earn your first podcast listen.

One way to do that is to take an insight from your podcast, use that as inspiration for your email, and end the email with a CTA to check out the rest of the conversation.

Video clips have NOT had the impact on podcast listening I expected. While they can be high-performing content on a specific platform (Reels, TikTok, Shorts, etc.), they do not seem to convert at a high rate to actual new listeners.

So, I would take a different approach if I dedicated resources to short-form podcast clips. Short-form clips on Instagram would be used to grow my Instagram audience so that I could get them to email (and then, eventually, the podcast).

It seems roundabout because it is. Trying to transfer attention from text or video to audio is just inefficient.

YouTube has been huge for reaching new viewers. We‘ve attracted 5 million views in two years, while the podcast has gotten 2 million downloads in four. I'm investing more and more into our YouTube podcast, but I think of it as a completely separate product from our audio feed because even those viewers are tough to convert to podcast listeners.

In a recent episode, we asked viewers to share in the comments how they listen to the podcast. The majority of responses mentioned listening on mobile – often in their pocket:

But when I tried to tell them about our audio show (that publishes more often)....

Brutal, right?

But I relearn this lesson all the time: people like what they like. If they like Instagram, they want to stay on Instagram. If they like YouTube, they want to stay on YouTube. And if they like podcasting, they want to stay in podcasting.

The best way to gain new listeners is from another audio audience. If you can be a guest on another show or do a two-part episode where you air half on each others' feeds, that will be your most efficient conversion to new listeners.

Here's the bottom line: building a podcast audience is hard. I'd argue it's the hardest audience to build, but it's also the most valuable audience you can build.

So, if you know that you want to be a podcaster, do it, and don't stop. Fight the good fight, think long term, and grow that thing brick by brick.

But recognize that it will play a middle- or bottom-of-the-funnel role in your business, not the top.

Want to learn everything we know about building a podcast audience on YouTube? My producer, Conor, and I created a comprehensive, 4.5-hour masterclass.

Podcast Like A YouTuber

A comprehensive masterclass teaching you the strategy we used to attract 105,000 subscribers and 5,000,000 views (in just two years)!

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