Content Business Week — Monetizing Content

Quotes

• “I think early on there is a lot of excitement, a lot of hope and a strong desire to get to monetization. That obviously takes time, effort, commitment, and consistency and it can be easy to not strike the monetization early on to lose that hope and enthusiasm and then flame out.” -Todd “That’s an important point and Todd, offline this is what you called ‘Smokin’ the Hope-ium.’ A lot of times people start with grandiose dreams of creating a content business then they are faced with a reality that it requires consistency and dedication over a long period of time.” -Ben “The point here is you got to be consistent. You have to build a voice, and trust, and a following and then once you’re building an audience you have a couple of different ways to think about monetization. In the podcast game, it’s called ‘pod-fading.” -Ben “Our turning point for monetization was after we were confident that we had an audience and we were offering solid and consistent value.” -Todd “The idea was I was going to create content to build professional relationships and I would hopefully sell those people consulting services. When the MarTech podcast grew quickly, I felt like there was a better opportunity for us to monetize the content and sponsorships. So we waited and waited until we got to 10,000 downloads. That was the key milestone.” -Ben “There are a couple of different ways that you can monetize content and not every platform is going to be the same. There is sponsorship, our model where we are directly reaching out to brands that want to reach our audience and we are negotiating our own deals. We are doing advertorial content, we’re able to do some performance marketing on behalf of the brands to promote our content.” -Ben “Most people in the podcast industry are monetizing on a CPM basis. Very similar to how you would monetize a website if you are going to put display advertising on it, video if you are going to be on YouTube. I have a problem with a CPM model for podcasting.” -Ben“If you think about what a 25 to 50 dollars CPM means, that means you’re going to get to 10,000 downloads a month and you are going to make $250 per month. I am not going to run a podcast for $250 a month. When we started the MarTech podcast we were able to generate $25,000 of revenue in a month that sold all of our inventory for the first quarter. So there’s a big difference between what you could sell if you understand who your audience is and what value you can bring to them.” -Ben“We have gotten to the point now, at the MarTech podcast where we could say, I know that we can reach tens of thousands of marketers, we can get them to listen to your content for a hundred hours and we can reach them with 75,000 ad impressions and 1% of people we reach are going to end up on your website. That allows us to sell for more than ‘We’ve got a podcast that has 10,000 downloads, would you like to buy them.’ So think very much about who you’re reaching, who’s interested in reaching, how impactful of a message can you deliver, and how often can you deliver that message.” -Ben“As you are thinking about growing your audience, focus on growing the audience. Understand who they are, understand what type of content they like, understand what their needs are and you build the products and services around their needs.” -Ben“For us, marketers listen to the show so we are providing access to brands that want to reach marketers, mostly B2B SaaS companies and they get access to our audience in exchange for sponsorship revenue.” -Ben