On this week’s episode – the last of the season – we hear from James Cridland, Podnews editor and radio futurologist. Podnews is a daily email newsletter about everything podcasting, and is one of the smartest setups we’ve seen in terms of its supporter structure, monetisation and automations.
James tells us how he’s found the sweet spot between his technical, editorial and audio skills, why classifieds were a surprising success story for him, and the balance between newsletter growth and revenue.
In the news roundup the team discusses the launch of the Guardian’s dedicated cooking app Feast, and asks what adjacent apps like cooking or games platforms offer to the parent brand.
Here are some highlights from the episode, lightly edited for clarity:
Prioritising Podnews’ newsletter workflow
I started by thinking, what is the quickest way that I can produce a daily podcast newsletter? I do a lot of speaking overseas, a lot of travel, my theory at the time was that I would be having a full-time day job too. I need to be able to write something in the evening when I’ve got this spare time.
The time that it comes out is to do with the workflow of making it fit with the rest of the things that I was planning on doing during the day. The format that it is in is to do with the workflow, because what I didn’t want to do is to rewrite a press release and make every single news story its own webpage, because madness lies there! The whole point of it is that it’s very short, and the workflow is as easy and as quick for me to do as possible so that I can focus on the creative side.
The creative side is the thinking up of stories, to write the reporting on particular stories, that’s much more creative. Whereas laying something out to appear in a newsletter is not a creative job at all, and it’s the sort of job that I didn’t really want to end up doing. [My setup] is very much focused on creativity, and trying to cut the amount of button-pushing down to the bare minimum that I can possibly manage.
Multiple newsletter revenue streams
The way that the revenue works now, a third of my revenue comes from classified advertising. A third of my revenue comes from supporters on Patreon that will support what I do either as a company – and you get a logo [in Podnews] – or as a personal supporter. Then the final third comes from sponsors and advertisers who are in the newsletter, and I have someone who helps me with sales for that who’s based in the US.
It’s so helpful to have three very different revenue streams, which allows me to report openly and honestly about individual companies, even if they’re advertising… You really need to spread where you’re getting revenue from, to make sure that you can weather storms in terms of less sponsorship money, or less supporter money, or whatever it might be. That was a really important part for me.
The reason why classifieds exist is that the pricing model starts very cheaply – so it starts at $29 per insertion. But the way that I priced it is the same way as airline tickets. So the more that are sold, the higher [the price] gets. I don’t have a maximum amount of ads that I will accept, but clearly you’re probably not going to buy the sixth, or the seventh, when it’s $4-5000 per insertion.
The seemingly rocky podcast market
I think we’re seeing a US industry resizing, absolutely. One of the things that I’ve tried to do with the Podnews newsletter is to tell a global story. [The North American market] over the last year or so, we’ve seen a lot of boom and bust as interest rates have risen, there’s no more free money. I think that has been incredibly painful. But I’ve not seen that in Europe, I’ve not seen that in the UK, I’ve not seen that in other parts – we’ve seen still an awful lot of M&A activity here in Australia.
There’s a tale of two industries at the moment. There’s the US, which probably overheated. And then there’s the rest of the world where slow and steady wins the race. We seem to be seeing nice increases in the amount of people who are tuning into podcasts, and the amount of revenue and advertising spend which is going into podcasts as well.
I am not very interested in the total amount of reach that podcasts have any more. We know that lots of people listen to podcasts, that’s fine. That’s now a given. I am much more interested in time spent listening because time spent listening is the thing that makes money. And if we can double time spent listening, even if we don’t double anything else, we double the amount of money coming into our industry.
There isn’t really the data out there that shows time spent listening, partially because it’s much harder to calculate. But I would love to see more data on that.
The news round-up
The Guardian has launched a subscription-based recipe app called Feast.
- The app will contain recipes from The Guardian’s food writers, and is available for £2.99 a month.
- They’re not wholly following in the New York Times’ footsteps though as The Guardian’s standalone Puzzles app is scheduled to shutter on April 30th, with all puzzle content being moved to the main Guardian Live app.
- “You can’t predict the news. Some days it’s crazy. Some days, it’s completely a snoozefest,” Mike Hume, former editor of emerging products at The Washington Post told Aftermath. “But you’re always going to have a crossword puzzle to play. In that way, you have these elements that are really good about building daily habits.”
- To what extent do these apps even act as an ‘on-ramp’ for news content, and do they need to?
For a full day of publisher podcast and newsletter best-practice, from what publishers are doing with paid podcasts to harnessing AI in newsletters, make sure you’ve got June 12th in your diary. Tickets are now available for the Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Summit at a pre-agenda rate until the end of April.
