How much is your podcast worth?

‘What is my podcast worth?’

This is a surprisingly hard question to find an answer to. If I want to find out the value of my house, I can do that within a minute. My old camera? 30 seconds. My car? Well, I don’t have one, but I imagine it would be easy. My dog? You can’t put a price on love.

But try and find any information on valuations for podcasting, or indeed the simple act of buying or selling a show, and the internet is deeply unfriendly. ‘Buying and selling podcasts’ brings up scores of DIY business shows, whilst the best that ‘podcast valuation’ gets you are a few articles asking if you can make a living podcasting (yes, you can). But establishing what the real-world value of your podcast is should be hugely important to us as an industry, in developing our shows, pitching to investors, and, maybe one day, exchanging one of our babies for that sweet, sustaining nectar: cash.

I have argued for a long time that podcasting, as an industry, needs to work out how it wants to be economically sustainable, even profitable. And people around me seem to be waking up to this fact — more and more, I sit down with podcasters who are clearly unhappy with the advertising rates offered by most of the key agencies, or by the idea that you have to get your audience to do a Patreon whip round if you want to feed yourself. It still feels like the…