Voice to the Voiceless: Part 8
3 Ways to Fund a Podcast
After several weeks of looking at how podcasts are formed and structured, it’s time to take a look at how they are funded. In a capitalistic society, it’s difficult to do anything without money. And the thing is, podcasts can be profitable. In general there are 3 major directions to go in order to start a podcast.
1. Kickstarter Campaigns and Crowdfunding
With the rise of the internet and further connection of the world, asking a massive audience for funds for a project (aka crowdfunding) has become more viable than ever. Kickstarter is a global corporation that launched in 2009 with the intention to help raise support for artists, inventors, podcasters, filmmakers, and more.
99% Invisible — “a podcast about all the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about” — is the perfect example of how money can be made by depending on the listeners. The show used Kickstarter to fund their third and fourth seasons, raising over $500,000 in support for their projects. With this revenue that far surpassed their original goals, the podcast was able to hire on a lot of talented people who added even more content and creativity to a podcast that was already making waves for its uniqueness. This increased activity continued to grow their listener support between their seasons, increasing from 5,000 to 11,000 backers for their projects. Because of the support of their loyal fans, the show is able to pay for their expenses and has become one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes.
Other platforms such as Patreon have similar goals: helping “every creator in the world achieve a sustainable income.” This is a place for novelists, poets, YouTubers, and more.
Of course, this kind of support can be just as easy as putting a PayPal and/or Donate button on your website page. But getting listeners to stay around and actually help is not as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of things that go into making an idea and podcast successful, which we don’t have room to discuss here. However, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a fantastic book called The Tipping Point that discusses some of the statistics and research that has been done to discover what makes an idea stick.
2. Advertising and Sponsors
Since podcasting is so similar to radio, it should be obvious that advertising is just as well-paying. As popular YouTubers have also discovered, advertisers will pay good money to have their brand represented to hundreds of people.
A common issue with radio and YouTube advertisements however is that listeners tune them out, change the channel, or skip them altogether. Podcasting can often have a lot of the same issues, but also has new potential.
One possible advantage of podcasting over radio and YouTube is how personal the experience is. While radio can often feels a bit broad in its reach and YouTube can feel a bit amateur, podcasts frequently feel like they are in the same room as the listener. The hosts are friendly and their voices are so close to the microphone that it often makes the experience more intimate than other platforms. According to the second half of Episode 2 of the BBC podcast The First Ten Years, this intimacy can build trust, and so when advertisers ask podcasters to represent their product, listeners are more likely to listen because it is the voice of someone they trust — not to mention that it can be less jarring.
However, this isn’t always possible, and advertising is frequently complicated by other factors, including measuring systems to figure out when and why people tune out, etc.
Panoply — “the people behind Slate’s award-winning audio network” and one of the world’s first podcast networks — has done a fair amount of research into the advertising world in order to make their long list of podcasts both available to the public and also productive for themselves and their partners. But none of this work is easy.
“The process of uploading, distributing, and tracking a podcast requires fluency on a variety of platforms; plus, the process of inserting ads dynamically into downloadable podcasts is both hard and expensive.” — The Podcast Purveyor
So even though podcasting has the potential to be something new, it’s still growing into itself — so to speak — and even the bigger networks and companies haven’t gotten this all figured out yet.
3. Live Events
Once a podcaster has a name for themselves, they can go on tour. This is especially true for comedy podcasts and the like that can put on an entire live performance. This way, the podcaster can make money selling tickets.
This might be more difficult for podcasts such as those I have covered in this project. StoryCorps obviously works better with its online interaction and community interest and contributions, and would have difficulty moving to a live performance. The Story Trek and Scene on Radio both have similar problems since the former is focused on travel and the latter is research heavy.
However, there are podcasts that do, such as NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, a weekly hour-long comedy quiz program that they record live. They also sell tickets to these events — some of which travel around the country — as does The Moth, and even This American Life.
Obviously this format isn’t for everyone, but it is another way to make money
Conclusion
This is not an exhaustive list of how to earn money from podcasting, but these are the major players in the podcasting sphere. Another source — which is common for the funding of projects such as Scene On Radio — include Community Development Grants from colleges and/or communities.
Obviously none of these are going to be particularly easy as a beginner. They take time, effort, and the spreading around and promotion of the podcast project by word of mouth and/or tweeting and Facebook. There is no easy way to make money from a podcast, but it is possible, and there are people who have been able to quit their day jobs in order to make their podcasts full time. But they had to make their podcasts first.
