Your Audience Is Your Asset: Treat Them Like One

It's taken you a while, but you have finally built up an actual audience.

Well, it's time to recognize your work, recognize your engagement, and quit underselling your audience.

Welcome to Profit from youm Podcast.

Proven strategies to Turn listeners into a Livelihood.

Here's your host, Dave Jackson.

Hey, I found two examples that I wanted to bring up to you and talk about a couple things about especially programmatic ads.

From my chair.

I put out an article not too long ago saying how the early days of podcasting, you could make decent money with banner ads because not everybody had a website and, you know, supply and demand.

And then everybody got a website and banner ads went in the toilet.

And I said, you know, right now, this was, I don't know, a couple months ago.

I said, you can make okay money with programmatic ads.

Doesn't work for 90% of people, but, you know, you can get Mountain Dew money.

And some people said, oh, that's just Dave trying to be clickbaity and pay no attention to the man, you know, and it's really not that I'm a genius here by any means.

It's, again, sublime demand.

It used to be you could get decent, and when we talk about CPMs, that's price per 1000 downloads.

And again, the prices were higher when not everybody could do dynamic ads, but, you know, now everybody can.

And I saw my personal CPMs go from five to three to a dollar.

So you get a thousand downloads and you get a dollar.

Now, I saw a post on Reddit, so take it for what it's worth.

It was on Reddit, but somebody saying they were on Podbean and they used to make again okay money, and their CPM now was 38 cents.

That's really sad if that's actually true.

And so there are things to think about.

My buddy Steve Stewart has a great quote.

He says, don't sell your audience to a sponsor.

Sell a sponsor on your audience.

And I was like, dude, that is a bumper sticker and a T shirt.

And that's really what we're not doing.

Well, we need to build that connection with your audience.

You could use something like Heartbeat or Circle or School to have some sort of community.

You can show emails, you can show reviews, something to show that when I ask for something, that my audience moves.

Now, that means you have to only accept sponsors that fit and sponsors that you would recommend.

My buddy Glenn Hebert over@the horseradionetwork.com he said, I've turned down a lot of money because they sent me the product And I'm like, I'm not recommending this.

That's integrity and that's how you build trust.

And I love Sam Sethi from POD News Weekly Review because we're all talking about, you know, the amp accords and measuring and all this stuff.

And nobody has answered this question.

And that is, why are we holding podcasting up to a higher standard than we do for radio and tv when we have report after report after report that the audience trusts us more than radio and tv?

James Cridland asked Dan Granger, who I like, and he said, why are we doing this?

And he didn't answer the question.

He said, well, we don't want to be right like radio, they, they're a melting iceberg.

And I'm like, well, that's an answer.

But he didn't answer the question.

And so I just have two examples here of shows.

One is called mostly technical.

And here again, they have an engaged audience and they're not measuring CPMs, they're not measuring, you know, codes.

They charge $1,000 for four episodes, they're selling it by the episode.

And you can do a one time purchase or you can subscribe monthly.

And they say rather than traditional one and done podcast ads.

Our format of short reoccurring ad reads, ensure maximum brand recognition for our audience.

Your link will also be included in the show notes for the episode and your sponsor.

And this goes on basically their show and their YouTube channel.

So that's one and then this one.

I am familiar with this show.

When I used to work at Libsyn, they were on Libsyn and they have, it's called Acquired.

And what's really interesting, this is where when we talk about not selling out your audience, right, you sell the sponsor on how great your audience is.

And so they have, and I'll put links to this, their partnership kit.

So again, it's not a sponsor, you're a partnership.

And they have a graph showing how they get.

You know, if we go back to 2022, they were getting about 200,000 downloads.

And now if you go up to 2026, they're getting up about 1.4 million.

And they talk about the audience.

It's 76% tech, finance and investing, 71% are founders and aspiring founders, and 35% are C level or VIP level executives.

And they go through and they show what percentage are CEOs and et cetera, et cetera.

They know their audience.

And if you think about it, if you've got a product for executives, this is the show you want to get on and they go over their approach and how they pick sponsors, et cetera, et cetera, how they like to do storytelling.

And when you go down to the part and you, it's.

It's a long kit that explains the different packages and seasons and such and such.

You can see where they are sold out.

As I record this, It's August of 2026 and the next ad is in 2028.

So 2027 completely sold out.

And if you want to buy that one remaining mid roll in spring of 2028, it will cost you $2.9 million.

That's amazing.

And then after your ad is run for whatever period that you bought, it's, you can basically, they're gonna wipe out.

This is dynamically inserted and they will wipe it out.

And then if you want to, you can be inserted into the back catalog for anywhere from $900,000 to 1.5 million.

Amazing.

It's not CPM.

It's not programmatic.

It's by the episode, by, you know, exact or et cetera.

And here's the thing.

You know how they're measuring success?

My guess would be when somebody says they're out on the golf course and they say, hey, I heard about you on the acquired show, that's probably how they're measuring it, or you're selling more product.

It's an easy way to do that.

Now, right now we're wasting time because they got to make sure not only did we sell more product, but where did we sell it and on what episode, at what time and who bought it and what was their age.

And we just want to.

And I'm just here to tell you, I think this is going to be the way people go is either a, because it just doesn't work, the CPM model doesn't work, and it's a race to the bottom.

So again, I'm going to read that little clip from my buddy, Steve Stewart.

Don't sell your audience to the sponsor.

Sell the sponsor on your audience.

But that is a key.

You have to have an audience.

And so many people like, Well, I got 32 people.

All right, that's a classroom.

Yeah, it's an audience, but it's a classroom.

You might need to work a little more on that.

And growing your audience is based on having an amazing show.

And today's episode is good.

I'm giving you information that you probably didn't know.

But was it amazing?

I don't know.

Are you going to share this with somebody and go, whoa, did you know somebody's making millions of dollars on their podcast ad.

Maybe.

But I think a lot of times we mistake pretty good for amazing and it's not.

There are two words for two different reasons.

Because for you to grow your show, almost everything I ever read, it's word of mouth, which means your show needs to be remarkable.

And while it's good, there is a difference between good and remarkable, especially if you want to make this kind of money.

So I will have links to these kits.

You can go out and check out the shows and go, okay, what kind of show is making this kind of money?

Well, you've got two that you can listen to.

And of course, if you want to read up more on other ways that you can make money with your podcast, check out the book Profit from youm Podcast.

You can find it at profitfromyourpodcast.com book and I have physical copies back in stock if you want an autographed copy.

Again, the website profitfromyourpodcast.com I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.

I help podcasters.

It's what I do.

Be nice to each other, would you?

And before we completely tune out, I want to give a shout out to Justin Jackson, who shared this information at A Mastermind I was in.

And he is the one of the founders of Transistor fm, which is a great media host, which it just so happens that both these shows that we talked about are hosted on Transistor.

So, Justin, thanks so much for the information.