00:00 Speaker A
How much content are you producing in a given week and in each episode? Are you making money on each episode?
00:07 Speaker B
Yes, because our production costs are very low, fundamentally lower than traditional content production. On the audio side, we create podcast content for about $1 per episode. Well, we’ve created over 200,000 podcast episodes so far. We are currently the largest independent podcast company by volume. We have approximately 5,000 active programs and produce approximately 3,000 podcast episodes each week.
00:44 Speaker B
And on the video side, we’re now on Instagram and YouTube, creating hundreds of new video episodes every week.
00:55 Speaker A
Is that the next frontier in video for you?
00:59 Speaker B
Yes, I mean video, but what we’re seeing with the content trends is that you need to meet your audience where they are. And in the past, people chose very bespoke platforms for content consumption. I want to see this on TV, I want to hear this on the radio, I want to have something like this on my podcast. But what we’ve discovered is that people now want and expect their content to be with them throughout the day and available in any way they want to consume it.
01:31 Speaker B
You might want to start listening to a podcast in the morning at the gym, get in the car and listen to it on CarPlay, then get to the office and listen to it on YouTube in the background, then go home and listen to it on your smart TV or on your smart speaker while you’re making dinner. People want a video-first experience, they want an audio-first experience, and they want that content to be device-independent and move with them throughout the day.
02:08 Speaker B
So to meet your audience where they are today, you have to be multi-platform, multi-format.
02:16 Speaker A
You create a ton of content every week, if not a day, but are you getting it all done? Is there such a thing as creating too much content?
02:25 Speaker B
Yeah, I mean what we actually find on the podcast side, but sometimes we think of ourselves as the audio version of Reddit or Wikipedia or Pinterest. We do a lot of what we call edutainment. Well, there’s an educational aspect as well, but we’re doing it in a kind of interesting way. And we believe that previously, you couldn’t create this kind of content commercially because you couldn’t monetize it unless you had a large audience.
02:57 Speaker B
But our production costs are so low that if a few dozen people listen to an episode of my podcast, I can already make a profit on that episode. That means I can target a lot of greenfield-like areas out there. Well, people haven’t been targeted in the past, but now people who grew up with audio first want to consume this content, and they no longer think that podcasting is just for long-form interviews and investigative reporting.
03:36 Speaker B
For example, we answer over 100,000 questions about smart speakers every month. And people don’t even realize what they’re listening to is a podcast because it’s delivered via RSS. But they listen to podcasts by asking their smart speakers questions and us providing answers.
