What is the org chart of your podcast? A question from Conal, the CEO of HowStart.com, when Discovery acquired HowStuffWorks.com
The episode was taped at the Hot Pod Summit. That’s our conference for the podcast industry. We have a whole newsletter for podcasters. It’s called Hot Pod, written by our very own Ariel Shapiro. At the Hot Pod Summit, creators, trendsetters, and decision-makers gather to find out about the latest developments in audio and audio-visual technology. It was a packed house and a great time.
Some controversial steps have been included in the maverick approach. Last year, Verge alumni and Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman reported that iHeart worked with a firm called Jun Group to essentially buy podcast downloads through video games. That seemed disingenuous to many of the industry people. I asked Conal a lot about that. He answered questions in front of a live audience and was a great guest.
People were asking questions while I was walking through the halls. It was hard to see your podcast being used as a series of note cards. One of these cards is asking, what is your org chart? That is my whole brand.
iHeart recently restructured and you became the CEO of a formal division. I told you it was all about org charts, and I’m not even to the org chart question yet. You became the CEO of a formal division that’s responsible for podcasts. Walk us through what that actually means. Sometimes these restructures are a little bit fake. You have a business that is undergoing a huge change, and it seems like this one is more real.
In around 2008, I was the general manager of a company called HowStuffWorks.com, and we were acquired by Discovery Communications. Discovery wanted a really strong digital strategy, and they bought the company so they could go public. It was a smart decision to buy a company like HowStuffWorks.com.
I’ve been on both sides of that, so it is a great question. It’s not that being inside Discovery was bad, it was just different. Ultimately, I think Discovery did the right thing by leaning into more of a streaming strategy for their digital media. We were not the main course anymore because of that.
Cut to 10 years later, and that has become almost as — and in some ways more — successful than the source of it, the website. We spun it out as its own company, Stuff Media, and very shortly thereafter we realized we needed two or three things to grow a lot faster and get a lot bigger. We felt like we were really onto something with podcasting, but we wanted to accelerate it 10 years ahead fast. You always do if you’re running a startup.
And yeah, a lot of it is Bob Pittman, and his partner, Rich Bressler, and our head of finance, Mike McGuinness. It’s a deep belief in the C-suite across iHeart that podcasting merits a place at the table. It’s been the same since day one, and has made the biggest difference.
This machine was number two. Today, broadcast radio remains a mass-reach medium. Nine out of 10 Americans listen to the radio on a monthly basis. That’s an insanely large but insanely accurate number. We wanted access to that to shout really loudly about the stuff we were doing.
The Voice of iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman: Is it a startup or something you did? A podcast about the ‘Chaos reigns’
We can go from 2018 to 2028 in our own way because of those three things. The last piece I will say is Bob Pittman, the CEO of iHeartMedia. He founded MTV way back in the day, and he’s had a long career of being the CEO of several companies. He has a certain energy about him, that allows him to run big companies as if they were startup companies. This is significant when you talk to him for 30 seconds in a room. That definitely makes a difference, so we jumped in.
I talk to a lot of startup CEOs, and a lot of them who get acquired by big companies. This is a common situation in the tech world. The things you’re describing don’t always happen, right? The culture is not preserved; the nimbleness is not preserved. When it comes to attaching a 1,000-plus person sales team to a startup, it usually goes sideways. Is it just Bob Pittman sayingChaos reigns? Is it a startup, or something you did?
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
iHeart Media Radio Podcasting Digital Ceo-Conal Byrne: Growth in the Podcasts Division Over The Last Four Years
This one was certainly not made up. I thought our podcast division was doing a good job and we were seeing a lot of growth. The medium was making a loud noise. We want to make iHeart more transparent to the investor community, to audiences, researchers, and to analysts, and this is what we are trying to accomplish.
One way to do that is to create different segments in your company so that you can discuss how well you are doing inside certain businesses, rather than having to focus on all of the numbers. The way to do that was to create two segments in our company.
The multi- platform group is referred to as a group. It comprises broadcast radio, live events, and a few other things. The digital audio group has a variety of audio sources. That comprises all of our social media assets, all of our websites, a huge streaming business, a lot of the innovative tech work we do — like how we launched iHeartLand in Roblox and Fortnite — and podcasting. After running the podcasts division for two or three years, I was made the CEO of the digital audio group. We were able to talk to the market more freely about how well this segment was growing and how we could do more to promote it.
To be clear though, there’s a whole lot of fluidity between these segments. One thousand or so sellers sit in the multi-platform group, and they sell all the assets that we have. We have this mantra at the company that “Any seller can sell anything any day of the week wherever they live and work,” and that has rung pretty true. That’s driven most of our growth in podcasting over the last two, three, four years at the company.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
What do we really do with the radio app? I think what we can do to boost the growth of podcasting and Roblox, podcasting, and podcasting
If I was to reframe what you just said more rudely, you could say that you have a division full of older distribution and you have a division full of newer distribution. Some of that newer distribution has proven out, like podcasting; some of it is Roblox. You could say you have a division that is declining and a division that is growing at a faster rate. Is there any tension there at all?
But no, you’re spot on. A broadcast radio is a very formatted media type. If you were to sit down with any of these creators on radio, they would say something to you. The other day, we were talking with Angela Yee, who was a former co-host of The Breakfast Club and has started a new radio show on iHeart called Way Up. She said it was a lot easier to listen to on the podcast. It isn’t as regulated as radio. I can talk about the things I can’t talk about on the radio. I can talk about what I enjoy and what I do not. I can go on as long as I want.”
The easiest example for me is Charlamagne Tha is. God hosting a show called The Breakfast Club out of Tribeca every morning. It’s a show where we distribute the file and then it drives upwards of 15 to 20 million downloads a month. He also co-owns a company with us called The Black Effect, that he 51 percent owns. It has 29, 30 podcasts under it, and it alone drives 15 to 20 million downloads a month. All I see is this constructiveness across these two segments.
This has changed the way that podcasting is done. It’s why we widely distribute. I would be saying, “We are really working hard to get everybody on the iHeartRadio app.” The business and the economics of podcasting today still sit with the creator and the publisher, because you own the pipe that you distribute your shows through. It is imperative that we plug that pipe into as many distribution points as possible since I haven’t found a business model that proves it differently.
One of the themes we come back to on Decoder over and over again, especially when I talk to creatives or creative executives, is that your distribution fundamentally shapes what you make. If you just describe to me the constraints of any distribution platform, I can tell you what you’re going to get. YouTube is a good example of this. We are all aware that the constraints of the platform to produce a video is what makes aYouTube video a video.
There are different constraints to radio and rpt. You’re saying, “Oh, there’s a seamless back and forth,” but surely you must see, “Oh, okay. On this distribution I make this. This is what the audience wants. We know a thing or two about Terrestrial radio distribution. Where is the tension?
iHeart: Are You Getting What You Want to Listen To? When You Can Show Me Where You Are, And When You Aren’t
It’s a great point and question. It has been a pitfall of digital media from day one. First of all, search engine optimization, period, is a version of what you’re talking about. You start to reverse-engineer all the content you make because that works best on such-and-such platform. There was a moment around 2010 when we all realized the same thing. It was like, “The optimal video is this length, and you have to open with this thing and close it with that.”
Getting optioned for TV may be a lottery ticket for podcast creators, but there are other ways to monetize their shows. “The IP game is great, but that’s not all it is, right?” Osborn said. “It could be a play, it could be a live show, or literally a physical product… doing all of those things together, I think, makes sense.”
I think there’s a creative freedom to it that allures a lot of people, but it doesn’t have the mass reach of broadcast radio yet. It’s the true mass-reach audiences you bring back, I think, that makes radio appealing.
Are you moving from the radio to a mobile device? Are you programming across to the radio, saying, “We’re going to run ads for our podcast on the radio, and you’re going to come listen to it”?
Nilay noted that there are risks with casting a wide net. He asked about the report that found iHeart had worked with Jun Group to buy downloads from the freemium mobile games. First, he denied doing that. Then he qualified the practice. We have been experimenting with Jun Group for a long time. He said the downloads percentage was not much more than just 1 percent, 2 percent and 2.5 percent. “We don’t use it anymore.”
No. We’ll tag all of our spots on air with, “Listen wherever you get podcasts.” We will both say our own app, as well as other apps. We are an obsessively, widely distributed content company.
This is a split, right? You own the distribution on the business side. You own the radio stations and you program them. Bob Pittman can buy Stuff Media and say, “You know what? We’re going to build the podcast business by running Will Ferrell at you until you’re sick of it, because we control that inventory and we control that distribution.”
Do you worry that you don’t have the same control? I mean, aside from the iHeartPodcasts app, obviously. By the way, put TheVerge.com on the home screen of your phone. Like I told you, we all have the same problems. The iHeartPodcasts app aside, this is an inherently decentralized medium with lots of different players, lots of different controls, and lots of different monetization schedules. Does that worry you?
“I choke my audience if I choose to pull my RSS feed out of a distribution app, because people who go there and expect it there won’t see it anymore,” Byrne said. It’s why we distribute. Otherwise, I’d be sitting up here saying, ‘We are really working hard to get everybody on the iHeartRadio app.’ The creator and the publisher still sit with business and economics because they own the pipe that your shows go through. I haven’t found a business model that proves it differently, so I think it behooves all of us to plug that pipe into as many distribution points as possible.”
People who use a distribution app will no longer see my RSS feed if I pull it out. But I still own and control the pipe. If I stop making and distributing content on my YouTube channel, my brand will go away. It’s gone. I could try to convert people to another platform, so that their audience relationship wouldn’t go away after I start my website. It is possible, but it is not easy to switch from an existing platform to a new one. A walk away from your channel would be like that.
I will say one more thing. It has made chatting with creators really simple, because at some point in the conversation they will ask, “How are we going to distribute?” Let’s hang with Will Ferrell for a second. He wants to get as much audience as possible. I make content. I think it’s going to be good, and I want to put it in front of many people.” There’s no asterisk on the answer back to him. Yes, we do as well. It’s really that simple. “In fact, we’ll distribute it on broadcast radio,” and so we did. The Ron Burgundy Podcast was distributed as a show on late Sunday night on broadcast radio too. There’s no ulterior motive or different goal.
I am aware it is about my competitors. I think that it tripped up as a business model. It said, let’s do mega deals. That could be worth it, if a creator is that good, you may want to pay that. It tripped up because of the exclusive distribution models that made sense for streaming services because they were solving problems. In this one, I couldn’t identify the problem that it was solving, and therefore I think the industry tripped up on it.
I want to come to exclusives and to consolidation. You have sat out a bunch of stuff, you have sat out subscription, but I just want to sit with distribution for one more second. Money from each of the pipes is different. The money you might get from overserving the Spotify audience or doing marketing on Spotify to get downloads does not necessarily result in the same return. If you were to just run the audio on YouTube, and say there’s a YouTube audience here, it’s probably a very different return based on how that ad model works. Did you look at your distribution endpoints and say, “That one is the most lucrative one, and this one is less lucrative?”
All of the distribution points we distribute to through RSS feeds are equal to what we make in the long run because that is how they work.
Is YouTube Really Interested in Audio? The Case for iHeart Media Radio Podcasting Digital Ceo-Conal Byrne
Facebook interest has waned, but it has grown on the internet. We’ve all seen this, so I’m not saying anything privileged. Over the last 10 years, I think it has been a question of them figuring out what they are as a platform and what the next chapter for them should be, whether it’s the metaverse or just doubling down on making newsfeed better. There have been moments in the last five to ten years where Facebook has shown real interest in audio, and then they’ve backed off the two or three times that has happened, so I’m not sure.
It makes sense to me why a platform like YouTube, which is a wonderful platform in many ways, would smartly say, “This is some of the best content in the world, we’d like to distribute that.” It is a different business model and you just have to be aware of it. That’s the only difference so far. The economics that go back to the publisher in the case of iHeart is the same everywhere we distribute to today.
The broad story is that Facebook wants something and everyone is going to make it, then they will stop using it and all the businesses will go away. You brought up SEO. We will all be successful, then they will turn it off, and a bunch of businesses will die. They are going to eat us all. Live it up. Is that an present for you? Is it possible that you built a business that is resilient to that kind of platform shift, or is it just RSS feeds again?
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
I Heart Media Radio Podcasting Digital Ceo-Conal Byrne: Yeah, I don’t have that concern, but I do
Yeah. All of them were like, “Thank God he said that.” I don’t pretend to know what their minds are thinking. This may be cheesy, but they seem to be genuinely in love with the medium, like we all are. I fell in love with this medium 10 years ago. That’s important, because I think they want to do the right thing by the medium.
I do. I don’t have this concern in the same way I had it when I was writing text-based articles for HowStuffWorks.com 20 years ago or when I was focused on social and digital video at Discovery Communications. You were always worried, like, “Oh, man.” But I’m always at the beck and call of the platforms I distribute on to a crazy, existential extent. I don’t have this concern in podcasting.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
IHEA: Radio Radio Podcasting Digital Ceo-Conal Byrne. I’m Preparing for a Comeback
Perhaps it’s because there is nothing broken in the distribution and monetization model today. Nothing’s perfect, but it’s pretty close to perfect. You have a distribution model that is free. You have an ad load that is light. You have a great content type, that is the best in the world right now, except for TV which is not very good at this time, but we are right there next to it. I struggle to see something broken with this.
Correct, it is right here. It’s happening. I am preparing for it. No, for real. We were talking about these giant platform companies. Have you had conversations with Spotify about making stuff exclusive?
No. I will test anything. I don’t think there is a reason. We have a platform. We have an app of our own. I have the ability to test exclusive or windowed content. We’ve dabbled in subscription channels on Apple Podcasts, just because I had creators who came to us and said, “I’d like to try this.” We are very proud of this. We are a good partner with creators. We tried it. It is a small focus for us. I don’t see the problem I’d be fixing if I kept repeating it.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
How Did You Get iHeart Digital? Where Are You Now? How Do You Want to Start? What Have You Don’t Know?
I know. The question for the org chart is suspense. It sounds like your business is going well, that you have confidence in it. How did you get iHeart Digital? How are you going to make all this work?
I don’t know if we will have a big reveal. There is a product lead; Uta Knablein is our chief product officer. At the back end of all our digital products, there’s a 100 person engineering team. We obviously have a podcast team, run by the president of the iHeart Podcast Network, Will Pearson. He is fantastic. He had a similar trajectory to me; he came from MentalFloss.com 20 years ago.
Yeah. He founded it in a Duke University dorm room, and now he’s found his way into podcasting. He was a wonderful guy because he had a similar trajectory. Carter is the head of our huge digital revenue sales team.
I end on this team because it’s very important, we have our business affairs team. We have partnerships with a lot of creators, as well as distribution platforms. On your electronic programming guide, there are streaming channels of the radio show of the same name. We also co-own a company with Will Ferrell. The business affairs team is responsible for a lot of our growth. That’s loosely how it’s org’d out.
I didn’t think I would have or need a robust business affairs department two years ago. We are mature enough as an industry to have networks of more than a medium-sized network. Sure we are. We have arrived. It’s a mass-reach medium. It takes eighty million Americans a week to listen to a podcasts. Is there more than one hundred and twenty million a month? The more interesting number to me is eighty million a week. We’re a mass-reach medium.
They are all looking for internship opportunities. The oldest one, Pierce, is 17. He is going to start this journey of trying to get into a college. I’ll answer it this way. He’s like, “How did you decide what you’re going to do?” I said, all I can tell you is that I work for a company that didn’t exist when I was in college. I didn’t have digital media when I went to college. So I told you to open your iris and have it wide open. New industries and new things inside the industry should be open to the public. When I told him this, I was like, “You know, like the blockchain!”
Do I think we’re mature enough to have all of the things that a big, respectable, grown-up-table business should have? Yes, of course we are. We have earned this. The people in this room have been working very hard for the last 20 years. We need it and deserve it.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
Are You Using Jun Group to Inflate Mobile App Downloads? Not Exactly. But I’ll Tell You When I Get Your Numbers
I need to ask you about them after you brought up your numbers. Notable Verge traitor Ashley Carman, who is in this room somewhere, wrote a great
story
at Bloomberg about Podtrac and how you might be inflating those numbers with mobile game downloads using the Jun Group. Are you doing that?
No. We used Jun Group. We have talked a lot with her about this. Jun Group is a vendor that drives marketing for podcast companies that is targeting mostly gamers, whether those are gamers playing Subway Surfer or people who overindex for the metaverse. We have experimented with Jun Group across the years. I think our stats were something like never more than 1 percent, 2 percent, 2.5 percent of our downloads in any given month.
We were launching a map called iHeartLand, which was basically iHeartMedia as a Roblox map and an island in the game, so we were interested in it. We were especially interested in, “If we got gamers into our podcast network, could we then bring them into these live shows in iHeartLand?” We don’t use it anymore.
I feel like an early version of the podcast industry was entirely built on host reads for direct-to-consumer brands. We all did it. We all did it, you can feel it in your bones but we did it. The toothbrushes were great. Those companies are also struggling. Is that still the person who you are talking to or is your publicist saying, hey, Will Ferrell is going to read about electric cars today?
Yeah. They’re killing it right now. I believe our marketing team devotes around 95 percent of their time to thinking about how to deploy what we would call house ads and then 5 percent of their time on paid marketing. Paid marketing is still helpful, but like 95 percent of that is Facebook marketing for a specific show if it wants to hit a very specific demographic. Ninety-five percent. I think they spend a lot of time on how to deploy billions of impressions of house ads a month.
But I’ll talk you through why. Some of this is obvious. It’s getting harder to target digital social media platforms. In some part, because of what Apple’s moves are, but it’s getting harder. CPMs and the quality of the online ad marketplace are going down. These are truths that are objective. If you’re a marketer, and this was a well-worn, tried-and-true way to market over the last 10, 20 years, that just got a lot harder. We are using terms like “cohorts” instead of “one-to-one targeting.” It’s confusing and it’s less effective.
Trust issues that are very real on social media have not been discussed. Folks trusting social media less, influencers having less success on social media because of that, and therefore marketers being like, “I don’t know what to do with this. I used to use it as my go-to tool, but now it is not.
As that has happened, this thing has come along called audio. In fact, it was always there, but now it has exploded. All of our attention is on audio. Because you have this new platform that’s incredibly cool, and lots of great creators using it, and it’s 80 million Americans a week. A third of the media we consume is audio all-up. For a second, think about that. Two years ago, we ran a study with WARC. Audio is a third of the media we consume. By the way, 75 percent of that third is broadcast radio. The media is a huge amount of the stuff we take in.
I’ll end on this. If you’re a marketer and you hear that third stat, you’re like, “Wow, a third of all the stuff that people take in is marketing. I wonder how much I’m spending on audio marketing?” Their overall investment percentage is usually between 9 or 10 percent. It’s just a disconnect.
Yeah. There is no way to get real reach in digital audio if you love it. There is no way for anyone to reach digital audio if they don’t purchase broadcast radio.
The multi-platform group iheartbuilt a product called smart audio that was really cool. The iHeart radio app ties it to shows you are listening to on the air, so when our panel listened to it, they looked at it by geography. They can target digitally now that it’s digitally infused. They took nine out of 10 American adults a month, and informed them with a digital listening panel.
I only say this to you because it is how we do that sale. We want to say that you should purchase podcasting. You should pay for streaming. Here is your reach extender. You cannot have the reach you need in digital audio if you don’t do this. Perhaps one day you will, but not today. We do that all the time.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
What do we really understand about the ad downturn? What have we learned in the last two or three months from a direct response business?
I look at the companies that have the targeting capabilities. There is some Apple chaos but most of the internet giants are hurting. Are you feeling the impact of the ad downturn?
The short answer is, no, we’re growing. The longer answer is, we’re in an odd economy. Wages, interest rates, unemployment rates are all metrics that we are interested in. We need things to stop and things to calm down. I believe marketers are not rejecting advertising as much as you would think. I believe some of that is because the last major downturn in marketing companies took place two, three, or four years ago and many of the people who are in power at marketing companies were in power 10 years ago.
I don’t think this is wishful thinking. I think it’s real. I think they know what happens after you stop marketing. So there’s a little bit more of a prioritization of continuing marketing, even through a strange economy, that there might not have been if the memory of COVID-19 wasn’t so fresh, that’s helping us a little bit.
I also think there’s a new thrust in influencer marketing. It kind of never went away, but now we’re back to this again. Maybe it has something to do with the tools of targeting getting harder, so people are just cycling back to, “Humans, tell my story on the platforms where you make stuff.” Podcasting, in particular, benefits from this. Simply put, the whole podcast industry in one sense is just the most amazing, best storytelling group of influencers to hit media in a really long time, so we benefit from there being new attention on the influencer market.
Direct response brands now face a lot of competition for their best kept secret, so it has made their lives a little harder. We’ve actually noticed in the last two or three months that it’s a very timely question for us at our businesses, because I feel like we’ve moved off the direct response business too fast. I think it’s still a very profitable business. Performance marketing companies can count on Ad Results, Veritone, and Oxford Road for great business. If anything, we’re making that more of a focus and paying more attention to it in the last two or three months. I think we moved too fast. and I think it’s a robust business we should still focus on. It’s also how we got here.
Usually, yeah. Isn’t everything direct at the end of the day? Yeah, you’re right. It’s redemption codes and URL codes. Those guys were the first ones to start using podcasting because they didn’t need your data.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
The Black Effect and the Hyperbolic Perturbations of Social Networks: Some Remarks on the Performance of a Multi-Billion Dollar Business
I don’t know. I’m not sure if it needs innovation. For 10, 15, 15 years it worked for them. I think we can do all the innovating with different kinds of marketers from bigger brands, bigger budgets, and maybe long-term, multi-year campaigns.
We had a company called The Black Effect, and we had big sponsors that were deeply embedded in it. We were trying to change together, which was actually happening. I think it is okay for people to innovate over here and they can do it in their own way. You would be surprised, as much as it may sound crazy, the extent to which you’re changing the show with different reads, different lengths and different placements. I know that sounds like, “eh, it’s kind of boring.” I want to be a part of it because it is a multi-billion dollar business and not for them.
There are glass walled conference rooms that come up with funnier promo codes. That’s a meeting I want to go to. I have thought about it many times. There are a few minutes left. You mentioned that you tried out subscriptions. I’ve listened to you in the past. You’ve been more or less anti-subscription. Why is that?
I do not see it fixing things that are broken. It made perfect sense for me as a consumer to subscribe to Netflix a decade ago. The problem it was solving, the price point was undeniable, it made perfect sense to me. I can’t find a reason for the show.
I believe you are starting to see exclusive or windowing of content in subscription models. I don’t think that there is a creator that wants to deciminate their audience size just for the sake of a big check. That’s interesting. I think that’s creator psychology, like, “Actually, sometimes it’s more important for me to have a large listener pool than it is to have a big check.” Some of the press recently has focused on that, and I think it’s smart.
The counterexample there is obviously
Joe Rogan at Spotify
. We don’t know how Joe Rogan feels about it, we got big exclusives from it, so we don’t know. Then on the other side, you have MrBeast, who literally gives away money to start a hamburger chain that will make him a billionaire.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
iHeart Media: Radio Podcasting Digital Ceo-Conal Byrne: a Conversation with Malcolm Gladwell and Shonda Rhimes
Yes. When we talk with people like Malcolm Gladwell, Shonda Rhimes, or Questlove, the pitch is that our show will be made available to any person who desires to listen to it.
That was my next question there. Do you give rev shares to your creators? The math works out in a subscription but I don’t know how it works in advertising.
I hate to answer it so vaguely. It’s incredibly collaborative. There is usually no moment when such-and-such advertiser has been buying the entire slate in order to make them dislike that brand. That’s not really how it works. I think it’s high attentiveness at scale with partners that we’ve been able to maintain so far.
Malcolm Gladwell has an existing slate of shows. His shows are more monetized by our partnership than he thinks he’s capable of, and we will also co- produce a whole new slate of shows. We can grow the thing bigger and make more revenue by covering iHeart marketing across all of it. We do all kinds of advertising models with Malcolm and his team. We are going to do standard, straight-up, quick-turn, host-read ads. We have a series with IBM called Smart Talks with IBM. That’s actually a podcast we make together that’s actually awesome. And everything in between.
The NFL is very similar. There were seven or eight podcasts that they were making. We were able to have a good relationship with the league. He was like, “I believe in this medium. I think it’s really cool. I just don’t know that we at the NFL are going to get this as right as you guys might, as fast, and we want to partner with somebody really big.” It’s a very similar model to Pushkin Industries. We pulled in their seven or eight podcasts with the promise that we would market and monetize them better. We’re also co-producing a slate of whole new stuff.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
iHeart: What are you doing? What do you’re doing now? How do you know what’s happening, where do you want to go?
We discussed a lot of your shows and the new things you are doing. iHeart does a lot of new things. Something new is happening. I have a card here that says “NFTs” on it. I feel like I already know how it went. How did the NFT thing go? Lightning round. Up or down on NFTs?
Yeah, we did a great
Decoder episode with Chris Dixon
, the lead partner for that stuff at Andreessen Horowitz. It didn’t go well for him too. Not great. Where the money went was that location.
You launched a lot of new stuff. I was checking out your website before we started. There are lots and lots of podcast titles, lots of celebrities in the format, lots of rewatch podcasts. There are some formats that hit, the other things that you lead with, and then there is a lot of stuff. Because if you’re launching new stuff, you’ve built the archive, you built the library. How do you make sure the library is not overrun with shows about celebrities? How do you make sure they get attention? How do you make sure they survive?
I’ll give two answers. It’s not mutually exclusive, first of all. Big Money players was started by us and was co-developed with Will Ferrell. The reason we started this company was because I think he genuinely had a blast making The Ron Burgundy Podcast. I think that he saw the potential of thePodcast as a way to find, develop, and break new talent in America.
There’s this adage for anybody that has worked in video. “Fast, cheap, and good. You have the chance to pick two. I think he realized he doesn’t have to pick. I can get all three, all the time. This is unlike anything else. So we launched a company together.
My point in answering this way is that he uses this company, to some extent, to find new comedic talent that is the long tail you’re talking about. In the Big Money Players network are many comedians, like Langston Kerman or Carolina Barlow. That’s really cool, but it’s not mutually exclusive.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
Back to the org chart. An example of a podcast with long tails and an edgy, innovative audio drama about dying languages
The second thing we do is spend a lot of time focusing on every show that we have on our network. We try to put them in slates with producers on top of them. With this it is back to the org chart.
I’ll give you an example of a show. A guy did a show out of Alaska where he was one of 20 or 30 people who spoke a dying language. He used his podcast as a way to capture that language and report on how a language dies off the face of the earth, never to come back. You have this relic now, that is a podcast limited series of what this language means to this guy and why he captured it in a podcast. That is a show with long tails. Its own set of executive producers in LA shepherd the NextUp program. Hopefully, it gives you an idea of how it has never been mutually exclusive for us. I spent the majority of our time on Will Ferrell. Okay, I guess we have some calls to make at the end of the day to the long tail.” It is usually one continuum or even the same slate.
Do you think that you’re moving the high-margin dollars into the longer tail? It’s probably cheaper to buy those shows, it might be cheaper to produce those shows. Do you know how to do that math?
No, not really. This model of partnering with Shonda Rhimes has been doubled down on because she wants a big playground that is long-term. Who wants to be able to try stuff a lot, make a few mistakes, get it righter and righter, and then hit something big — or two or three things. It seems that the people at Shondaland want to use this medium to help two things so far. One is really good companion content to a lot of the shows they’re making for Netflix. That feels obvious to me. There is good content. And the other is really edgy, innovative audio drama. What is the audio drama today?
A little bit. I don’t have it candidly on a P&L anywhere. I don’t depend on it. I don’t predict what we might get. Hollywood is a difficult, complicated industry, it’s nothing new to say that. There have been some traction across 10 shows that have been optioned and with the help of big partners in Hollywood, it is meaningful. It has been fun, if nothing else.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
I Heart Media Radio Podcasting Digital Ceo Conal Byrne: Can You Reach Out To Me With Video? Why You Shouldn’t
I just keep coming back to the idea that it is perfect. You have a mass-reach medium. Do you know how hard it is to get 80 million Americans a week to reach out to you with a mass-reach medium? They work it out for an hour a day. It is not a low-engagement medium. That’s my only fear with video.
We have shows with video, like Stuff It is awesome that they don’t want you to know. You should subscribe to it. It’s three guys who are hilarious and fantastic. I am protective of the other 3,000 shows. I don’t think they need to be if they do not want to be. They’re just an audio podcasts. That’s probably how I think about it.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
Decoder Questions: How Do You Start Making Decisions? A Question for Media Radio Broadcasting and Its Relevance to Video Production of Partial Waves
I want to wrap up with the Decoder question. I ask it of everyone. I think that you have a very strong conviction, so I might know how to answer this in a certain way, but I have to ask everybody else. You have to make a lot of decisions. You’ve had a lot of different kinds of careers; you’ve had to make structure decisions, you have to make video decisions. What is your framework for making decisions? How do you do it?
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
Why Do Humans Overcomplicate? The Essential Thing That Makes People Simplistic: Understanding Why People Overcomplain and Overcomplicate
Humans like to overcomplicating things. They do it for one of two reasons. They want to do a really good job. They have this instinct to do good work, so they will try to over-perform and overcomplicate a task. Or, the negative reason, they’re covering up bad work. They will cover something they probably shouldn’t have done. Almost every turn we will avoid simplicity. It’s just simplicity. Be as simple as you can in your answers, in your approaches, in your strategies. Everything, I promise you, is simpler than you think.
I think it would be more of a human thing. Insecurity was the cause of most people acting strangely, politicking at work, or behaving badly. It is not that they are bad people. They are just afraid. That framework changes your whole outlook when you walk into every meeting.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23617404/iheart-media-radio-podcasting-digital-ceo-conal-byrne
Hot Pod Summit – A Highlight and An Evening Had with a Great Day at Work. Nilay Patel’s Interview with Conal Byrne
I have not mastered this, by the way. A friend told me about it a few years ago. I didn’t know it until then, but once he said it I was like, “Oh my God. That is correct. We all do this. If there are principles that I try to remember once a week or so, it’s probably those three.
The Hot Pod Summit was a great success, thanks to everyone who attended. Thanks to the person who did the job, I can say that it was very good. Our partners are at Work. I think that is it. Go make good decisions and follow Decoder on TikTok.
I hope you all had a great week! Hot Pod Summit was a lot of fun — it was great to meet so many of you in person and chat about some of the biggest issues in the industry.
We’ll have more on that below, but first, some acknowledgments. We would like to thank our partners at work and the whole. The Wythe Hotel and On Air Fest team did a great job of hosting us. I wouldn’t have made it to this without the help of my colleagues and friends, of course. Plus, we were so lucky that the Decoder team was down to put on their first live show at the summit. You can hear Nilay Patel’s interview with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s digital audio group, right here.
AdsWizz and Subtext: Podcasts on the YouTube Music Platform and a Digital Publishing Economy for Audiobooks in the 21st Century
And finally, thank you to our sponsors for the event: AdsWizz and Subtext. AdsWizz is a self-serve advertising platform for creating and running audio ads. Subtext is a text messaging platform designed to connect creators directly with their subscribers.
Love to break some news at Hot Pod Summit. I had the opportunity to sit down with Kai Chuk, head of podcasting atYouTube, and Steve McLendon, product lead for the product, as well as talk about their plans for the medium. The crux of it: podcasts will soon be available on YouTube Music in both the free and paid versions. It marks a major departure from YouTube’s video-first approach to podcasting so far.
Kai Chuk said that there are a whole new group of users and creators that they do not know what to do with. That is something that we would like to change.
Background listening, downloads, speed control, and the ability to switch between video and audio are just some of the features that users will have access to on YouTube Music. The platform is basically just Enabling a better consumption experience for existing video podcasts, but the team is working on integrating RSS into the platform. The 80 million subscribers for YouTube Music is less than 2.5 billion users. YouTube’s edge is its searchability and reach. Both Chuk and Mclendon said it didn’t have to be an approach.
McLendon used his own experience as an example, when he found a Kevin Systrom podcast interview on YouTube when he was at his work computer and then switched to the audio version when he got into his car to go home. It is going to be priority number one for allowing consumers to switch between the two. “We’ll bridge some of those experiences in seamless ways for the user and really center on the user journey,” McLendon said.
As an extension of the traditional publishing economy, the audiobooks model has been pretty steady for a while now. Consumers, who mostly come to the medium as book readers, either buy premium titles a la carte on something like Apple Books (usually for $10–$20 a pop) or have a subscription to Audible or audiobooks.com for about $15 a month. Prices are always in line with print prices. The company will seek to expand how it monetizes audiobooks after it chooses the a la carte route.
Former Spotify content and advertising chief Dawn Ostroff mentioned at an investor event last year that audiobooks could be available for free, supported by advertising. Zicherman would not say whether Spotify would go down that path but only said that the model would be “interesting” (cryptic!). He also said that there is a possibility of a similar option for the streaming service.
Rubin used ad-supported distribution for her own work and went over the benefits and drawbacks of using it. Advertising support is free for the audience so if they like it, then so be it. She said that this will bring in people to her work that would not get it otherwise. “On the other hand, we all know that if people are used to paying for something, you would rather them keep paying for it, rather than starting to give it to them for free. It can be hard to get it back once people give something for free.
Zitt was interested in the ability of creators to make a living. He said a menu of options in selling content is a good thing, with the aside that creators are paid fairly for the content. Some models that have come and gone are not beneficial to the artist and only to the platform.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23619312/hot-pod-summit-youtube-spotify-iheart-decoder-apple
How Much Does It Cost to Make a Good Audio-Visual Project? A Proposed Solution to Perotti’s Welcome to Provincetown
How much does it cost to make a good audio-visual project? “$250,000 is the floor to make truly good narrative, engaging content,” said Osborn. “I’d rather make less than make it for under the resources that we [need].” If the story requires travel or lengthy investigations, that will push the price tag up even higher.
Perotti explained how, when he went out pitching the show that became last year’s critically acclaimed series Welcome to Provincetown, he got no bites. So he self-financed the project until getting investment from Stitcher’s Witness Docs. The risk was worth it. We own the feed because we did it that way. Not only do we own the feed, it’s going to be a television show, or at least it’s been optioned for television,” he said. “So it’s like, yeah, that’s a lottery ticket, I get it. But that’s value.”