Opinion: Podcasters, You’re The Landlord. The Platforms Are Just Tenants.

There's a field about 30 miles away from me which has got a fence around it, and

inside that fence there's a mast and a little brick shed that constantly hums.

That's it.

That's the whole thing.

And for about 100 years, that shed was the reason anybody in broadcasting

had to be polite to a business owner, because if you weren't granted access

to the tech inside it, you could be the single greatest broadcaster who ever

drew breath, and you were functionally a bloke shouting in a Wickes car

park with nobody listening to you.

This week, a woman who has never even been within 40 miles of one of those sheds

got valued at half a billion dollars.

So let's talk about what that actually means,

Because it's not the dull podcasting business story all the tech

journos seem to be publishing it as

This is Podmastery, Podcasting Opinions, a part of the Podcasting

Insight show that I host.

I'm Neal Veglio, the podmaster, 25-odd years in radio and audio, and these

days I help indie creators get more out of the show they've already got.

things with the kind of candor that made an entire generation of dads suddenly

discover they had a phone call to make.

Since then, she's built a company with a bloke called Matt Kaplan,

and that is called Unwell, and Unwell is not a podcast.

Unwell owns her show, some other people's shows, some live events,

and just give this a second to think about, a drinks brand.

She's turned a podcast into a beverage, and the rest of us can't

even get people to click follow.

This week, an investment firm run by Patrick Whitesell put some cash into it.

Whitesell used to run Endeavor.

He's a proper Hollywood power blokey, the kind of dude who has people to

have people to have people, and the valuation on the deal was $500 million.

Now, at this point, every LinkedIn podcast expert in the world went, "And that's

more than iHeartMedia" because Podnews mentioned iHeart were worth 450 million.

So I went to check it because I don't repeat numbers that I haven't checked,

which I appreciate makes me a bit of an outlier around these parts of podcasting.

I wanna tell you exactly what happened when I checked.

I got three different answers.

Three, from three perfectly respectable financial sources on the same day

about the same company, ranging from about $300 million to over 600 million.

Turns out iHeart has multiple classes of share and about $6

billion of debt strapped to its back.

So depending on which bit you decide to measure, you can have

whatever number you fancy really.

It's less a valuation and more a horoscope.

Which brings me neatly to my first free tip of the day for you.

Anyone quoting with confidence a valuation comparison on LinkedIn

this week has not looked.

They've seen a headline, retyped it, and put a little rocket emoji on the end.

But here's what survives all of that, and it's the bit that actually matters.

A company that didn't exist six years ago, built out of a podcast, is now

having conversations alongside one of the biggest radio companies in America, a

company with hundreds of radio stations, licenses, transmitters, buildings,

thousands of staff, and 100 years of the experience I built my career in.

And a podcast about shagging has pulled level with it

. Which I imagine has kind of made you think to yourself, "Lovely. Rich

podcaster gets richer. Absolutely nothing to do with me and my 200

downloads." And do you know what?

90% of the time you'd be dead right.

Most of these stories are just numbers being shouted at you by

people who want you to feel small.

But not this one.

Stay with me, kiddo

The version of this story that's currently doing the rounds is

creator wins, platforms lose, and that's absolute rubbish.

She went to Barstool first, then Spotify, reportedly about $60 million in that deal.

SiriusXM for up to 125 million.

So she used platforms harder than almost anyone alive.

They paid her a small fortune.

She's been to bed with all of them, and every single time when the

lease was up, she walked out and took the entire audience with her.

That's the core part of this that I want you to understand.

Barstool never owned the podcast.

Spotify never owned the

podcast.

SiriusXM don't even own it now.

They're just the current tenant with the nicest kitchen that

she's decided to rent out.

She's the landlord.

So three tenancies, three moves, different apps, different feeds, different business

model, and the audience got up off the sofa and followed her down the road every

single time like loyal little ducklings.

That is what got valued at half a billion dollars, not a download

figure on any one platform.

The fact is when she moves, they all move

And here's where I now need to tell you what that hum in the shed at the beginning

of this episode's opening actually meant.

For my entire career, the landlord was whoever owned the transmitter,

the frequency, the license, the mast.

If nobody handed you one, your talent was just a hobby.

That's not me being dramatic.

That is literally how the system worked.

Gatekeepers with offices decided who was allowed to be heard in a building,

sometimes in London, over lunch, and that barrier hasn't weakened, it's gone.

And I'm gonna hold my hands up here.

I did not clock this for ages because when you've spent decades inside the thing, you

assume that the walls are load-bearing.

I've absolutely been the bloke going, "Well, actually, some of us were uploading

audio before RSS was even invented", which is, let's be honest about it,

the audio equivalent of telling someone you saw the band before they were big.

Nobody cares, Neal.

Sit down there, love

Here's the thing, though.

What got valued isn't the money.

It's

It's not the pizzazz.

It's not Patrick Whitesell's checkbook.

It's whether people follow.

And that is measurable at any size.

It's measurable at 200 downloads.

It's just as measurable in a much smaller room.

So if you moved tomorrow, went to a new platform with a new feed, a

different app entirely, would they come?

Would they follow you?

And the honest answer for most people within the sound of my

voice right now is, "I don't know. I've never once tested it." Yeah.

Ponder that for a second, because that's the actual gap in your

success, not your download count

Now, I'm not gonna insult you by pretending you can do what she did.

She had Barstool's distribution behind her.

She had a fan base.

She had a genuine once in a decade cultural moment.

Nobody wrote her a check because she had good SEO and posted consistently

on Tuesdays, and anyone telling you, "You can build this too.

Here's my nine-step framework.

Use code UNWELL20," they're selling you something, and I'd

quite like them to stop, frankly.

So no, you can't do what she did.

Neither can I. But a thing that turned out to be valuable, the following,

the fact that they move with you,

that is available at literally any size.

It's the only asset in this entire industry that nobody

can put a skip button on

In a moment, I'd like to play you a trailer from one of our

Podmastery community members

And if you'd like to be in it, we're opening the doors to public soon.

Go to podmastery.co/waitlist, and I'll put you on the founding members list

Here's something

that you can do that might make you feel, you know, like you're

going in the right direction.

Go into your podcast analytics and stop looking at the download numbers.

Just pick one number that measures relationship instead of distribution.

So repeat listeners, the completion rate, how many people showed

up for two episodes running.

Any of those, doesn't matter which, just pick one.

You'll usually see it in Apple Podcast Connect or maybe the Spotify

Creator's Dashboard if you prefer that, and make that the number that

you look at first from now on, because downloads are a distribution metric.

It's the podcast equivalent of counting transmitters in the countryside.

It's how many sheds you've got humming in how many fields.

And this week the market had a really good look at those sheds and at

the following, and they decided the following was worth about the same

as the number of sheds, frankly.

You've been feeling rubbish about yourself on the wrong scoreboard.

So what do you do when you're not doing well on the scoreboard?

You change the scoreboard.

We see that in life in many ways these days

If people can't compete in the way that everyone else is, they

invent a new way of competing

Go and find out whether your audience would follow you.

Because I promise you,

that's a far more useful question to ask than how you get from

200 downloads to 400 downloads

I hope you found this interesting.

Share it with somebody that you think might also find it interesting.

I'm Neal Veglio, the podmaster, and good luck with your continuing

journey towards podmastery.