How Slate's Charlie Krammerer is prioritizing frequency to boost podcast revenue

Slate has been in the podcast business for nearly two decades, but refreshed its strategy this year to increase the frequency of its most popular shows.

“Slowburn,” “Decoder Ring” and “One Year” are all narrative podcast series at Slate that will move from one season per year to two or three, to increase listenership as well as give advertisers the opportunity to advertise in those products at different points of the year. Meanwhile, some of the publisher’s weekly series will increase to a biweekly schedule to achieve the same goal of having more sellable inventory.

On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Slate’s CRO and president Charlie Krammerer discussed why his team has prioritized the frequency of existing shows instead of chasing scale like other podcast networks, as well as how his team of sellers is prioritizing a specific mix of custom content ads while investing in the host-read model.

Making up about half of the company’s revenue, the podcast business is primarily advertising-dependent, although there has been a trend of podcast listeners turning into paid subscribers with Slate putting certain episodes of its most popular series behind its paywall.