The Business of Content with Simon Owens

Branded podcasts are on the rise. With one out of every four Americans saying they listen to at least one podcast a month, companies are increasingly incorporating the medium into their content marketing strategies, and in some cases these branded podcasts are really taking off with listeners. The first major success of a branded podcast was The Message, a joint venture between the Panoply Network and GE. The science fiction serial has generated over 8 million downloads and, during its run, stayed at the top of the iTunes charts. Gimlet Media, one of the largest and most well-funded podcast networks, recently launched its branded content studio Gimlet Creative, and it's since created narrative podcasts for Tinder and eBay. Suddenly, there's strong demand for people who can leverage their podcast expertise to help companies launch podcasts that their target consumers will actually want to listen to. One of those people is Ernesto Gluecksmann. Ernesto is the co-founder of Human Factor Media, a podcast consulting company that works with associations to launch and produce podcasts. I recently interviewed Ernesto about how he launched the company and what makes for a successful branded podcast.

For more than a decade, publishers attempted to grow ad-supported businesses that depended on massive scale and distribution of free content, but in recent years, many have acknowledged that purely advertising-based business models simply don't work in a world in which Facebook and Google are vacuuming up nearly all ad dollars that migrate online. So they've begun asking their readers to pony up, launching various forms of paywalls that require paid subscriptions for those wanting to access gated content. There are three kinds of paywalls that have emerged: there's the hard paywall where virtually all content is gated off. There's the metered paywall, where the user gets access to a certain number of free articles before the paywall is triggered. And then there's the freemium model, where a publisher will publish most of its content for free while reserving extra goodies for those willing to pony up money. So what should these extra goodies be? Discounted tickets to live events? Access to a private Slack channel? Physical objects? Or just exclusive content? To answer this question, I interviewed Adam Rowe, a journalist for Tech.Co. Rowe recently wrote about subscription services and argued that publishers should put their best content in front of the paywall. He explained his reasoning in our interview.