Friday 27th November: Lessons learned producing 100 podcast episodes

November 27, 2020

You made it, it's Friday!!! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter.

Simon Owens produces The Business of Content podcast about how publishers create, distribute, and monetize digital content. It took him a while to launch the podcast - he was wary of the time commitment and a steep learning curve.

It turns out neither the learning curve nor the time needed was that extreme and he's just published his 100th episode. In this post, Simon is sharing the lessons he's learned in reaching his podcast's centenary. The lessons that chimed with our experience include:

  • Consistency and frequency will deliver audience growth

  • Transcript highlights published to the web get attention

  • Get great guests and prep them properly

  • Small tweaks really improve production quality

There' some great, practical advice in Simon's post; you should really read the whole thing. But if you want just one takeaway, it's this...

"Virtually every podcaster, no matter how amateur, can follow the above steps, and they’ll begin seeing positive feedback, both in terms of quality and growth, almost immediately."

Analysis from Press Gazette has shown that some of the world’s biggest news publishers are worth more now than in 2019. The market value of the 16 publicly-listed companies examined is up an average of 40% since the end of March. The bad news - some of the investor confidence may be down to Covid-inspired budget cuts improving profitability.

WaPo's Arc promised clients the power of the paper's homegrown publishing platform and a quick-to-implement paywall solution. Now, the company is fostering partnerships with third-party software vendors to support integration with customer data platforms already being use by publishers to grow their subs and first-party data businesses.

Damian Radcliffe has updated his subscription strategies article to reflect developments over the last six months and with ad revenues forecast to be down at least 7.4% in 2020, making the most of the Covid-19 reader revenue surge has never looked more important.

This week's podcast:

This week, Peter spoke to Scott Omelianuk about how starting his new job just before lockdown affected Inc.’s plans for change, how their content strategy has shifted in response to a momentous year, and about the thinking behind Inc's new texting subscription service.

We've already exceeded the total number of entries we had last year! But we know it's a really busy time of year, so we're giving you another week to get your entries in. Submissions will now close on Friday 4th December at 11.59pm GMT. Get on it now!!!