Building the IMDB of Podcasts with Podchaser's Bradley Davis

Jeff Umbro: This is Podcast Perspectives, a show about the latest news in the podcast industry and the people behind it. I'm Jeff Umbro, your host and the founder and CEO of the Podglomerate. We're a podcast agency focused on production, audience growth, and monetization for some of the biggest podcasts in the world.

Today on the show, I'll be speaking with Podchaser CEO and co-founder, Bradley Davis, about his journey [and] how his platform revolutionized a lot of the podcast ecosystem in ways that we know and in ways that we don't. Full disclosure, the Podglomerate has been a happy customer of the platform for years.

If you're interested in learning more about the Podglomerate please head to podglomerate.com or resources.podglomerate.com to see some of the latest things that we've been working on, including a transcript of this conversation, plus tips and tricks from our team and interviews with some of the top creators in the podcast space.

Let's get to it.

All right, welcome to the show, Bradley. First question is what is Podchaser?

Bradley Davis: Great question and thanks for having me. Podchaser is a database company. In its simplest form, we collect data about podcasting to help people find stuff related to podcasting.

Jeff Umbro: And can you break that down a little bit? Like who uses this?

Bradley Davis: Sure. So a lot of people: we have listeners - so this is kind of what we built the site for in the very beginning - so if you want to find a podcast to listen to as a fan. That's the bulk of our traffic to the website.

And then if you are a company, maybe a PR firm or a marketing agency or a podcast publisher, you would use our paid features and our on-platform SaaS product, which is Podchaser Pro.

And then we also have a lot of these, mainly, podcast platforms [who] use our API to power some of their internal tooling, whether it be for show acquisition, or to help build out a catalog for a podcast product. Quite a few of our clients use our API.

Jeff Umbro: Since you brought it up, I am curious: through the API, you mentioned that people are looking at this for show acquisition, strategy, and that kind of thing. So are you suggesting that the Acasts of the world, or the Wonderys, or any of the big networks might be using this to do some of their market research as to who they may want to pursue or what kind of genres they want to go after?

Bradley Davis: Absolutely. I'd say most major podcast publishers utilize our data for some sort of acquisition or market research, pinging our API every single day to find the next big hit.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, we do that at Podglomerate. Not quite in the same way - it's not necessarily us looking for acquisition targets. But on the media side it's super helpful and we'll dive into that in a moment. But Bradley, where did this company come from?

Bradley Davis: Great question. So I was selling cardboard boxes for a living.

Jeff Umbro: No you weren't!

Bradley Davis: Yes, I was! So, I was a cardboard box salesperson, which is a very sexy lifestyle that I can talk to you more about later. So anyway, I was obviously very successful and was driving a lot every day and started to get really into podcasts. And I found myself getting excited to get in the car to go knock on the door of some 50 year old maintenance worker trying to sell them boxes or rags or whatever.

And I found maybe six months into this, I felt like I had run out of podcasts to listen to. And so I'm a huge nerd and I'm really into IMDB, and Letterboxd, and all of these sort of database products for other media verticals. So when I went to look for the solution in podcasting, I was really shocked that there was like nothing at all - it was like 2017. The only thing I could find was these obscure bodybuilding.com forum posts, and subreddits, and these little corners of the internet that would have these brief conversations about a topic I was interested in.

So I went on the podcast subreddit and I was like, "Hey is there an IMDB of podcasts? If not, does anybody wanna build that with me?" And that's where I found my co-founder.

Jeff Umbro: So the two big use cases, outside of the API portion, are listeners - and you've been called the IMDB of podcasting - and podcasters. Or I guess media or communications departments at companies may want to use this for research.

So we'll start on the podcaster side. How specifically is somebody using this if they're a hobbyist, they have 5,000 listeners a month across a weekly interview show or something. How are they using the platform?

Bradley Davis: So we have roughly 50,000 podcasters on the platform. So they will come in and our tooling for podcasters is free. You claim your podcast, you add additional metadata, such as, like a custom category. Credits are a big piece of this. So adding yourself as a host and then adding yourself to other shows as a guest or a producer or whatever it may be. And kind of building out almost a resume for yourself within the industry.

Once you input this data, it's easier for others to find you and to collaborate with you. A lot of independent podcasters use Podchaser to kind of find their cluster in the podcast universe and work with other podcasters within that cluster for things like cross-promotion, co-marketing, and networking.

Jeff Umbro: Then in terms of how a listener might use it, you know, somebody who's seeking out like a hunting podcast that they wanna listen to. I know a lot of people are finding this through Google search queries and that kind of thing, then once they hit the site, how are they engaging with it?

Bradley Davis: Yeah, so there's varying levels of engagement from a listener perspective. Like you said, most people will hit our website through Google search, and then that will help them, for example, figure out a celebrity's guest appearances and trying to build a list of podcasts that they wanna listen to around a certain personality.

Then some of our more engaged users will build lists to try to curate and catalog shows that they've already listened to, which is actually a really popular use case. Or to curate shows to listen to, generally through our bookmark functionality - so going in on an episode level and building a list. You can actually export that list to an RSS feed and pop that into your podcast player choice.

We definitely view ourselves as a sort of backup or an additional resource on top of your favorite [hosting platform]. We don't wanna play that game because it's a very crowded, very competitive space that has billions of dollars into it. So we try to create tooling that can offer a deeper dive into the podcast catalog at large and help users really hone in on a specific group of shows to listen to.

Jeff Umbro: I think that a lot of the tools that you have created have been super valuable. I'll just speak as a client - and full disclaimer, Podglomerate is a paying client of Podchaser Pro.

Bradley Davis: Thank you, Podglomerate.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you for making the tool. It makes our lives really easy.

So we have historically done a lot of work in the space of actually creating these playlists, and sharing them on socials, and using this as a platform for us to actually create added value for our consumers and listeners. But the real thing that we love and keep coming back to at the Podglomerate is the Podchaser Pro tool.

And just to take a step back, at the company we're often doing these audience growth campaigns, which consists of marketing, PR, cross promotion, pitching podcast apps, paid acquisition, which often includes buys on other podcasts. And one of the things that we've learned over the years is it is really difficult to tell the size of some of the shows that you're buying ads on, or that you want to be pursuing for publicity opportunities, or cross promos. Podchaser Pro is one of the first and one of the better tools that really helps you to understand the kind of demos and audience sizes of these shows that you are trying to target.

So can you walk us through why you built Podchaser Pro, the makeup of some of the folks who are using it, and what has kind of developed over the years since you launched it?

Bradley Davis: So when Podchaser first started, I knew pretty much nothing about podcasting or media at all. It was just a random idea on a Reddit thread that stemmed from me wanting to find more podcasts to listen to. And so once we built Podchaser, and got some funding, and started having some progress, the question came eventually: how do we make money? How do we charge for this?

And as we surveyed and talked to people within the industry, outside the industry, and tangential to the industry, it was the same problem, the same complaints, which is that podcasting is very valuable, but it's very fragmented. The beauty of podcasting is that it's fragmented, but that also gets in the way of podcasting's growth.

So we tried to marry our skillset of search discovery and aggregation with pro tooling. Essentially we just decided we needed to figure out how to measure or estimate the size of every podcast. How do we do that? At the time, we're like, "Well, that's impossible, so that's not gonna work." But we eventually started partnering with podcast apps who send us these aggregated, anonymized sample sets of the popularity of podcasts. And then coupled with our search and discovery, we realized that a ton of people need [that] sort of functionality. And so we built Podchaser Pro.

So the initial impetus was how do we make money? And then drilling down from there, it was how do we make money in a sustainable way that serves the industry, where are the gaps, and what kind of people are using this platform?

Jeff Umbro: I know how we use it, but I'm curious if there are other use cases within the industry.

Bradley Davis: I think your use case is very popular, so market research, cross promo, audience development. We have a lot of usage from PR firms, marketing agencies, media planners, nonprofits, brands. Any sort of organization that behooves them to find podcasts more efficiently to accomplish X goal tends to use the platform.

PR was a really big, surprising one, because their use case was: we have an executive from a Fortune 500 company and they're getting pitched to be on all these podcasts. As a PR professional, I can't qualify the opportunity and I can't measure that opportunity in any such way. And so I knew nothing about the PR industry and that was our first really big client base, was just a qualification tool to figure out if these big CEOs should be on these podcasts, which I [know has] helped hundreds of interviews take place within the industry.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I actually come from the book publicity world...

Bradley Davis: We have every single book publisher. It's a big use case.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. I remember - this was back in like 2016 was when I left that job - but they were just starting to ask about the podcast industry, at that point in part, because of Serial. The industry just kind of took everybody off guard and started to become a more accessible way to implement media strategy beyond the legacy publications.

But because it was the Wild West, genuinely there was a point in the world where nobody knew - and this is gonna sound crazy - but they didn't know if Joe Rogan or Chris Matthews had a bigger show.

Bradley Davis: Exactly.

Jeff Umbro: So the tools that you built helped people really figure that out.

Bradley, one of the early messaging points that you had back in the day was that you were trying to solve the "podcast discovery problem." I guess I'll first ask: is that still one of the mandates that you're trying to achieve?

Bradley Davis: Yeah, totally. I think that we view ourselves as trying to be the best at the very top of the funnel of the podcast journey, whether you're a listener, or a buyer, or whoever. So to do that, we need to aggregate as many useful data points as possible.

I know there's a lot of discourse about how podcast discovery isn't actually broken. I'm not really claiming it's necessarily broken, but it's something that can be always improved upon and it's something that's good for the industry.

So we're very focused on discovery and our three steps are discovery, qualification, and action, and trying to use data and use data across, ideally, every podcast in the world to make that easier.

Jeff Umbro: So I guess a question, and you kind of answered this, but I'll just ask it more directly: do you feel that what you've done has helped to improve podcast discovery?

Bradley Davis: Certainly, at least, I can only talk to our own experience, but with our clients who include most of the big podcast players, they utilize our data to make discovery easier and better, whether it's for their products or for their end users, which are podcast listeners. So I would say yes.

But, I think we have way more to do and way more to go. It's a constantly evolving problem that we are always chasing, because it keeps growing, and so it just gets harder and harder.

Jeff Umbro: When I first started in the industry, I was writing a bunch of articles for outlets like Paste, and The Daily Dot, and a few other folks. I remember I wrote an article about the "podcast discovery problem," and I very pointedly, in the article, said that that doesn't exist. And then the editor changed the title of the article to say something along the lines of "How to Fix a Broken Podcast Discovery Problem," because it's good click bait. But I'm just like, “Did you read the article?”

So who are some of your competitors if you have any?

Bradley Davis: Competitors... Listen Notes, Magellan, Google.

Jeff Umbro: Just those guys.

Bradley Davis: Yeah Google, I don't know if you've heard of them.

There are many companies that do parts of what we do. As far as a one-to-one full suite competitor, luckily, I don't think we really have that. From the beginning we were trying to be kind of boring, just handle a pretty small sliver, and have resisted the temptation to [be] like, Oh, let's do TikTok now," and "Let's do YouTube," "Let's do everything else..."

So in that sense, a lot of those other kinds of intelligence platforms are much more robust for other mediums, and that's great. There's a great use case for that. But we're just trying to double down and go really deep on podcasting.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, asking that question is one of my favorites, because I think it reveals a lot about how people are thinking about the roles they're in. But yeah, being boring has really paid off for you.

What happened last year?

Bradley Davis: We got bought by this mysterious Swedish company called Acast.

Jeff Umbro: So anybody who's interested, you can Google it and find out how much, but it's a lot of money, and in theory has a lot of synergies that will really help to grow the business overall.

And so I wanted to actually ask you about that. From your point of view, why is Acast the right buyer for this company?

Bradley Davis: I mean, it almost sounds cheesy at this point, but I think that Acast represents one of the largest companies that upholds this vision of independent podcasting. And not necessarily like a podcaster that has no sales affiliation, but just that, podcasting should exist on its own independent ecosystem. And the more people we can get to listen to podcasting, the more money the industry can make, and the larger the industry grows. So I think Acast is a uniquely large company that does only podcasting. There's no terrestrial radio origin story there, there's no music origin story there... It was podcasting first from the beginning with a tech focus.

So I think that's why it made the most sense, was because that's what we're all about is aggregation, working with everybody, and trying to get the word out about podcasting, as many places as possible. And so from a philosophical lens, we aligned really well.

Jeff Umbro: I think most of our listeners are gonna be pretty familiar with Acast, but in 10 seconds, what is Acast? What does that company do?

Bradley Davis: Acast is, man, I hope I don't get in trouble for this... They're a podcast platform, a hosting platform, and monetization platform as well. They have a hundred million monthly unique listeners, so they're really big. And they're headquartered in Sweden.

Jeff Umbro: I think Acast is interesting on a number of levels, not least of which is that they're a lot more advanced internationally than a lot of other companies are in the US.

Bradley Davis: Yes.

Jeff Umbro: [For] a lot of US consumers, who are probably listening to this show, Acast is part of the conversation, but not as big a part as it is elsewhere. As we record this, I'm getting ready to go to London for the podcast show and Acast is sponsoring like every single event, I think.

Bradley Davis: Yeah. Acast is pretty dominant globally. Its entry into the US is unique because they can take learnings from, in some ways more mature audio countries, and bring that expertise into the US. That is both exciting, and an opportunity, and also a challenge at times to adapt to the US and our podcast culture, which is very different than the UK.

Jeff Umbro: And so I guess that leads me to my next question: how has the transition been going so far, integrating Podchaser into Acast?

Bradley Davis: It's been great. I think that the goal from the very beginning - and the big reason why we agreed to do it - was operational independence. So even from a legal corporate structure, we're our own entity. I'm still the CEO of Podchaser. We're our own C corp.

But with that though, there's a lot of learnings and a lot of synergy... I wish there were a better word, but a lot of synergy between the two companies. We have this data-first, software-first approach, and Acast has so much more experience with the buyer journey and content and media. So combining those two has, I think, helped both companies quite a bit.

But the transition has been great. Just a super fun and collaborative environment. I'm learning a lot about Sweden, which is always fun. And yeah, no complaints. I promise, there's no gun to my head.

Jeff Umbro: There's obviously a lot of ways in which these companies will help influence and impact one another. I'm really curious what the plans are in the future. Have you thought about that? Have you talked about that?

It sounds like a lot of this is gonna be complimentary to one another: you have access to their API, they have access to all of your customers, and everything for sourcing future deals. Is there anything else that I'm missing there?

Bradley Davis: The future's exciting, Jeff. The idea is that Acast has more or less solved for very specific problems within the buyer journey. And I think as [a] user in the Pro platform, a frustration, or an opportunity, is you find the show you want to interact with, you qualify it, but then you have to go off platform and go somewhere else to perform whatever it is you wanna perform - whether that's buying an ad, or a guest pitch, or whatever it may be.

So I think the future, with the help of Acast, is to do a lot more of that journey on the platform itself in a very efficient, automated way.

Jeff Umbro: The wheels are turning right now, because I know that Acast has been really pushing their programmatic marketplace and direct sales on platform and everything. I'm now starting to put two and two together.

Bradley Davis: Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity to kind of blend the knowledge of Acast with the tech savvy of Podchaser. And any more detail than that, I cannot reveal. But it'll be awesome. It's really exciting.

Jeff Umbro: It sounds like it. Honestly, you sound very happy. You sound like this is the right place for you.

Thank you so much for joining us Bradley. Everybody head to Podchaser.com and check out the platform. You can follow Podchaser on all the different socials. And thank you so much for joining us Bradley. This was awesome.

Bradley Davis: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jeff Umbro: Thanks again to Bradley Davis for joining me on this episode of Podcast Perspectives. You can find more from the Podglomerate at thepodglomerate.com or send us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com. You can follow us on all social platforms @podglomerate. And thank you to Chris Boniello, Henry Lavoie, and Jordan Aaron for producing the show. We'll see you next week.