Atomic Entertainment Co-Founder Jerry Kolber on Designing Profitable Family Podcasts

Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

Jeff Umbro: This week on Podcast Perspectives.

Jerry Kolber: I do think we're now in what I would call the story age. Now you go on like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. Everyone has started to understand the power of using story to connect.

Jeff Umbro: Today's guest is Jerry Kolber, the Emmy nominated producer behind Nat Geo's Brain Games and Netflix's Brainchild, and the co-creator and host of the hit kids podcast, Who Smarted? Through his company Atomic Entertainment, Jerry has taken everything he learned in television and applied it to audio reaching tens of millions of downloads worldwide. He's also one of the few kids' audio creators leaning hard into paid growth with a structured approach to Facebook ads and a new fundraise aimed largely at scaling that engine. Today we're going to dig into how he designs family shows and why he believes this is the moment to go all in on kids podcasting.

And a quick disclaimer, The Podglomerate is a very small investor in Atomic Entertainment as part of his recent fundraise.

Welcome to the show, Jerry.

Jerry Kolber: Thanks Jeff. It's great to be here.

Jeff Umbro: I want to start by just talking about your TV career, 'cause it's a podcast show about podcasts.

Jerry Kolber: Okay.

Jeff Umbro: You've worked with everyone, Nat Geo, Netflix, many, many others. How do you tell the story of pre podcast Jerry in a way that connects to what you're doing today?

Jerry Kolber: Sure. So pre podcast Jerry was a TV producer, then a TV showrunner, and then a TV executive producer. And the simplest way to put it is that I always had an interest in television shows that were as educational as they were entertaining. Didn't, didn't manage to pull that off every single show I worked on, but I did get better at it the later I got in my career, ultimately creating a show called Brain Games for National Geographic channel, and then a show called Brainchild for Netflix. Both of these were educational shows that were super fun to watch, playing games with the TV getting people really engaged. And I would've continued down that road. If the TV industry had remained open to those kind of shows, but there's just been a bit of a shift in, in tastes in terms of what TV networks and and streamers are, are buying, and that coincided with the pandemic.

And so all of that sort of perfect storm during the pandemic led us to say, you know, we're an impact driven company. We love helping people see the world in different ways. We love inspiring curiosity, and the only thing we can do while everything is shut down and we can't shoot is record something in our homes. And so we decided to start podcasting. And it, we really thought it was a temporary, you know, few month thing. And then of course it just, as things kept going and the shows kept growing, we realized that this was an opportunity in audio to launch the kind of shows we wanna make, have bigger impact than we ever had in television, own all the IP, own the whole process, and be able to do it in a way that scaled. And so it just kind of became a, a no brainer to shift the company in that direction.

Jeff Umbro: Are you doing like a hundred percent podcasting now? Are you still like engaged in any TV or film properties at this point?

Jerry Kolber: Right now we're a hundred percent podcasting 'cause we're in, in a real growth phase with the business. So, you know, there will eventually be an opportunity to license some of our podcasts back to television, and we continue to, you know, keep those relationships going. But in terms of our focus for the next couple of years, it's 100% on on growing the audio business.

Jeff Umbro: I love that. So what did you assume from TV that would translate directly to audio and where, what surprised you about that?

Jerry Kolber: So the one thing we knew would translate from from TV to audio was our ability to tell stories in really innovative ways and in ways that were counterintuitive, but would really draw people in. It's something we've gotten really good at from, you know, 15 or 20 years of making television. The thing that we didn't understand about podcasting was the relationship with the listeners that, you know, we really didn't, we, we had, we have some friends who have some big podcasts, but we never really kind of dug into like, what is that like? And when you make a TV show, you have no relationship with the fans. Like if anything, they're communicating with the network, you know, whoever's running the network Q&A or forms or whatever.

But immediately in podcasting, we started hearing directly from the listeners. There was such a, there's such a joy in that, in like actually knowing the impact you're having on people's lives and hearing from them. And to this day we get, you know, now we get thousands of listener comments and emails every week.

And most of our show ideas on Who Smarted?, our big family show, comes from our fans.

Jeff Umbro: I was just listening to an episode today that was all just listener questions and you have something with that show. I was getting a kick out of it, and I am, I'm clearly not the audience, but I enjoyed it.

Jerry Kolber: But you are though. That's, that's the thing. So that's, yeah. I'm glad you said that.

Jeff Umbro: I was teeing you up.

Jerry Kolber: Yeah. No. Good job.

That's another thing we're, we're, that is, uh, another, it's like something we take for granted, but it's such a special thing that we do, which is we make shows for families. We don't make shows for, for these shows aren't, we don't call them kids' shows. Right. And that was, that was something we discovered with Brain Games at Nat Geo. Nat Geo's an adult channel. Right. It's not a kids' channel. But when we started doing brain games, they saw the average age of the, the viewer declining in the Nielsen ratings from like 52 down to like 32. And it wasn't because there was suddenly a bunch of 32 year olds watching Nat Geo, it was that kids were watching with their parents.

And that actually changed how we thought about the show. And it made us realize that if you get the tone right, you can, you can appeal to kids and parents at the same time. And so that's something that's very unique about Who Smarted? is that we really deliberately set out to make an audio show that parents would keep listening to after their kids got out of the car. Right? Because so many kids shows are, you know, they're fine. For, for adults, they're great for kids, but maybe not so much for the parents. So we, we really try to make something that you would listen to and enjoy. So you actually are kind of the, the target audience, even though you're not a kid, so.

Jeff Umbro: Parents aren't gonna sit and watch Sesame Street once the kid leaves the room, so, okay. So I've heard you discuss this thing called the story era, which is is, you know, a broader thesis of where you think we are today and, and I think is the broader thesis of what you and Atomic are doing. So could you walk us through what the Story Era is?

Jerry Kolber: Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, I think societies go through errors we've had like the Industrial Age, the Automation Age, Information Age, Technology Age. And I do think we're now in what I would call the Story Age, which is when you look around, even at how brands are talking about themselves, like 30-second commercials don't work anymore, right? Everybody's onto it. Everyone knows the levers, everyone knows how it works. So even big brands now look at how can they tell their story to a consumer and get the consumer involved. That's at the brand level.

On the creator level, when you look at the amount of story being created every hour of every day, now, it's extraordinary. Like before YouTube existed, most people weren't creating story. And now you go on like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. People are really getting very, very good at telling stories, short stories, longer stories. And so I do think that we're in an era where everyone has started to understand the power of using story to connect in a way that they didn't used to.

And so that's why I think we're now in a, in a Story Age.

Jeff Umbro: With Who's Smarted? and all the rest of the shows that you all produce, and I want to come back to that, I think you have kind of transformed your, your properties into this, these really unique vehicles that really embody that story age that you're talking about. Because as I was listening to who Smarted, just for example, all the ads were like incredibly native to the episodes in the show. You know, it was the narrator embodying the voice within the world, talking about. How this would be relevant to the listener, which you know, as you said, is families. It's not just the kid who's listening to this, it's also their parents. The brother, the sister. The ad I heard was DoorDash, and it was basically like when my niece was sick, I used DoorDash and, and I got some ice cream too for me.

So that's the kind of idea of how you're trying to integrate these ads into the show, which in my mind leads to, you know, higher CPMs and premium buys and bigger integrations with other organizations and that kind of thing. Can you walk through how you make money on these shows?

Jerry Kolber: Yeah, sure. So there's a few ways that we, we monetize the shows. The first is the most obvious one, ad revenue that's accounts for, you know, anywhere from 90 to 95% of our revenue, depending on the show.

Jeff Umbro: Let's pause there for one second though, because I, I do want to point out, and we talked to a few folks with, you know, kid oriented content on this show before. Because of things like COPPA and because you know the audience is presumably mostly children, but with families, do you find it difficult to find advertisers for these, these shows?

Jerry Kolber: So we did find it difficult. I'm not gonna name the networks, but let just pretty much every major podcast network, we were on them at one point or another. They all were very excited to have Who Smarted? because we, we started to get to some really significant numbers in towards the end of year two. And there was just this, just a lot of excitement around representing us for ads. And then every single one of them failed to sell any ads. And the reason for that was both COPPA, which is Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, issues as well as, you know, the reality is ad salespeople, unless they're bundling, you know, tens of millions of, of ads for a genre, they're just not gonna pay that much attention.

Like the, the people who run the network might be like, Oh my gosh. Yes. Who Smarted?'s amazing. It's impactful. And then they, you know, someone goes, well wait, I can go sell, you know, Athletic Greens across my 70 million download true crime portfolio or I can go try and chase down Hasbro for, you know, a million downloads on Who Smarted?

Jeff Umbro: Even if you get like a 10 x premium, you're, you're still making 10% of the, of the revenue.

Jerry Kolber: Yes, exactly. And that took me a minute to sort of wrap my head around, so we were at a point where we were literally building our own children's advertising network at Atomic, and we were starting to figure out how to do that. And then a guy named Jed Baker, who runs a company called Starglow, came to us and said, Hey, I'm starting this ad network just for kids and family shows. And I said, well, it's not gonna work because these 10 reasons. And he thought through all of that and we said, okay, we'll give it a shot, because that seemed a lot easier to me than building our own internal system at, at that time at least. And so that became a.

Jeff Umbro: Let someone else do it.

Jerry Kolber: Really, yeah, that was a really important inflection point for us because he actually was able to get the right advertisers for the shows and able to bundle us along with some other shows to have some scale.

And so from that point we've actually been able to, to monetize with ads. As far as COPPA, we are very, we're COPPA compliant in the sense that we are very careful about announcing who the sponsors are. Making it very clear when there's ads. I don't know how in the weeds do you wanna get on this? But in terms of COPPA stuff with kids, so most people use programmatic advertising to fill in any unsold direct ads, which is just gonna be like, you know, piping in Mint Mobile and pre, you know, prerecorded ads. And we thought we could do that with Who Smarted? And we actually discovered we can't because all of the backend systems that drive programmatic, or at least the ones that currently exist, are pulling such detailed demographic information that they actually do violate COPPA laws. So we don't use programmatic.

Jeff Umbro: That makes a lot of sense. What about attribution tracking? Are you using pixels?

Jerry Kolber: Nope.

Jeff Umbro: and advertisers are fine with that.

Jerry Kolber: Yeah, I mean we explained to them we can't do it because, you know, especially as the show got bigger and, and, and actually Star Glow has now been acquired by Super Awesome, we were already COPA compliant and already compliant with all of the, all of that, that stuff. But we, you know, we have to be very, very, very vigilant about it.

And so we don't do any kind of, any kind of user level tracking.

Jeff Umbro: So Star Glow is selling a lot of the ads for your shows at Atomic Star Glow. You know, as of recording, like a week ago, was acquired by Super

awesome. Will that change your relationship with Star?

Jerry Kolber: It will in the sense that we now have, instead of Jed and a and a handful of folks selling the ads, we're now gonna have Jed working with a, a massive international team of sales agents who already have direct relationships with all of the brands that we've always wanted to have on the show. That should be on the show, you know, the Mattel and Nike and all that kind of stuff.

So, yeah, it's gonna, I think it's going to, it's gonna change it for the better. And I do think that long term, this is both great for our shows, but I also think it's, it's fantastic for the whole family audio space in general because now there's, you know, a real heavyweight kids media advertising company in the space really committing to audio.

And so it's, it's an important and, and big inflection point.

Jeff Umbro: I love that and I also hope that that is very much the case as opposed to every other time big international organization came into podcasting. So we will see.

Jerry Kolber: You do, you, do you, do you think, I haven't woken up at night with some of the night sweats. I mean, look, they haven't sold audio, you know, so that is a thing. Like they're, but they are uniquely, I, I would, I'll say, I'll say this in terms of why I'm, I'm excited and optimistic, right? Because traditionally, when a big company comes into a space, we have not experienced that to be necessarily always a positive thing. Right?

Jeff Umbro: Some, sometimes, it is, but not always. Yes.

Jerry Kolber: But sometimes, it is. And in this case, these, this is a, this is a company that is very committed to creators and very committed to advertising and, and systems that support those creators in the family and kids space. So I think they're, they're starting from a much, a much stronger starting place than some of the other companies that we've dealt with. So I'm very optimistic about it.

Jeff Umbro: Well, fingers crossed. Okay, so advertising is the first way in which you make money. What is the second and is there a third and fourth?

Jerry Kolber: Sure there's a few. So the second would be the subscriptions subscription revenue. We do a decent amount of subscription on our adult shows, but our kid shows are very, very heavily subscribed. We have, I think, almost a 2% subscription rate of our listeners on, on Who Smarted?, Which is very, very high. So that's actually a significant source of our revenue.

And then I would say sort of equally on, on the third position is what I would call sort of ancillary projects. So for instance, we just ran what we call Who Smarted? C Camp. Uh, in December, we did like three days where kids can sign up and we've actually created this like video experience that's very Who Smarted? branded, but very unique that they essentially buy tickets for and they come and they chat with the trusty narrator who's the host of the show while they're watching this video and doing activities at home.

So that's a piece of it. And then the other piece is becoming more, more significant is branded revenue. As our reputation is, is is even growing more in the audio space, we've had brands come to us ranging from Flintstones vitamins, uh, Chick-fil-A came to us and we did a project for them, Siemens corporation.

So there's a big and growing piece of the business that is branded audio and white label audio.

Jeff Umbro: That's incredible. I know you're also doing a lot of stuff in the classrooms, group listening activities and education. And ultimately, you know, I'm sure you're not as kind of selfish as I am in these thoughts when it comes to audience growth, but like ultimately this all is inspiring audience growth and community around the show, right?

Jerry Kolber: I don't think it's selfish to think that way. I think if you're making something that has impact, then the more people who are exposed to it, and the more impact you have, the better, the better it is for the world. And so I'm gonna say it's a selfless act. No, we are, we do, we do think about that. Like we give away, so one of the, one of the challenges for getting Who Smarted? Used in classrooms is that we, we do have ads, and even though the ads are like unbelievably family safe teachers just didn't want to have ads playing in the classroom. And so we said, okay, the solution then is we'll give any K through 12 educator who asks a free subscription to Who Smarted? Plus. So they can use the ad free version in their classroom. And so now we're in something like, I think 15,000 classrooms around the country.

Jeff Umbro: Really. Wow.

I, Jerry, I was excited to have you on the show. I didn't know anything about these numbers. That's, that's wild.

Jerry Kolber: Yeah. There's been a huge, huge uptake on that and, and even, and I think as more and more teachers tell other teachers about it, and to be honest, Jeff, we haven't really pushed it that hard. We probably should start. We mentioned it on the show for a while. We haven't, so, but it's, it just keeps kind of growing on its own.

Jeff Umbro: So that makes my next question a little more relevant. I have heard you state that your listenership is actually much higher than your number of unique devices that have downloaded episodes.

Because you have all these like group listening scenarios. How are you thinking about that with brand deals and advertisers and that kind of thing?

Are you charging a premium for that?

Jerry Kolber: It's a little tricky to charge a premium for something you can't point to actual data for. So we know that, you know, most adult shows are solo listening. You're listening in the car, you're listening with headphones. We know that our show is almost always consumed by at least two and usually three or four people at a time in the home or in the car. In the classroom you've got, you know, 25, 30 kids. But we're not monetizing that. So we kind of leave that aside. But it's hard to point to say to an advertiser, I swear that, you know, even though there's 250,000 unique devices, it's actually closer to a million listeners.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Jerry Kolber: You know?

I mean, it's, they get it.

Jeff Umbro: I'll, I'll take your word for it.

Jerry Kolber: They get it. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, we, we, we can.

Jeff Umbro: Tell my boss that I'll, that I he told me I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna believe him.

Jerry Kolber: Triple the CPM, it'll be great.

So we do, you know, we have been really able, Jed's been greatat getting a premium CPM, but you still have to sell based on the number of downloads and impressions.

Jeff Umbro: Do you use any of the kids listening devices, like a Yoto or something? Like are you, are you doing any work on with them?

Jerry Kolber: We are in Yoto. We've been on Yoto since pretty much when they started. We continue to be one of their top four or five shows typically in terms of time listened, but it is strictly us giving them the RSS feed, which includes the ads. We were just talking to them about doing our own unique Yoda cards.

It's a very long process and it's, it could take a year or two and it's just not where we're, where we're super focused right now, but it's something we're very interested in, but we're on the player, so we're, we're happy to be there.

Jeff Umbro: Are there other players that are kids?

Jerry Kolber: The other big one is, is Tonies. T-O-N-I-E-S is a big one, but they tend to lean more into IP driven stories. So, you know, it's like Star Wars stuff or you know, Marvel, stuff like that. So, and then you put like a little, it's like a little character you have to put in the box and it, yeah. So, but that's another big one.

Jeff Umbro: Okay, so I want to turn our attention to growth for a minute. You are one of the only, what I would call professional creators that I've spoken to in, in recent years who actually buys Facebook ads and is actually finding success there. So, so let's just pause there for a second and, and stew in that. Can you walk us through like what you're actually doing and, and why you feel it's successful?

Jerry Kolber: Sure. So the biggest problem with family shows getting the audience that they should have isn't, isn't even necessarily people knowing or not knowing about a specific show. It's that they don't even know that podcasts for families exist. So if you think about it, there's 30 million. Kids in our age range, you know, 8 to 11 in this country. We know that, you know, between our show and some of the other big shows, there's probably a million of them listening to podcasts, to kids podcasts. So what we have found, and, and I think this is probably unique to this, to the family space, is that when we're advertising on Facebook, we're not even saying, come check out our show.

We do kind of a pattern interrupter, funny image, or something goofy related to science or animals. And then it says, "A podcast for families," or "A podcast you can listen to with your kids." And then it's, that's, that's what drives them to click. And then once they hear the show, they're hooked. You know, you really, you know, we, we, we say the only difference between a, a parent with an 8 to an 11-year-old who's a, Who's Smarted? listener or not, is whether or not they found the show.

Because once they find the show, they're like down the rabbit hole, like the kids love it, the parents love it. So we see our job on Facebook isn't to necessarily get them excited about Who's Smarted. It's to let them know that a podcast for families exists and it happens to be ours that we're pushing, but like, you know, we're still, I still do think the family space is in this and I think this is why Super Awesome got into it, is like we're just now at the point where there's enough volume to be like, this is a real genre and corner of the podcast business, but it's just at the beginning because there's so much of the audience that has yet to even discover that these podcasts even exist. True crime, everyone knows about, you know, self-help, all that stuff. But the family space, there's still a tremendous amount of untapped potential in the audience.

So that's why the Facebook thing works, I think, really well for us.

Jeff Umbro: And so everything that you're doing there is targeting the parents, right?

Jerry Kolber: We will never, ever target a child with, with an ad. And the reason for that besides, you know, there's very, like, there, you get into a.

Jeff Umbro: Besides the law.

Jerry Kolber: Around it, besides the law. But besides, besides that is we realize, you know, sort of hand in hand with the idea, like, we're making shows that are fun for parents and kids to listen to, but kids are not in the podcast ecosphere, naturally. Parents are, right? And so that's something we saw a lot of other kids shows do these, these ads that feel like they're probably targeting the kids in terms of the tone or the style. And we're like, no, we gotta target the parents. They're the ones who are listening to podcasts. They're the ones who are pressing play. You know, we started joking, our PPP was "Parents press play." Because once we, once we realized that and we stopped even thinking about advertising to kids, it unlocked so much, so much more growth because we just, we go to the parents, they're the ones who have to get the kid into it, you know?

So until you reach, at some point, there'll be a tipping point where kids are on the, you know, at school going, did you listen to Who's Smarted? And you know, and then they gotta go tell their parents to listen. But I still think we're in the parents press play space.

Jeff Umbro: Let's talk about these social ads and the math behind them. So you create these disruptors. People will be scrolling through their feed. They'll see a big raccoon and it'll say, click here. Listen to a kids' podcast, and somebody will click. What is the math on how expensive is an, is an impression for that ad? How many people are clicking it based on impressions? How many people are downloading the episode based on the clicks? What can you anticipate based on your spend?

Jerry Kolber: Yeah, sure. So, so we know the cost per click is around 6 to 8 cents, and we know that roughly every, you know, something like 5% of those clicks convert into listeners. So our, our cost per listener acquired is somewhere around $1.80 to $2, depending on, you know, how, how the math is running that week.

And we know that listeners are typically, you know, the, the revenue we earn from advertising to a listener over the two or three years they're with us is somewhere between $5 to $7. So, and some of them will actually convert into subscribers, which obviously, you know, is a, is a much higher ROI. But we kind of leave that out. We just treat it as, you know, 'cause we, we can't track which Facebook listener converts to a subscriber. So that's just gravy.

Jeff Umbro: One day you might be able to, although not with your podcast, 'cause.

Jerry Kolber: Not with Who Smarted?

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, exactly. One day a, a random listener to the show might be able to.

Jerry Kolber: Exactly. Yeah, that would be amazing. Someone's like, Hey, I've got data. I'm like, I, I don't know how you got that data.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Jerry Kolber: I know we, we can't track any of that per user behavior. So we just, we track it in sort of an aggregate, like spend, we can see what's happening in the, in the podcast feed. And we, you know, the one thing we do is when we're running a Facebook campaign, we try and turn off everything else.

So no promo swaps, no other marketing, just so we can track it as clean, cleanly as possible.

Jeff Umbro: It's very smart, sophisticated, and experienced, and, and I do want to underline this. Jerry is talking about the result of him testing this for a long time. I don't wanna speak for you, Jerry, but I'm sure that you had a long time where you were spending a lot more than, you know, 8 cents per click. So just be careful for whoever's listening if they're gonna try and like replicate this process. But that said, it's very smart and for the right show, I think it, it can be very effective at driving audience. And you've done a very great job synthesizing why you think Who Smarted? is the right show for this. For anybody out there who's listening, who's like, you know, running a, a business show about podcasting, for example, like maybe don't go and spend a million dollars on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Jerry Kolber: We've tried this with some of our adult shows and the results are okay. They're okay, but they're not as good as, as the kid shows. And what's interesting is you can actually be even more targeted with an adult show to like a true crime fan or a movie fan or a whatever fan. And it just doesn't, it just doesn't convert as highly as the kid shows.

But I'll also say this, Jeff, I don't think anyone should touch Facebook advertising or any kind of advertising spend until you're like 50 or 100 episodes in.

Jeff Umbro: Until you know that you have a show that people actually wanna listen to.

Jerry Kolber: Exactly. Because you got, it, it took, we didn't, we didn't touch Facebook or any of that advertising until probably two and a half to three years in, and we were doing three episodes a week. So we were, I think, probably 300, 200 or 300 episodes in before we started trying that, but I wouldn't. I think your, your focus should be on building a great show and building an audience within the, there's so much growth you can do without spending a penny, by smart promo swaps and interview strategies and do all that stuff.

And then when you really have some momentum and you're like, you're hitting a plateau, but you know, the show is great and the feedback is great, your engagement numbers are high, and you're there, then maybe think about spending on advertising. But don't even, it's just, it's such a, it's a lot of work and it's a lot of testing and it's, it's a distraction if you're doing it too early in your show's growth.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, I agree. I think there, there is a point where it makes sense initially like to get a stronger launch, but that's gonna totally depend on like the goal of the show that you have. And to your point, I do think that it makes all the sense in the world to make sure that the show's actually, you know, striking a chord with the audience that it wants.

Jerry Kolber: Well, and there's brand. If you're doing a branded show, sometimes you, you do wanna drive a lot of listenership at the top, and that's a different, different story. That's if someone else is paying for it and they need the me the metrics, they want that growth right away. That's different. But if you're doing your own show, like bootstrapping.

Jeff Umbro: Yes.

Jerry Kolber: Maybe wait a minute.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, exactly. On that note, you have recently raised some money for atomic Entertainment. You wanna walk us through how much you raised, what you want to use it for, why now?

Jerry Kolber: Yeah, so we, so early on, you know, 'cause we, we have such a great track record in TV, right? When we started podcasting five years ago, a lot of people came to us like, we'll invest. We'll invest. I'm like, I'm not taking any investments until I know that this is a business. Right. Until I've. Put in my own money and seen this grow and my co-founder, Adam Davis, Adam "Text" Davis of, add the "Tex." Adam "Tex" Davis and I were like, we wanna know that this works from, from our own perspective and our own bootstrapping this before we started taking investment. And so towards the end of 2024, that's when we said, look, this is a profitable business. We can see the path to growth. And so the thing that we can do to grow this faster is to take on some outside investment pro, primarily to go to marketing and growing the shows. And so in 2025, we raised around a half a million dollars from a lot of folks, including.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, a very small amount from Podglomerate.

Jerry Kolber: Podglomerate, but we were so excited. I love, there was a few, a few companies came in from the podcast space, which makes me so happy because it's, it's not just an investment, but it's like strategic and it's like, it's just great.

Jeff Umbro: Supporting our own.

Jerry Kolber: Yeah, like, and it's awesome. So we ended up probably like five, 500 and change total, which is, which has really driven a lot of growth over the last year. We were able to take the systems that we were using and we nearly doubled our audience from January 2025 till December.

Jeff Umbro: So I think you just answered the question, but just to ask it like why put money into growth as opposed to expanding the portfolio?

Jerry Kolber: So it's a, it's a good question, and I don't, I don't know that there's exactly a right answer for everyone. I'll tell you, for us, it was looking particularly at Who Smarted? and our true crime show Slaycation. Those are both shows we know that there's a, an, an enormous audience that hasn't discovered this show yet.

Because those we'd spent years perfecting the formats, and because they have kind of both shows have kind of a cult following, it made more sense to us to just continue growing what we knew already worked and then start, we're gonna launch some new shows this year. The sort of other nuanced answer is marketing and growing a show using advertising takes dollars. Launching a show for us doesn't take a lot like we, 'cause we have so many in internal folks that, that work with us. We don't really need capital to do that. And so for us it just made sense to focus on the spend on growth and really tap, like keep, keep growing those audiences and then launch some more shows later this year.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, and, and it quite literally is priceless to be able to utilize like a giant flagship RSS feed to launch new shows in the future.

Jerry Kolber: Yeah, we, we launched Mysteries About True Histories is our other family show. We launched that, MATH. Math, it's hidden in the title and it's hidden in the show. We started that show because every parent was like, can you guys make a Who Smarted? That teaches our kids about math? And we're like, I dunno. Show, fun? Math, fun?

But we figured it out. And that's Mysteries About True Histories. And we used Who Smarted? To launch that show in 2024 and it launched with over a hundred thousand listeners in month one on the strength of the Who Smarted? RSS feed. So.

Jeff Umbro: And how's it doing today?

Jerry Kolber: it's great. It does about two, I think 250,000 a month now. So.

Jeff Umbro: Wow. Nice. That's good for you. You, you have really built a high quality machine. I, I, I'm very, I'm very jealous. It, it sounds really great.

Jerry Kolber: Yeah. Well, listen, me and my, my co-founder a Adam "Text" Davis, like, he's, he's kind of the, the creative, you know, we're both big picture guys, but like in terms of like keeping the, the quality of everything up and running the writers and stuff, he's just a, he's a, he's an absolute genius and workaholic.

Jeff Umbro: Says the host of your largest show.

Jerry Kolber: Well, I just say the words. He, he writes that.

A number of people who say to me like, how do you know so much? And I'm like, I don't know anything. Adam and, and this amazing team of writers he has writes everything. I just have to go in a booth a few times a week and you know, Hey kids, you know, like, it's a lot of fun. I love it.

Jeff Umbro: You have the fun part. Yeah. You don't have to, I mean, i'm sure you do plenty of hard work, but you're not doing the hardest work on that particular show, so.

Jerry Kolber: No, there's the heavy, the heavy creative lifting, like I'll be, I'm big picture ideas with Adam, but the, the heavy lift is, is him and then I'm more the heavy lift on the, on the marketing and business side.

Jeff Umbro: So, okay, last question. For someone running a kids or family show today, what should they emulate from your approach and what should they absolutely not copy.

Jerry Kolber: Well, I would say I had this insight and I, I, you know, I don't mean this to sound crass, so I, it, but I now, I shifted about a year and a half ago from thinking of us as a podcast company that does great marketing to a marketing company that has great podcasts. And I think that if you can think of yourself that way, 'cause if you're making a family podcast, you, you're doing it. If you're, if you're entering this space to make a lot of money, don't. Like, it's rare for family shows to be able to do it. We have the benefit of, of years and years of making, you know, this kind of TV show, like we come to this with a skill set that was earned over 15 years.

There are a lot of great family shows that people do for, for impact, and they're wonderful, but they're not ever gonna be, you know, big, big businesses necessarily. If you are entering this to try and monetize, think of yourself in terms of marketing, it's, it's as if not more important than the show. I mean, 'cause you're gonna make a great show, hopefully, you know, if you're, if you're here to have some impact.

But think about how you're marketing to parents, how you're gonna, you know, literally like the tone of your marketing, where you're gonna market it, how you're gonna do that, you know, through promo swaps and, and interviews and, and anything like that. I would just think really, really carefully about that piece of it.

As far as what not to do, that's very easy. I can tell you exactly what not to do. Do not start making a show that comes out three times a week and tell everyone you're gonna do that forever. We're six times a week now, but it's, it's a lot.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, that is an, in my opinion, an unreasonable amount. I love the idea of kind of reframing that as a marketing org as opposed to a podcast org, because I do feel like it opens up the door for more people outside of the podcast space to gain entry into the podcast space, without them having to like carve out a whole line item in their budget for podcasting, which I think is like the biggest issue for most organizations in the space.

So thank you for that. And thank you for everything else that you do, and I'm sure we'll have you back. This has been a really, really fun conversation.

Jerry Kolber: Yeah, this was awesome, Jeff. I'd love to come back anytime. Thanks.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much to Jerry Kolber for joining us on this week's episode of Podcast Perspectives. You can find Jerry on LinkedIn or at atomicentertainment.com.

For more podcast related news info and takes you can follow me on LinkedIn at Jeff Umbro. 

Podcast Perspectives is a production of the Podglomerate. If you're looking for help producing marketing or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at podglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com or follow us on all socials @podglomeratepods. 

This episode was produced by myself, Jeff Umbro, Chris Boniello, and José Roman. This episode was edited and mixed by José Roman. Thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Erin Weiss, and Sheeba Joseph, and a special thank you to Dan Christo.