A Legacy Comedy Podcast Network Shifts to Video with Forever Dog’s Joe Cilio

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, what is the most difficult part about making comedy podcasts?

Joe Cilio: To constantly have to battle all the big companies, to overpay for talent is annoying. And I wish the market corrected itself in the comedy space.

Jeff Umbro: Podcasting is going through another era of consolidation. In 2025, we've already seen Wonder Media Network get purchased by Acast and Red Seat Ventures purchased by Fox News under the Tubi umbrella.

I like to think of Forever Dog Productions as the Red Seat Ventures for alt comedy. In the same way that Red Seat helps to incubate talent with help on production, marketing, and distribution, that's exactly what Forever Dog does for their clients. Joe Cilio is a co founder and CEO of Forever Dog Productions.

And just one quick disclaimer, I, Jeff Umbro, am a very small investor in Forever Dog Productions.

Welcome to the show, Joe.

Joe Cilio: Hey, thanks for having me, Jeff. This is fun. I feel honored.

Jeff Umbro: Talk to us about your world pre podcast.

Joe Cilio: I started Forever Dog with two friends of mine, Alex Ramsey and Brett Boham. I met those guys when I was in middle school and in high school.

I met Brett when I was like very, very young. And even in our youth, we were making creative projects together. Even in high school, we made like feature like films. We made like art installations. We did, well, Forever Dog started really in earnest when I was in college in New York at a, as a, as a theater troupe, as a theater company, we did tons of plays and comedy shows in New York and we did lots of fringe festivals and traveling theater and comedy and things of that like.

And it was in that, in college or in and around New York city, when we got to meet a lot of great comedic talent and a lot of people, and we did a ton of shows and plays, but we'd look out into the audience and like, sometimes it'd be packed and sometimes it'd be like 20 people and then we just sort of were like, one day we're going to need to buy a house, it's, we're going to need to buy a house, I just, one day it's going to have to happen, we need to think of something different besides plays.

And we were like, in 2015, we were like, let's try podcasting. And we launched with a slate of six podcasts, two of which, three of which became very popular. One of which was Las Culturistas, which now is a huge program on iHeart with Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers was the show that we launched with, I'm very proud of.

And yeah, it's been, it's been. Almost been like eight years, eight years since then.

Jeff Umbro: So you guys launched with six shows. What did that look like? Did you just go out to people who already had podcasts or did you develop all of these from scratch?

Joe Cilio: The slate developed because we walked around town and just asked people that we thought were insanely funny to, hey, want to do a podcast with us?

And then we set it up in Alex's house and we made it for years. We'd edit all the shows, me and Brett and Alex recorded and edited all the shows for like four years. And sometimes we had 30 weekly shows. It was, it was stupid. If you want to start your own business, Jeff, as you know, you have to have some smarts and you also have to have a lot of thumbs because you really got to like, tell yourself every day, like it's going to work out, we got this. Because some days you're just staying up late editing a lot of podcasts that aren't making any money because you got to get your name out there and you got to produce a lot of content and work with people.

And once we started, if you build it, they will come. Once we had a little network, people in New York, specifically at that time, were like, wait, can I have a podcast? And these people were like, they're not, they're not famous yet, but these are the funniest people in the world. And now they are famous. So we were in the right place at the right time with the right XLR microphones and a SoundCloud.

Jeff Umbro: But there's a difference between putting a bunch of podcasts out and running a business.

Do you remember the first check that you got because of these podcasts?

Joe Cilio: No, but I, I do remember when we looked at the numbers for the first time on Las Culturistas, and realized that's a lot, we were like, I forget, 10, 000, 10, 000 people listen to this? That's insane. And then it happened on another show we did with wonderful comedians, Rob Haze and Chris Daniels.

And it happened on another show. We very quickly got looped in with a member of the Kids in the Hall, the famous Canadian comedy troupe, Kevin McDonald. And he was a helpful to us because again, right place at the right time, got connected to him. Older guy didn't know how to make a podcast, right? You know, it's been all of our value to everybody in the world this whole time, like we know how to plug in the microphone.

We were lucky to work with him because when Kevin would do a show, we got to surround ourselves with amazing guests. Like on that show, we were booking not just today's best up and coming comedians, like on Las Culturistas, it was so exciting. We're like whoa, Sudi Green's on, whoa, Pat Regan's on, oh my god, here's Aaron Jackson, and those are huge names in the comedy world then and now, now bigger.

Oh, Patti Harrison's coming on, oh my god. And we were lucky enough to get that energy. Simultaneously, Kevin was booking Mike Myers, you know what I mean? And so we got to take pictures of ourselves next to Bowen, and then we got to take pictures of ourselves next to Mike Myers. And then if you do that in six months span, people will think you're smart and famous.

And then people started like coming to us because we had put together a little podcasting moment and a little podcasting scene, which we got to work with that crew in New York City and that amazing group of comedians for about, about three or four years before everybody got famous and things changed and we all moved on with our lives.

Jeff Umbro: But at what point did you look at this and say, like, I can make a career out of this.

Joe Cilio: When we launched six podcasts into the blue, we knew a couple of things. Like just at our core, like this has to come out the same day, every single week, hell or high water, or else we suck and it's not real. It has to have certain deliverables attached to it from a marketing perspective.

And I think back then it was like, what, like a Facebook post, you know, whatever it was, we just understood that it has to have marketing surrounding it. We understood intuitively how guests can appropriately build a program and create a fan base. And we also understood intuitively how the live experience, since we came out of the theater, how deeply impactful the live experience can be in growing any sort of community around content.

With Las Culturistas, specifically, we would have these blowout shows called I Don't Think So Honeys, where you'd rent something like the Bell House, Matt and Bowen had this amazing segment. I don't think so, honey. They still do it. It's like their famous segment. And everybody got on stage and they do a minute of, I Don't Think So, whatever, right?

It was a brilliant bit that, that Bowen and Matt thought of and it is genius. And then we, they produced a fantastic live show where you could go one night, you saw the 50 hottest comedians in town doing the, I Don't Think So Honey. And the vibes, like, it was a heyday. It was like a micro heyday of New York queer and queer adjacent alt comedy.

And it was a beautiful thing to be a part of and I'll see all those guys again because these things come and go in waves and up and who's up and who's down and I love them all. And I think they're so impressively cool and talented people I got to work with. Very cool. Very lucky.

I got to work with Cole Escola. We, I hired him to be the head writer of the rebooted National Lampoon Radio Hour. I got to work with River Ramirez and Patti Harrison on their like once in a lifetime genius comedy podcast, A Woman's Smile. We got, because we were dumb and hungry and in the right place at the right time and had good taste, we got to make a lot of wonderful creative projects that these days it would be a lot more difficult to justify because they were not made for monetization often.

Las Culturistas, chat shows, weekly programs. We understood that's a good thing, but some of, we used to make a lot of short form narrative, high concept content. And there used to be an audience for that, and also 10 and 20 cares a week used to be able to make money. And now, if you're not rolling up with the 50, 60, 70, you won't even get a second look.

It was a different time, Jeff. You should have been there. It was, it was fun. You were there. We went to breakfast eight years ago. Yeah. Those were, those were the dog days, man. I remember one day Kevin was like, I'm famous or I, I, you know, I, I'm, I, the guest is Mike Myers. Like, can you guys get some fucking advertisers on my program?

And we're like, Oh my God, yes. Oh God. So we like, I think we had a call with like a aggregate or not an aggregator. Affiliate, affiliate advertiser. And we were like, okay, okay. Got to do affiliate advertiser. Like AKA, like we did not know what we were doing. I had no idea how to sell ads appropriately. It wasn't really until I don't know, oh, we know what we did. We hired a, well, we hired a CEO at a certain point in our youth. And this guy, Gary Reisman, he came in from cable and from analytics at Fox and from sales, in cable for his whole entire career. And he taught us the game. He brought in a head salesperson from Viacom, Karen Bressner.

She was amazing. We went from we 10 X our sales in one year a because Karen and Gary are super smart and we all are super hardworking, but really because there was no sales infrastructure. Oh, there was a ton of empty inventory. And like Karen knew to, knew to call BetterHelp.

I remember like Karen calls me one day, she's like, yeah, BetterHelp just bought like the whole network for a year. I was like, you're kidding. Like, no they didn't.

Gary developed that sales infrastructure. Karen went on to do her thing. We brought in our CRO, Lynne Kraselsky. We ran in house sales with Lynne and Gary for about three years. And I learned so, so much from them.

And I'm really grateful that we took our lumps and did the in house sales team thing early. We really got to meet everybody and know the landscape and know what buyers buy and understand how to package and sell this media content. And I'm lucky that we got in it so young because I feel like we instantly wanted to start helping pushing ad sales forward and helping our brand partners, specifically our agency partners help like, like so many of us in the space do, talk to brands about the, the, the beauty of podcasting, why it's valuable, all those things.

Jeff Umbro: And that brings us to today. And you guys have done a lot of things. I would love for you to spend a minute just kind of like walking the listener through what is Forever Dog today.

Joe Cilio: So about three and a half years ago, we took over the company again, amicably. We love our wonderful advisors, our former CEOs and CROs, but we, Alex and Brett and I took over the company about three years ago. Some of the things that we immediately did was outsource our sales because we didn't have the scale appropriate to continue to support that in house staff.

And we'll get back there. And I have a very forward thinking approach to the sales market, and I'm really excited about our current sales partners. I'm excited about how sales grows and develops, but for whatever, you know, at that point in time, we made that choice to outsource our sales. We cut back on a lot of programs that weren't working.

We just like, we just had to grow up and understand they do not want your fucking 15k-ers anymore. Like you have to make 50k-ers. And, you know, if you want to be a real big podcast network, you got to grow and scale your shows, provide value to the agencies and the buyers and the talent.

Like, Forever Dog creates ambitious video podcasts. We have two networks currently we have Forever Dog. That is our namesake comedy imprint. We have about nine or 10 shows on Forever Dog. And then we have a second network called MOM, Moguls of Media. And that network is dedicated specifically to the drag scene. And that is a massive network for us as well.

So we make, we produce shows at those two networks. They're all video shows. We distribute them as social media. We are front to back, you know, we do everything for our programs. We develop programs. We built sets for our programs. We shoot our programs. We have a podcast version of our programs. It's totally different than our, not totally, but it's a different thing than our YouTube program, which is different than our social media output.

Every single show is cared for appropriately. We are not an aggregator. We are a production company for new media, and we know how to take talent or franchises or programs and either adapt them for or produce and develop them for new media distribution in its fullest context and not leaving any meat on the bone, we aren't just a sales aggregator. I'm not trying to onboard a hundred shows this year. I'm trying to onboard an appropriate amount of shows that we can actually take in house, have our resources dedicated towards these programs and effectively and transparently grow with talent over time.

That is our goal currently. And guess what? I love it, Jeff, because that's what a lot of people want. I think a lot of, a lot of creators want, I would never begrudge anybody the check. When I lose all of my bids to Spotify because they paid 50k fuck you dollars more, like, okay, like that's life, right? But we are always this close and sometimes we win because some creators understand the value in having an entire production team of experts that have been doing it for a decade come to your program and actually care about it in a real development sense. Cause Spotify, God bless them, they're going to give you the money and that's, that's good enough sometimes, but that's going to be that. And then they're going not really to dedicate resources necessarily to growing your, your program.

I know they have, I mean, that's just facts, duh, sorry. They're not going to build you a set unless you're, you know, the most famous person on the network. They're not going to think of a YouTube strategy. They aren't really going to help you grow. And when you don't grow, they're going to give you a shittier deal next time when it comes time for renewals.

Jeff Umbro: Walk me through though, how you do that, why somebody like Spotify can't, what is the secret sauce that you guys put in? And also, how does it look? Like who owns what?

Joe Cilio: We just are investing in infrastructure development, aka personnel. I think that every big company, every, everybody, it's not bad business to gut Sirius XM and only keep the highest profiting shows and get rid of all your production line items and just have a bunch of pure profit. Like I get it from a balance sheet, PnL, I run Sirius XM perspective, but I don't run Sirius XM and that isn't what I am interested in. I think that quality will always get a portion of market share. And I believe that quality comes from the people that work on the program.

So you asked about how we allocate our resources. All of our shows have producers, probably a post production manager, and some shows that team might expand to six people because it's a huge show. Sometimes I might stay localized with those two people. But whether a program is two people staffed or ten people staffed, every single show at Forever Dog gets the same resources.

We have an executive producer of YouTube who just works with everybody on their YouTube shows. Our operations teams will specially work with you on your show's ad development and branding around your show. Graphic designers, we have an art director on staff. We have all of these amazing resources that are just like line items that other production companies aren't currently investing in.

And I think being able to have these resources on retainer is enticing to a creator. You can come to our studio, have our professional engineers set it up. We can art direct it, build it a set, booking support, all of these things that agents pretend we don't, you don't have to pay for and aren't important or they are, that is the secret sauce and adding a little bit to the budget is, is not a crime.

And I'm, I'm leaning into the camera to talk to my agent friends. I don't want you to nickel and dime me on production costs anymore. I want you to engage with me in good faith and let's grow talent, talents. Let's make them famous together.

Jeff Umbro: How do you structure that? Just cause I, I mean, I'm curious, but also like, I'm sure our listeners are.

Big famous comedian comes to you. They want a show, you charge them five or six grand a month. They get a weekly, very well produced podcast with video. And then you sell ads and you split the revenue on the ads.

Joe Cilio: That's it. I'm talking about when, when, when it comes to that moment, when we discuss costs for the show, I find that more often than not, probably because of previous relationships that agents and creators have had with podcast companies, they balk at all of your production costs.

So I'm over here trying to spread the good word that, hey, you know what, if we take a little bit of money and invest in the right resources to develop this property, I think that we could. 2x, 3x, 4x this program and expand its revenue streams. And agents will hear that and their fear is that, you know, whatever. There's been a bunch of, whatever, it's, it's tough out there. We're new. It's not like everybody's worked with me. You know, it takes convincing and I just want to earn people's trust and let them know like, hey, when I say I want to spend five or 6k on production costs for this show a month, that's because I want this show to yield 40, 000 of money a month.

Jeff Umbro: That is a very low amount for like the kind of services that you're providing.

Joe Cilio: I know that's their job and how they're trained, but it's just so funny to be like the flabbergasted looks from our agent friends. It's like, guys, stop, you're being silly. Enough.

Jeff Umbro: If their talent was going to go and hire a bunch of freelancers to do this work, they could not get it for double the price.

Joe Cilio: That's the thing. They're always like, Oh, well, we could just hire an editor for 3k. That's completely different than having an entire team of new media professionals dedicated 40 hours plus a week to making your talent famous. That's just a completely different thing.

Jeff Umbro: How are you protecting your investment in that talent?

Is there any piece of this that you own, like the RSS feed or any of the IP or anything?

Joe Cilio: We're trying currently to blend acquisition and scaling with in house development. We always, because we like development and because we believe in our development process and that it can yield creative and financial results, sometimes we make shows in house and then hire talent at like a flat fee rate to host our program.

That's a great way to make talent feel comfortable. So they're making money out of the gate. And it's also a way for you to control costs, period. Then there's like back end rev sharing all that normal stuff. Sometimes we'll bring in a show and I, we won't get our way. We won't be able to participate in every revenue stream.

Perhaps the show has a really developed Patreon. I under, that people's rent, that's people's livelihood. They built that platform. I understand why people can get kind of hands off my Patreon, like all good. All good. No problem. I, I, from the bottom of my heart, right. But. So sometimes we work with somebody in just limited scopes and capacities.

Maybe we will be your sales arm, which we're really good at. And we have a lot of wonderful people working really hard on that. And sometimes we'll be in a much more expansive relationship. So it's a blend. Talent retention is about being, is actually having a relationship with your talent and actually making them part of your like creative and financial team.

In fact, they're the most important member of that team. I make an effort, and we all do at Forever Dog, to make sure talent understands why we make choices. Why are, why do we want program to be distributed this way? Why are we changing it this way? Why are you going dark for three weeks? Why do we need to remake the logo? Why are we cutting your beautiful, well watched show in half and distributing it as two parts on YouTube when it was already getting 100k the way it was before? Because I'm not, I'm not satisfied with 100k. This could be 500k. We have to continually play the game.

Jeff Umbro: I know that you have the revenue model already.

And you're also able to plug that into like the quality that you're that you're seeking. So walk me through what that revenue model looks like beyond just the idea of like an audio podcast ad.

Joe Cilio: So basically for every single show, there's like five obvious first thought revenue streams we could approach.

There's podcasting, audio. There's video, there's social media, there's merchandise, and there's live shows. And then of course there's also like the amorphous sixth category of branded integration.

Jeff Umbro: What about premium content? Is that in there?

Joe Cilio: That's like the most important one. Thanks Jeff. Yeah, Jeff's an investor and he was like, Oh fuck, they got rid of premium.

No, sorry. Of course, premium would be like an absolute pillar of that revenue blend. And we love premium because A, it's just great recurring revenue. That's nice. But what I really love about premium is like, that's where the sickos are, like they love the show, you know, they want the weird content. And I love those Patreon fans, God bless them.

So you have to be able to invest in these different revenue streams to be able to get the most out of them. And we're continuing to invest in developing our merchandise and our live show sort of infrastructure across the board, even though we do those things quite a bit, yeah, those are the different ways that we currently make money, but there's so many more different ways coming down the pipeline, like licensing.

Jeff, when Netflix gave Miss Rachel, the popular child YouTuber, a Netflix show, they didn't give her a Netflix show. They licensed her YouTube content. Like they're not, there's not a glossy Miss Rachel show coming, or maybe that's part of it, but you know what? The biggest part of the deal is, is distributing her already made YouTube content on the Netflix platform because YouTube is not quite eating Netflix's lunch per se today, but Netflix knows the writing on the wall inside the Netflix platform, you better have your own YouTube.

Jeff Umbro: There's two things that just happened this week. We're recording this on Valentine's Day, February 14th. For anybody listening this past week, business insider came out with an article that said that Netflix was part of the conversation of trying to get call her daddy from Alice Cooper.

Joe Cilio: Great idea, Netflix. Yeah.

Jeff Umbro: And the second thing that is pretty big is that Fox News or specifically Tubi just bought Red Seat Ventures, which is the company behind Megan Kelly, Tucker Carlson, who, if you're paying attention, are distributing all their video products on X.

Joe Cilio: The Red Sea Ventures nailed it. They're like, we'll develop an entire media ecosystem and new media and then one day, one of these giant vultures will come and buy us up for a trillion dollars. That's genius. That is kind of what I want to do. I want to create a new media

empire company of well, like, and not just an aggregator. I don't want a hundred pages full of bots. I want to create millions of unique listeners that are engaged in our program and multiple revenue streams that when we amass and scale the correct amount of them, we're able to create other projects and experiences for our fans, whether that's in television, film, live experiences, when it comes time for Forever Dog to make a feature film, if that's a piece of content we decide to produce,

then we will be able to market it to our gigantic, engaged, well considered, and specifically developed fan base of millions and millions of uniques. And then we can save a lot of money on marketing, and we'll be able to speak directly to the people we want to speak to in an incredibly personal way. It's going to be so powerful.

And that's what the Red Seat ghouls thought of so brilliantly.

Jeff Umbro: Well, how is that different though than like, All Things Comedy, for example? I love this idea. I very strongly believe in it. You know this. But I'm also curious where you guys will succeed where other people have maybe not.

Joe Cilio: Bill burr is a major participant in, this is either his company or he's a owner.

Jeff Umbro: He's a partial owner with Al Madrigal.

Joe Cilio: Bill Burr might just like be very happy with it the way that it is. It might be monetizing really appropriately and effectively on podcasting. And it might be very helpful from a content distribution and sales standpoint in other mediums. And that might just be what he wants.

Maybe he doesn't have like the Reese Witherspoon scale to a billion dollars plan, but he's not going to have pans with Bill Burr's face on them in the Target, even though I would buy one Bill. As a comp, it, he's Bill Burr doing that for Bill Burr stuff. And it's a great model. I would be, and lots of celebrities and talent and famous people are going to have their own everything from skincare line to production company and label, and a lot of people have stuff like that. The difference that forever dog is just the scale. I'm not. Like, I want 10 Bill Burrs here.

I want, I want to build 10 All Things Comedys here.

Jeff Umbro: How do you monetize YouTube? We all know, like the YouTube partner program, you can do baked in ads. But like, how can you do that better?

Joe Cilio: I'm like the YouTube podcast guy, so I should have a fancy ass answer. But I'm also like a very current producer and seller of the stuff. So I'll just tell you like the lay of the land. So far our buyers are incredibly responsive to the simulcast product, which is great. What I mean by that is we distribute essentially one to one content on YouTube and podcasts.

We bundle those impressions and we sell them at the same CPM. And hey, that's great news for me. Cause that just, you know, doubles or increases our, you know, the scale of the buyer.

Jeff Umbro: When you're selling the YouTube because it's so, it's a lot less predictable in terms of the scale, are you just taking the average viewership of the last 10 videos or something?

Joe Cilio: We are, but we're really, really interested in making sure that our buyers can get as much value out of the YouTube analytics as possible. So what we're doing in regards to that is. In the past, maybe we've had like MOM, our network, has a MOM YouTube page and behind the scenes, we're currently over the course of this quarter, migrating all of those shows to their own YouTube pages. That comes with a very regimented communication thing with our fan base.

And it's going to take a few weeks to migrate them over very appropriately and the message it clearly and do it appropriately. But when this process is done and over, we will have all of our shows on their own YouTube pages. Then we will look at the content. Are we appropriately distributing this content to be optimized for YouTube distribution, AKA what are our watch through times? When do people, what did they skip ahead to? When do they jump out?

YouTube is the answer to all of podcasting people's prayers, because I don't know about y'all, but I don't know how much your Megaphone backend is helping you communicate the value of your shows to your clients. Because they don't care that 3 percent of them is in Germany and they don't care about the most boring, basic stuff.

YouTube gives podcasters the power of Google Analytics. I can like zoom in on my fans houses. You know what I mean? Like I don't know everything about these people. No, but no, but for real, one of the reasons we're moving it is to play the algorithm game appropriately, but also so that we can report very efficiently and effectively to our buyers, like right now to pull one show's data can be difficult cause it's all mixed up. So I want to just sell them like a page that YouTube page per week averages a hundred thousand watches. And this is how we're going to bake your ads into our content, even if it's not one to one. I think the great thing about simulcast right now is they get it in the sense that, Oh, it's a video version of the podcast and that's the podcast. It's the same. The ads go in the same.

Where I want to take them is like, but you know, what's really going to help you reach our audience. This content can't be one to one all the time. Sometimes we need to take this hour and a half long podcast and make it a 20 minute YouTube video and you have to, or I hope that our brand partners will trust us that that's the right move and that we will work with them.

Basically now when it comes to like an inventory management and how we sell our programming, you know, not to get too deep into it, but by the end of the year, we're going to be, our offering is going to look a little different than it does right now. Right now we get RFPs in and we have inventory slots and we do a pod, a podcast first sort of approach.

But by the end of the year, we're going to be like, we're a video podcast company. And then we're going to have to look at the, the lay of the land and say, all right, we got four inventory slots. The first two are baked in, you can buy them. And the last two are just going to be DI for whatever program we're in, whether that's the span one or the YouTube one, or, you know, whatever, and that's how we're going to redo our inventory.

What if our sales arms watching this, like, Oh fuck, Joe's going to change everything soon?

Jeff Umbro: You mentioned that you'd love to have a bunch of podcast networks under your umbrella. You have two currently, you know, Forever Dog and MOM. At one point, you guys were on your way to launching a third and that didn't work out.

What does this look like in the future? Will there be 10 different imprints that you're putting out?

Joe Cilio: Imprints has a interesting and spotty track record in the business. Remember when this might be just like so inside baseball. It's like even too inside baseball for Podcast Perspectives. I don't know. You remember, remember when Stitcher bought or like Scripps bought Stitcher and then they were going to turn it all into like hubs for different content categories and.

Jeff Umbro: Yes, yes.

Joe Cilio: Break it out. Like, yeah, didn't happen, but like not the worst idea of all time. And then here at Forever Dog, like we have two networks and we did that very deliberately when we took over the company again.

Jeff Umbro: Sorry, just to pause you. But in my opinion on that, the reason they did that was so that they could target the same kind of listener, but now people can do that dynamically.

And, you know, it's kind of garbage how it, the end result of it. But like, that's the reason I think people have moved away from that.

Joe Cilio: So based off of that, we decided to split Forever Dog into and take all of our drag content and put it under MOM and all of our comedy content under Forever Dog and start making two distinct brands for two distinctive groups of consumer, and that did help increase sales. And on the buy side that was helpful. And on the marketing side, and it also exploded the content, like clarity is good. So when you ask, Will I continue to make networks and stuff, I think that networks as like a,

like, I don't have any plans right now to start a new network. Like I have plans to expand Forever Dog and MOM this year and next year, but like, we did try to start a third brand like two years ago called Eve. Long story short there was, it's actually, it's like an interesting, like failure that I'm really glad we went through.

Can I talk about this for two seconds? Like I never talked about this.

Jeff Umbro: Please.

Joe Cilio: Our sales team was like, you know who buys a lot of stuff is young women, right? Like that's true, right? Beauty products is a humongous category. Like young women, burgeon, like a growth area in this space. Like, and all of our buys for all of our female skewing shows were like, uh, five inventory slots filled a week.

And then like the guy shows, not Joe Rogan. It's like, who cares? Right. So like a guy show at like 70 K it's like, I'm just going to go buy more Rogan.

Jeff Umbro: We went through the exact same thing, by the way, we used to represent a female reality television network and exactly identical story. We would sell dozens of ads every month for that network and everything else, it was like, we'd get the scraps.

Joe Cilio: So it was just like gangbusters on that side of the sales aisle. And we had lots of younger talent and plenty of female skewing shows. And you know, who, who doesn't want a piece of like the influencer economy and this is the way it's going. So we built a brand, like we built like a style guide and it was geared towards Gen Z women and it had like a point of view and we launched it with three programs.

We had a production unit in the UK. We had production units in LA. We had photo shoots and videos and all this stuff.

Jeff Umbro: Sounds very expensive.

Joe Cilio: Ding, ding, ding, because we were, we thought like, cause we did it back when we were kids, you know, we're like, Oh, you just start a podcast network and you work really hard and then you have a company.

But man, the world was so different when we, like when we started Forever Dog eight years ago, completely different than when we tried Eve two and a half years ago. It was like a totally different thing and we needed so much money and so much runway to grow these programs and we didn't understand YouTube like we understand it now.

It was just, we bit off more than we could chew and learned a lot in the process, but sincerely did learn a lot. And it was a good experience. And it's a good idea that we should do again one day when we have the appropriate resources and means, because I think that that's a cool idea. Like, I think that like, we always talk about it.

We don't have any true crime, right? You know, let's just talk like, what does a Forever Dog true crime network feel like and look like? And what are the differentiators about that? Or what does a horror imprint look like at Forever Dog Productions? And like, how do we work in that space? We are going to eventually want to expand beyond sort of comedy, which is the broadest amorphous category of all time, but there's no rush.

I want to build appropriately piece by piece, show by show, and really develop a very valuable listener base. And we will follow the bouncing ball. When drag, we had the show Race Chaser come on to forever dog. It was instantly our biggest show of all time. And I wanted to retain that talent, Jeff.

So I had to come to them and say, I'm going to build you a network. This works. This works. This works today. This is a good idea. I said, guys, I want to build you a network. You're going to make X percent of the shows. This is how we're going to run the financials. I want you to EP it and market it and speak to your community about these kinds of programs. And it's been a partnership from heaven.

They've upheld their end of the bargain. And I'm happy to report that we held up our end of the bargain and MOM is a serious competitor and problem for WOW, RuPaul's company. And I really like where we are in that space. And it's a fun space to be competitive in because from the outside, it's like, surely the drag queens' networks wouldn't want to have a big fight. I'm sure it's all love. Of course we want to have a big fight. I love it. I love the competition. They love it too.

Jeff Umbro: What's coming next? What's in the future?

Joe Cilio: This video shift is undergoing and it's not like taken lightly. Like I don't, I'm not like, on Monday I need you guys to have YouTube shows. It's like a serious development process of like considering like what are the assets?

What's the asset language that we're going to establish for this program? What are the, let's develop the templates for that. How are we going to build that out technically? So the great thing I forever dog right now is we've been cranking, turning up our video operation. We invested a ton in our resources, like our technical resources, our cameras, our lights.

Our shows look so good right now, folks. I'm just, I don't mean to brag. I'm just really happy and proud of our amazing team. Like it's tough to take a podcast team and be like, just kidding. We're, now we're all YouTube creators. Didn't you hear? And everyone's like, I don't think we are dude. It's like, no, we could, we are, we are, but they've adapted beautifully.

Our stuff looks great. So I I'm really proud of like the contents looking nicer and crisper. The workflow on the backend is getting refined. I mean, I want efficiencies cause I want to scale. I love the way we distribute and think about things here. And I just need to increase the efficiency on the backend, which we're successfully doing think like every new YouTube show isn't, it has to be considered and thought about.

And then what I want to do is look at specific revenue streams like live and merchandise and make sure we are like increasing our totals pretty significantly in those areas this year. And I want to be a leader in video podcasting and I want to be a person or a sounding board or somebody who helps us all think about how are we going to work together to get brands in the mix on these video podcasts authentic, like it's such a, it's, it's all going to work out brands. Like I can't wait until we're all on the same page because we like, what value has podcasting been to the advertisers? Like authenticity, like connection to fans, host read advertising.

We're going to continue that tradition in video podcasting. Like, brands are going to feel in and of the communities. They're going to be taken care of at Forever Dog. And they're going to be very, very excited to walk into their quarterly meetings and show their teams how beautiful our products look next to their products on YouTube with a video, not just audio.

So I'm really excited about the future, Jeff, and I, I just can't wait to work with more great creators and just keep kind of discovering like, how do you grow a show, right? The eternal question and just keep trying to solve that question.

Jeff Umbro: That makes me really happy, man. Congratulations on all the success and the future success.

Joe Cilio: Thank you. Likewise Jeff. You can find all our shows at foreverdogpodcasts.com and you can find MOM  at everybodysaymom.com.

Jeff Umbro: Well, thanks again, Joe.

Joe Cilio: Thanks Jeff and thank you Chris. Thanks guys.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you all for joining us on the show this week. 

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 at @podglomeratepods. 

This episode was produced by Chris Boniello, and myself, Jeff Umbro. This episode was edited and mixed by Jose Roman. And thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Perri Gross. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. 

Thank you for listening and I'll catch you all in a few weeks.