Monetizing Audio: Ads, Subscriptions, and Audiobooks with Eric Barnett

Jeff Umbro: I'm your host, Jeff Umbro and this is Podcast Perspectives, a show about the latest news in the podcast industry and the people behind it. Each episode, we bring you discussions about the latest news in the audio world and conversations with leaders in the industry.

Joining me today is Eric Barnett, director of Sales and Marketing at Supporting Cast. Supporting Cast is a company that offers premium subscription solutions for audio publishers. That could be in podcasts, audio books, or anything in between. The non jargony way of saying that is that it is a tool that allows you to charge subscription fees for exclusive and premium access to your content.

They have partnered with huge names in the audio industry, including NPR, Wondery+, Pushkin, American Public Media, Slate, Sony Music, and WNYC. Eric spent seven years prior to Supporting Cast at Findaway, an audiobooks distribution platform that was later acquired by Spotify and is helping to enable their push into the audiobook industry.

The two themes that we discuss today are audiobooks in the podcast industry and premium subscription content on your podcasts. Hope y'all enjoy the interview.

So now that we know what you had for breakfast, Eric, how are you doing?

Eric Barnett: I'm doing great. Thank you. I'm doing great.

Jeff Umbro: I love it. So I want to talk about two major things today: one is subscriptions, one's gonna be audio books. You have a lot of experience in both. So to start, what does Supporting Cast do? Say I'm an end user. Like, what do I expect from the service?

Eric Barnett: Sure. Absolutely. So Supporting Cast, essentially we're the largest independent podcast subscription platform. And ultimately what we do as an organization is try to help companies to be able to sell premium podcast subscriptions to listeners. That could be an ongoing subscription, that could be a single time sale... And then ultimately when that's done to get people from that purchase to listening to their content as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

And ultimately, like the biggest part in what we will do there is, you know, the full control and ownership is with the podcasters versus Supporting Cast. So we're completely white labeled in that sense.

But like, if I had to describe it in like a sentence, like if somebody has like 10 seconds to understand it, we'd say "white label Patreon." and then people will generally understand what it means from there.

Jeff Umbro: And functionally, like what does that look like? You guys have the software, you can process the credit cards, all that stuff, but do you provide a website landing page? Is it just code that you give to somebody and then they implement it themselves?

Like big picture: what would somebody need to understand in order to implement this?

Eric Barnett: You don't need to understand much, but we have three primary ways in which people can sort of integrate with Supporting Cast:

Basically, you can use a supporting cast landing page, which we have. I'd say the majority of the people that we integrate with will choose to go that route just because it is functionally the most simple to be able to do that. You can also CNAME the URL as well, so people wouldn't even know that they're coming to a Supporting Cast landing page. NPR would actually be a great example of somebody who's using that. You go to plus.npr.org, that's technically Supporting Cast in the background that is powering that.

The second way in which people integrate with us: we do have a WordPress plugin that people can implement and utilize. So if they have a WordPress site, they can fully have the experience within their website to allow people to purchase and then ultimately consume the premium content or access to premium content from their site. Pushkin and Dan Savage / Savage Love would be the best examples of people we have who are doing that great.

And then the last one, which is sort of the more complex version of it, is that if you have an existing subscription and you're trying to integrate Supporting Cast into a part of it, you can do a full API integration in which we just basically will integrate with whatever your existing subscription is and we'll handle the delivery of the premium audio from there. So best examples of those would be Wondery and Wondery+. So you know, they use us for an API integration. Basically anything that's consumed outside of the Wondery+ app, that's Supporting Cast in the background that is delivering that audio to that person in whatever podcast app that they want.

Or actually Slate, which is our parent company, Slate.com. They also do a API integration with us, where they're technically a news subscription first and foremost, and then the podcast subscription is a part of that. And then we deliver the premium audio for them as well.

Jeff Umbro: So you guys are mainly a vehicle to deliver the audio and process the payments and subscriptions.

Eric Barnett: Primarily, yeah, but we do a lot of stuff outside of that, so I don't wanna limit it to sort of that, but yeah, that's what we specialize in and do first. So audio first subscriptions and people who have additional stuff added to it, like we specialize in that.

Jeff Umbro: So now that we know what the platform is all about , what are actual use cases for why people would want to use Supporting Cast? I know that's a silly question, but like, for anybody who isn't aware, why do people want to implement premium feeds?

Eric Barnett: If you take it back from like a higher level, right? Like there's a question about why would you do a subscription to begin with? Right? And ultimately in the world of podcasting, there's two, maybe three, primary ways in which people can draw revenue.

Ad revenue being the one that most people are familiar with. You have a certain number of downloads, therefore you have a certain number of impressions that'll be associated with, therefore we get paid this much money. It's interesting because that's a little bit more volatile.

What's different from this in advertising is that subscription revenue is wholly owned by the podcaster or wholly owned by the organization, right? So the work that you put into it is something that you'll see benefit from every single month. It's something that is much more predictable. It's something that allows you to build a sustainable base that only grows over time as well too.

That's the other really interesting part of it: you know every subscriber you get and people that join, your revenue will only increase up and to the right over the long term. So it just continues to grow and grow and grow and grow over the years. And even when it plateaus, that is something that will still be sustainable for you for a long time.

Jeff Umbro: And are you guys explicitly leaning into that right now because of the ad market dip that we're seeing on a macro level? Is this part of your pitch?

Eric Barnett: You know, it's funny. It doesn't have to be part of our pitch, right? Like owning revenue was always part of our pitch. People's reason for coming to us, we hear that more often now for sure.

But it is to an extent, like I would say the majority of our business comes from referrals right now, and we're okay with that, right? Because for us it's something where the quality of our work speaks for itself. We very much pride ourselves on being a white label solution, where it's like, you look at someone initially, you may not know that they're partnering with Supporting Cast.

That's okay because we want it to be Pushkin Plus first, right? It's their subscription first and foremost, and we're sort of an afterthought in that case.

Jeff Umbro: We haven't really gotten into what specifically your role is yet. You are the Director of Sales and Marketing, but what does that mean in this particular context?

Eric Barnett: So my job is essentially just to oversee new partnerships and then ultimately the promotion of the organization as well . So we have a sales team internally that oversees a couple of different parts of sales verticals that we operate in. So we operate in three primary sales verticals. And I oversee the teams for those. So that would be podcast memberships, internal podcasts, and direct audiobook sales, and all those sort of fall under my umbrella in terms of partnership explorations within those realms.

And then also the marketing and sort of promotional side of the business as well too. So anything that we do from paid advertisements, sponsorships, promotions, things like that as well, I'll oversee.

Jeff Umbro: Can you give me a few examples of your ideal customer clientele?

Eric Barnett: I don't wanna say we have an ideal one, because what we pride ourselves in, again, is sort of like the flexibility of the platform. You could be a single podcast and wanna do a subscription or you could be a complicated network and either one of those we could cater to.

But there are some that do well on a regular basis with subscriptions. They all can do very well. Some categories that overperform for some reason would be, like history tends to perform very, very well from a subscription standpoint. “The Rest Is History” out of England actually is probably the largest of those that performs excellently from a subscription standpoint. So that is something, it's just like an interesting tidbit, you know, if somebody has a history podcast out there that's considering that.

Sports also tend to do really well from a per capita subscriber basis. Dunked On, the NBA podcast is the one that is, in my opinion, the best performing podcast subscription in the world.

And then you'll also see anything that is host driven as well. So if you have a strong host that has a strong connection with their subscribers, they will often have a really strong subscription to go with that.

Like we launched with Nick Viall and the Viall Files earlier this year, and excellent, excellent subscription, huge push right out of the gate. It was a very impressive launch from their perspective as well.

Jeff Umbro: This is gonna sound so silly, but I check the comments on that show, like the Apple reviews on the Viall Files, because like every day there's like 20 new comments in there and most of them are really awful one star reviews saying X, Y, and Z.

But the fact that people care that much, that every single day you can go on there and hit refresh and you're gonna have like 20 different versions of that painful review, it says so much about that show because you know that there's 200 people who aren't commenting.

But my question, the reason I bring that up is you kind of laid out a profile of the types of shows that can garner engagement and that is generally shows that can build community. But is there a scale at which it makes sense? Like can somebody with a hundred subscribers, however dedicated, do this and do this well? Or do you need to hit some kind of threshold?

Eric Barnett: You know that's actually a really, really good question. And on our side of things, we usually don't recommend people to start a subscription unless they've seen at least 5 to 10,000 downloads per episode. That's when it will start to be some meaningful revenue, at least to an extent for people with a show that size. You can do it smaller, but you just need to have realistic expectations of what your return is going to be, right?

So we have data from across all Supporting Cast partners of what your average conversion rates would be. So, you know, like for instance, if you offer ad free, and that's gonna be the only sort of benefit that you offer, you can realistically expect anywhere from a half a percent to 1% of your subscribers to convert within the first year. Up to maybe 2% over the course of three years. So like, again, if that's a hundred people, that's, you know…

Jeff Umbro: You're looking at like one or two people.

Eric Barnett: Right. So it's not gonna be really worth it for you. It's gonna be like five bucks a month.

But then if you look at bonus content... you'll typically see about, if you look at downloads per episode, 3 to 5% of that will convert. If you're offering a compelling enough bonus content structure within the first year, that will usually go up to around 8% over the course of three years or so. And you know, and if you are a large enough show, that is some very meaningful revenue for people to have and something that is very consistent and easy for them to track.

Interestingly enough, when we were talking about some of these niche shows as well too, there is a world in which you can paywall the majority of your content. If we're talking about Dunked On, I think it's a good example to come back to, right? So you know Nathan Duncan and Dunked On, that was a five day a week daily podcast that was free. All five days were free. And when they partnered with us, they made the decision like, okay, we're gonna paywall the majority of this content, and they paywalled four of their five days. So Monday through Thursday, is subscriber only, and Friday is their free show that's available to everybody. And they converted in their case, like 25, 30% of their audience converted over to a paid subscriber. And for a midsize show of roughly like 20, 30,000 downloads per episode, like that's a lot of money. And, that's a lot of money that is recurrable that they can track. And so there is a world in which you can make way more money from subscriptions than you can from advertising just because of how dedicated your audience is.

And networks for what it's worth, they'll see the same types of conversion numbers that individual shows will see, but it's typically a little bit of a slower burn. Whereas individual shows will come and shoot right up almost immediately, networks will sort of come out and have a little bit more of a gradual start and then have a higher ceiling.

Jeff Umbro: It's probably really tough unless there's content alignment within the network, which is not always the case.

Eric Barnett: Right.

Jeff Umbro: But what kind of strategies are people using to actually convert? Because I'm sure that there's a whole range of how people are actually implementing this.

Eric Barnett: Yeah. So we have best practices and stuff that we typically recommend.

First and foremost is you have to make sure your offer is compelling. Like if you come in and are like, "Oh, we just wanna do a subscription, because we heard it's like the sort of soup de jour. The thing to do right now is subscriptions." You're, you're not gonna convert anybody. You're just not.

You have to have a compelling offer. If you are a weekly podcast and you wanna give something that is actually worth it to people, you should consider doing at least one to two bonus episodes per month, possibly even more than that, where you have bonus episodes, you could have Q&A sessions, you could have all these different things.

You can then charge accordingly for the content that you're providing people, right? Like if you look at, from like a pricing perspective, five bucks being the average price for a subscription, you look at what you're doing and you can sort of adjust up or down from there based upon what you're doing relative to the rest of the market.

So, once you have a compelling offer in place, the first thing to do is make sure that you are pitching this and you're pitching this passionately and on a consistent basis, right? Like, it's no different than anything else, like, "Welcome to the show. We really appreciate having you here. If you wanna continue to support us, please join our new subscription program, X, Y, Z Prime. You can go to this website in order to do it. We'd really appreciate your support, blah, blah, blah." And then you sort of move on and you do that one or two times per show, and that's like your biggest driver.

And then from there it's making sure that people can find your subscription simply. So you have a simple URL or you have something that's easy for people to remember. You have a link in the show notes, you have a link in the episode notes, all of those elements that people can find.

And then interestingly enough, the one that most people will forget is also putting free previews of your bonus content. So if you are doing bonus content, put the first five minutes of the interview for free on your free feed and then sort of fade it out and say like, "Hey, if you wanna continue to listen to this, make sure you become X, Y, Z prime member, blah, blah, blah by going to this website, would love to have you there."

Those are sort of your best practices that will get you those conversion numbers that you're looking for.

Jeff Umbro: We did a premium subscription model with Apple on one of our shows, and we took the admittedly easy route and just offered ad free and we did have bonus content and extended interviews, but we didn't do a ton of promotion for this. We did a dynamically inserted ad in the show and just kind of said like, "If you're interested in more, check it out."

And. It was kind of shocking to me, how few subscribers we got on the premium feed. It was closer to 1% I think. But also on the flip side, it was shocking how many subscribers we got based on how little we did it. It strikes me that we probably could have gone a little bit further, and we were just with the Apple ecosystem.

Which brings me to my next question: who are some of your competitors out there?

Eric Barnett: Yeah, I mean the most well known, like you hit on one just a second ago: Apple has their own sort of native subscription platform that they've built into that. The most notable of which would be Patreon, is probably the one that I think we get compared to most often. And then occasionally stuff like Substack or other things that would get brought in as well.

Jeff Umbro: And what are the offers that you guys have that would bring people to Supporting Cast as opposed to a Patreon or an Apple Premium?

Eric Barnett: For us, the biggest reason that people will choose Supporting Cast over our competitors, really, is it's all about ownership, and whose subscription it is, first and foremost. Like NPR is never gonna sell a Patreon. It's just not within their brand. It's something that doesn't mesh.

So if you have your subscription be your subscription first, that's when you come to Supporting Cast, you know, and our biggest thing is that at the end of the day: these are your subscribers. You own the relationship with them, you own the data. Even if you don't work with Supporting Cast in the future, your paying subscribers go with you. And that is something that, really, any of our competitors aren't able to say, or at least say with any real degree of truth behind it. And that's something where we pride ourselves very much.

And ultimately you are giving access to everyone. You're allowing people to consume in whichever podcast app that they want. We are host agnostic, so you can be with whatever podcast host that you want. You can set up integrations with whatever CRM that you want.

So ultimately our goal is to make it, one, as easy as possible for people to own their subscription and have it, and set it up and continue to do it. And then two, give them full control of ownership over it in the long run as well. And that's why we believe it really is the compelling offer and it's why we work.

You know, eight of the top 25 podcast networks trust us. Hundreds of top shows around the world trust us. And they do that very much for a reason, right? It's because of who we are as an organization, our mission behind it, and what we're always trying to do.

Jeff Umbro: I couldn't agree more. I think that there are a lot of options in this space, and a lot of them are really, really great and offer really compelling value props. But you guys are the ones that kind of check all of the boxes and then also deliver on it.

So, are you nervous about any of your existing competitors or anything in the space? Like do you feel that there's enough of an ecosystem here for multiple people to be successful here?

Eric Barnett: I do think there's enough of an ecosystem for multiple people to be successful. For sure.

The world of podcasting, you can sort of say high tide raises all ships. Like as the industry grows, the ability to be able to grow premium subscriptions, whether they be through Supporting Cast or otherwise, we'll continue to be there. So yeah, I definitely think there's more than enough market share for everybody to be a part of it.

Of course, I would love Supporting Cast to be the biggest part of that. That's my goal. But yeah, absolutely.

Jeff Umbro: Well, you're making great strides in that direction. So I wanna shift our focus a tiny bit now to audiobooks, and I was hoping that you could give us a little bit of background as to your role in the audiobook industry, and then we'll move that forward to what you're doing today with audiobooks.

Eric Barnett: Yeah, so historically, prior to my life at Supporting Cast, I was with Findaway, which was the largest digital audiobook distributor in the world, based out of Cleveland as well. And then I left Findaway, that would've been almost a little over a year and a half ago, to Supporting Cast. And that was sort of right as the acquisition to Spotify completed. So I was there sort of through the acquisition of that.

And then my role at Findaway was similar in capacity to what I'm doing with Supporting Cast. It was business development, so less sort of sales and overseeing a sales team and more just sort of straight business development and partnerships specifically. Any type of corporate partnership in there, help facilitate that primarily on the side of new retailers who are looking to sell audiobooks in the world.

Jeff Umbro: Can you give me in 60 or 90 seconds a lay of the land of the audiobook industry today, as a consumer, and then if it's relevant, as a distributor of audiobooks?

Eric Barnett: The audiobook world used to be divided into physical audiobooks and digital audiobooks. Books on CD and books on tape are no longer a thing. There's still technically a device that's called a Playaway that's being sold by formally Findaway that's for libraries, but you know, that's a smaller share of it. So when we speak audiobooks, we're primarily talking about digital audiobooks these days.

So we'll start with sort of a retail perspective : when you look at the retail world of audiobooks, there's a lot of different business models. There's a couple of distributors, but ultimately you have Audible sort of being the elephant in the room of the largest audiobook platform, but that market share is decreasing, and they run primarily on a credit subscription business. So you pay 15 bucks a month, you get one audiobook credit to consume with however you want. I have my thoughts about that business model. I think for better, for worse, I think it's holding back the industry in a lot of ways.

But you know, you have that, and then outside of that you have a bunch of sort of secondary retail platforms that are also really big, Apple Books being the second largest in the marketplace, followed by Barnes and Noble and Nook Audiobooks also continues to be quite successful. Audiobooks.com is carrying a decent amount of market share, Libro.Fm… So there's all of these ones that are doing sort of a la carte sales that are fairly successful at it.

The difficult part, I'll say, about a la carte sales is that it's very much like a discount type of game when you're going into it, right? So people don't really know how much an audio book actually costs because they understand that a credit costs 15 bucks, so they think all audio books cost 15 bucks. But the actual digital list price of tha is anywhere from about $8 up to like $45 or $50 depending on the length of the audiobook, what's going on, all these different factors around it. So there can be sort of some sticker shock that exists when somebody wants like 45 bucks for the new Matthew McConaughey audiobook or something like that, right? Like all of a sudden people are like, “Wait a minute.”

And then there's a whole group of people that also will do subscriptions and all-you-can-consume models, Scribd probably being the most successful of those. Publishers are not as onboard as say music labels are, when it comes to those types of revenue models. So they can be difficult for a retailer to sustain because it can be very expensive for them very quickly in order to have that type of subscription. Or the catalog will be so limited that it's not compelling to a consumer because it's a bunch of older titles. So it's there. I think it'll get bigger.

I'm very curious to see what Spotify is gonna be rolling out here in the next year or so. I know they're making some big moves and I think it'll be good for the industry as a whole to tell you the truth.

And if I could plug Supporting Cast on this real quick too, we also do direct audiobook sales. So that same technology that will deliver premium podcast subscriptions, you can do that with direct audiobook sales as well. Best example will be Malcolm Gladwell and Pushkin and his publishing arm. We do all of their direct audiobook sales, and actually, probably by the time this comes out, it might be public, but we have a very big partnership with one of the big five publishers that's coming out here within the next couple of months.

Jeff Umbro: Congrats.

That was actually gonna be my next question for you is what kind of novel, pun intended, ideas are you seeing with book publishers or otherwise starting to use RSS technology for audio books?

Eric Barnett: I'll say, it's something I can't speak a ton to because we're under NDA. But I'll say we have a lot of really active talks that are currently going on for book publishers, in terms of what we're doing in this space.

Direct audiobook sales is one I'm most bullish about in terms of publishers that can take advantage of the podcast ecosystem because if you look at the way that the audio book market is set up, they're all walled gardens, right? Like every single one of them is like it's controlled by the retailer. The publishers, or the authors have no control over anything, and the retailer sets the price. The retailer does all these different things. And then ultimately, the retailer owns all the data.

Versus direct sales, where you can take advantage of what an RSS feed does and deliver it to an ecosystem where people are already used to consuming audio. But in this case, you control it. You make more money from this. Your royalty rates are typically about 45% when you're selling an audiobook through the normal channels versus like 86%, 87% when you sell it direct to people. So I mean it's an order of magnitude different in terms of how successful you can be for the money that you're keeping for your content.

Jeff Umbro: It was like the revolution that happened with eBooks back in the day and self-publishing. Historically, you needed bookstores and distributors and sales and publicity and everything in order to get your book in front of readers. And today you have the Colleen Hoovers who started off as self-published authors and threw it on Amazon's Kindle Direct, and now she's the number one selling author in the world.

With social media, with the lack of gatekeepers out there in the podcast space, you can, in theory, be really successful on your own there.

Eric Barnett: Yeah, you really can. And you're much closer to the market.

It's interesting. So I actually, outside of the Supporting Cast and Findaway world, I sit on the board for the Audio Publishers Association. So that's a collection of all the world's largest traditional audio publishers, are the ones that are mostly a part of it.

But you know, we're making a big push as an organization: the world of podcasting and audiobooks is slowly colliding. Right? What's cool about it, I'll say from my macro perspective of being in both, is that they almost have opposite problems. And I think they could benefit from each other in a lot of ways.

Like in podcasting, people are so used to having free content and that no matter what, people aren't necessarily willing to pay for it, in my opinion... unless they're successful and they have a really good subscription. But I'll say that there's still the expectation that it's free.

Outside of that, audio books, there is the expectation that they sometimes are too prohibitively expensive, right? But the benefit of that is that there's no “listen” in an audio book that isn't monetized. It doesn't matter if it's an all you can eat consumption or a la carte, it's always monetized.

And the difference between the two is very interesting: podcasts have a much higher ceiling in terms of the amount of money that they can earn with a collection of advertising and subscription together. But the floor is also way lower. Like you could be really in the red losing all sorts of money for any type of podcast size. And then on an audio book, you don't need to sell a ton of units in order to break even. So you may not make a bunch of money, but you aren't gonna necessarily be in the red.

But the difference is the ceiling is lower for an audiobook, but they have a higher floor. Podcasting has a much higher ceiling, much lower floor.

Jeff Umbro: Can you explain to the listener what's going on with Spotify and why they're not able to have a seamless sales operation within the app for audiobooks?

Eric Barnett: Actually anybody in the app market will run into this issue, and that's just a structural monopoly that both Apple and Google, to an extent, have within the app market. Like if you're using in an in-app payment system, you are going to have to pay Apple or Google 30% in order to make that transaction within an app.

When you're looking at the world of any type of subscription, whether that be audio books, whether that be a subscription to a game, it doesn't really matter... cutting 30% off of the top of it will sometimes make that model unsustainable. Like it just won't be possible. Like retailers typically want at least 30% to 50% of margin to play with so they can make a profit on whatever product they're selling. Like if a book is a price of 20 bucks, they expect to buy that book for 10 bucks at wholesale, so therefore they can make money in order to sustain their store.

Now, if you come in and say that this same book is 20 bucks, but Apple is going to take another $4 out of $5, all of a sudden it becomes crazy in terms of the little money that you're trying to eek out from this, let alone all of your competitors are selling at a discount, Apple's selling at a discount, Google's selling it at a discount in their own store.

So that's what's gonna plague Spotify. I think they're even trying to go to court over this right now. Fortnite did the same thing with Apple in terms of trying to take them, like... you're killing the business by taking this much money. I also, I mean, I get Apple's perspective, but it's, it's interesting. I'm very curious to see where this goes long term.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, I've been paying close attention here and it makes sense. Like when we're selling ads, generally 20% of the sale goes to the overhead of actually going about selling - super rough numbers. And thus we usually have a 30/70 split or a 40/60 split depending on the show and what they need from us. But whenever somebody comes to us and asks for an 80/20, I explain to them, it costs us 20% to actually do this work. So we already have pretty thin margins on this and we can't really budge on that.

And so just imagine somebody coming in and pulling 30% right off the top before you even get to the part where you have to like think about a profit. It's kind of wild. And to your point, like I also see where Apple's coming from. They make this whole thing possible. But on the same note, this is not a sustainable thing long term.

Eric Barnett: No, it's not. And I don't think the general public... like if you're not savvy to the tech business, right, and the models and everything that's in there, like people just want stuff cheaper. They don't really care about the back end. But it's like they don't realize that everyone thinks all these tech companies are super successful, but they're maintaining on these razor thin margin that if something goes wrong, the whole thing sort of falls apart.

Jeff Umbro: I also wanted to talk to you about what your thoughts are about the idea that Spotify and some other players may try and monetize audiobooks through advertising. What do you think that does to the product, to the listener, to the author? Are you for or against?

Eric Barnett: Oh I'm absolutely for it, a hundred percent for it.

I pushed for that quite hard at Findaway. We explored a model pretty deeply about potentially doing something ad supported. Not everybody is ready for that. If we make the comparison again between podcasting and audiobooks, whereas like podcasts, I define that typically as a very personality driven business, where it's like the people making the shows and like, you know, they're all for advertising because that's the health of it.

Whereas audiobooks, it's a content driven business and that's a good thing to an extent. But there is sort of this air of... superiority is probably the wrong word, but it's like, it's sort of something where there is like the sanctity of the content and how precious it is.

And it's good, and it's cool that you love your content that much, but I think that can often be to the detriment of the publishers, or the industry as a whole because they're holding back new business models and the overall growth of the organization by trying to maintain these things, traditional sales, blah, blah, blah... Versus saying: "Hey let's put something out there with some ads and get people listening to it."

When we're talking about that high ceiling, people don't realize how much money they can make by combining all this advertising revenue in addition to their direct sales. Like, you could do that. You could do the same thing in terms of, you have a free version of the audiobook that's available, that's ad supported. You have a premium version of the audiobook that needs to be purchased, and the premium version comes with additional content. Like there's so many cool things you could do if people were willing to get out of their way and try something innovative in the market.

Jeff Umbro: So for anybody who's interested in checking out Supporting Cast and looking at premium subscriptions or launching an audiobook direct to consumer, you can check out supportingcast.fm.

Eric, where can someone find you if they're interested in learning more?

Eric Barnett: Yeah, specifically if you're looking for me, you can do eric.barnett@supportingcast. fm. You can also just reach out to hello@supportingcast.fm and that will eventually get to me as well.

Jeff Umbro: Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun.

Eric Barnett: Thank you. I appreciate it, Jeff. It's always great to talk shop with you, man.