Sounds Profitable’s Bryan Barletta on Building an Audio Industry

Jeff Umbro: This is Podcast Perspectives, a show about the latest news in the podcast industry and the people behind it. I'm your host, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of the Podglomerate. Today on the show, I'm speaking with Bryan Barletta, founder and partner at Sounds Profitable, a company which covers the audio world and partners with over 140 players in the industry to set the course of the business side of podcasting.

Today, we will chat with Bryan about Sounds Profitable, its mission, business model, strategy in this moment, and what happens when Sounds Profitable's mission conflicts with the business model of the rest of the industry. 

Let's get right to it.

Hey, Bryan. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to the show.

Bryan Barletta: Thanks for having me.

Jeff Umbro: I guess to start what is Sounds Profitable in your words.

Bryan Barletta: I guess we're a research and advocacy firm focused on growing podcasting through listenership and monetization. That's the tagline that we go with. And it's a mouthful, right? It doesn't get easier to understand until I break it down into a few more things. 

[We’ve seen] what trade associations can do for other industries, and we have one: we have the IAB, [the] ANA is a little bit active in audio. There're opportunities there, but there was nothing podcast specific. So I think we emulate a lot of the ideals that we want to see out of a trade association in podcasting. That's the first one. 

We also have newsletters, a lot of them, that go out to basically everybody in the business of podcasting, trying to educate them on what's going on in the industry, how they can apply it; how they can compare and understand advertising, marketing, content, and other channels as well.

And then live events and support there. We really want our partners and the whole industry to benefit from everywhere that they spend money, or they're asked to spend money. So we have lounges at major events like Podcast Movement, Podcast Show London,.. 

Jeff Umbro: It sounds like you're busy! 

Bryan Barletta: A little bit!

Jeff Umbro: So if you're talking to somebody who's not in the space, or somebody just entering the space – cause that's hopefully the audience of this show – I would go to Sounds Profitable for research and content about the industry. If I'm going to become a sponsor or something, [I would go to Sounds Profitable for] connections and know-how, going below the hood when it comes to how to optimize X, Y, and Z.

Would you say that that's accurate?

Bryan Barletta: Yeah. And I think if you're [looking at] podcasting as a business seriously – and that could be anything right? That could be, you're not investing money, but you're investing time. That's absolutely valid, right? You have a business plan, you have a mindset on it. This isn't just like you're putting up 10 episodes and you're hoping that someone's going to discover you. You really want to put effort into it. We have something for you at every part of it. 

I do want to emphasize it's not sponsorship. We call it partnership because the real mindset is that all the content is actually free. Everything that we put out there, when people ask us questions, I can point to an article. I can point to something that we've recorded at one point or another to share so that they can get it. 

What partners get, on top of helping us accomplish all this, is the, “well, let's break that down. Let's take that article and topic. Let's understand your specific issue and work on it.” It's not a requirement. 

If anybody listening to this reads Sounds Profitable or listens to Sounds Profitable and has a question – if they hit reply, it goes right to me. And I absolutely put in time to make sure that we answer people's questions. Because sometimes we went too far over their head. Sometimes we didn't link back to an older article. We made assumptions. So we want to help everybody get up to speed. 

Jeff Umbro: I don't usually talk about Podglomerate in the context of the people that we're speaking with, but I do want to talk about it here because I think it can provide some examples and anecdotes of how this did effectively work for us.

Years ago, I was speaking with Bryan about how we can optimize like our programmatic marketplace on our podcasts. Bryan gave me a lot of really valuable tips on how we can set up our tech stack in such a way that it would optimize what we're doing. I don't know if I've told you this recently, but I can directly point to something around five figures in revenue that came in annually that was not coming in before.

So the way I like to think about Sounds Profitable is if you use your services and community properly, then you can directly influence the success of the different initiatives that you are trying to take, usually in the ad tech space. But I know in the last couple of years, you’ve been expanding beyond that.

Bryan Barletta: Yeah, my background is ad tech. And honestly, that's really cool to hear. I wish we could get more people that tell me stuff like that, because I do want to emphasize to the people listening, we don't do commission, kickback, anything like that. We don't hold equity, advisory board seats in any company, and we also own the company outright. It's really important for us to be as neutral as possible as a for-profit company. So everything is flat rate based. 

But that's my background: the ad tech, the BD, and the connections there. Tom [Webster] is killer on the branding and research – the amount of companies [we’ve gotten] the opportunity to dig into lately where they have the potential to tap into a 55-plus audience or a Gen-Z audience, right? But [their podcast] was too wide. So what direction can we give them from research and study? 

And then honestly. We end up introducing them to people like you [and] to other great people. Because our goal as consultants is conversation, and sharing, and connection. We're not contractors. We're not going to execute. We're not going to run media plans. 

But the ad tech stuff is just fun for me because that was my background. I helped build a lot of it in this space and in other spaces, and being able to say, “I heard you have some new inventory in, [for example], the Middle East. Well, I actually just met a partner over there who's doing great at it and is looking for more inventory. They have plenty of demand for really popular English-language podcasts.” Being able to make those connections is really fun. Helping people set up their unique stack – because again, all the information is there, but the nuance of, “well, it's not one size fits all.” That's where we really get to work with people, and I really enjoy it. 

Jeff Umbro: So you have on your website that Sounds Profitable has education, resources, and insights into the podcasting industry. Why, big picture, does the industry need that? 

Bryan Barletta: We're like 20 years deep into this medium. Everybody can point back to, “oh, that was a podcast that I downloaded and listened to as an MP3 on my computer.” Things have changed a lot, but they also haven't. We are hiring and we're growing. We're trying to build this into a bigger space.  We're chasing an advertising number more than anything else. We're not talking about the total number of people employed by the industry. We're not talking about the major IPs in it. The numbers we tend to chase are just advertising-based. 

So things get lost. It's very easy for people to just buy into the company culture. You ask a question and you get that company's specific answer, not the podcast industry's answer. You don't have a place you can reference it – you have an email, a Slack chat where someone said something when you asked a question. We're just trying to centralize it. 

And it's funny, there are so many different things like, [for example], you're saying “baked-in,” I'm saying “integrated.” In 2018, the IAB in their guide wrote that what we call “baked-in” is “integrated” ads, and all of the publishers, all of the hosting platforms, everybody who signed off on it, agreed to that. [But] nobody uses that. So we put out a glossary and that was a great starting point. 

The IAB just put out a buyers guide, which is an interesting starting point for them on that side. And we're building out educational content, for people to hire and bring in people who know nothing about podcasting and really catch them up on the stuff. That I think is easier, right?

I think too many people in the space, unfortunately, have gained their knowledge through mistakes more than they have from reading about it or being sat down and taught anything. 

Jeff Umbro:  Yeah, it's the best way to learn, to be honest.

Bryan Barletta: I've caused millions of dollars in damages.

Jeff Umbro: Alright, so we're gonna have our lawyer review this...

Bryan Barletta: [Laughs] But I've definitely caused ad ops mistakes – massive mistakes. I served a full-screen ad on the launch of the iPad for the New York Times with no close button. We had to update the entire spec of how mobile ads work so that the close button wasn't part of the creative file, but was rather part of the SDK in the app because of those mistakes.

And I think [in] any startup race, those mistakes can happen. But I think we're past that startup race. I think podcasting is a medium, and it's where we are, and we're going to see double digit growth year-over-year. We're not going to see 4x, 5x, 6x, or whatever we saw. We're not going to see the COVID boom again.

And now that it's long term, it's about education and preventing those mistakes. Because every one of those mistakes could be margin that makes you profitable. [It] could be jobs you save.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, I think generally, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I read on the website that Sounds Profitable's mission, in your own words, is to “set the course of the future of the audio business.” What do you think or what do you want to see as the future of the audio industry?

Bryan Barletta: I've spent a lot of time in a lot of organizations that have audio groups: IAB, ANA, I've dug into other places... Podcasting is the only thing talked about there. Streaming's figured out. There's no tech lab about streaming really, there's not any of that stuff. Music, streaming, and radio all seem to be settled.

So podcasting is that outlier. I think we get to decide what we want to be. And I think that if we want to be our own channel, we have to accept that growth might be slow, and it might be long, and it might be hard work. It might be accepting those unfavorable deal terms, because if that buyer leaves the space, [if] too many people said no, then that number drops, and if that number drops, no brand advertisers are going to come [here]. We have to ride the wave and then convert the wave, right? 

But alternatively, we could simply become influencer marketing. We could simply be in the same category as Instagram, YouTube, and all of these other places, and be the most performant part of that. There's a lot of ego tied up in that, but sometimes I think that that could be the best thing for audio, right?

Is audio supposed to be a destination? Or is it the glue that holds everything together? And those are the things that we need to think about as an industry. And I think each company really has [an] opportunity there. 

We see that from a handful of companies saying we don't just sell podcast ads, we sell sponsorship across socials, newsletter, live events, podcast, video, phone call endorsement, like you name it. They can plug into that model and that's really powerful for some. 

And then others say, “we're a podcast business. What we do is we put out podcasts. You get us on Apple, end the story.”

Jeff Umbro: I think a lot of the people who are running the integrated campaigns across different platforms, including audio, kind of got there by mistake. And I'm very jealous because that's, in my opinion, the right answer. But also, it's funny how people got from point A to point B.

Bryan Barletta: Yeah. I do envy those people constantly, the ones who fall into that sponsorship package. Because advertising is a CPM game and is buyer-side. Sponsorship is a publisher game. You get to define what it is. That entity, you can't pick it apart. It's buying a value meal. [It’s] more expensive if you want all the pieces separately.

Jeff Umbro: I think that the work you do, in a lot of ways, is essential to the growth of the industry.

One example of this is a conversation that you've been having actively throughout the industry for the last several months, which was essentially flagging that there were auto downloads happening on Apple Podcasts based on people adopting new devices and operating systems. I'm probably oversimplifying that, but the result of that is that Apple has actually changed the way [the app functions]. Apple considers that a feature, you consider that a bug with the auto downloads.

Bryan Barletta: …I own so many Apple products, I'm not here in any way to disparage them, I really do think they do killer work.

It was just a lot of separate conversations from separate hosting platforms and separate publishers saying, “hey, we're seeing this, and we don't think that these downloads are actually being listened to.” And it's tough because Apple is a big company. Podcasting is a very small part of it for them. And there wasn't the ability to have unification around that.

It had been identified in some ways, but the team at Podscribe actually identified it from a very specific angle. That allowed us to kind of pinpoint it. We provided all that data, grabbed all my partners together, everybody who could share that data, we provided it. And what was really neat is we've been digging into this for a while, and there was a lot of concern about it becoming public and becoming a big deal in drama and gossip. [So] we brought 150 companies together, shared it with them, and said, “please keep this private as we work on it, right?” 

We elevated it to Apple. They said, “we still believe [the] listen is the primary metric. We'll look into it.” And then it just kind of sat. We brought it to the IAB, it didn't move fast enough.

And as it was starting to move and people were starting to share in the IAB, we got wind that Apple might be making changes. [Then with the] iOS 17 release with the latest iPhone, what they did was – let's say auto downloading stopped at episode 100 and you came back at episode 200 and hit auto download again. Previously, it would say, “immediately download episode 101 through 200 right now.” They've since changed that to when you hit auto download, it'll only download what's coming next. Not anything that you've missed. 

But one of the cool things they added is, if you press play on something that you previously auto downloaded, and it had turned off, it will start back up. Which is, I think, a really helpful feature, [because it’s] very likely that if you're going to listen to the new episode, you'd like to. continue listening to them. 

They made a few other changes related to backdated episodes, and we're seeing some other changes there. 

But they're in a tough spot. [These changes are] built into the operating system. So that means that we're seeing 10-15% adoption today. It was 10 months, I think, for iOS 16 to hit about 80%. So this is going to be something that changes over time. And we're going to see downloads decline a little bit.

Jeff Umbro: Just to be clear, by the way, I also think that your job in this instance is simply to point out the fact that this is a thing, and then other people decide how they want to actually integrate that or not.

I'm so torn on this entire conversation about that particular situation, because on the one hand, you're not actually impacting the number of true listeners to a show. There is no change there. What will change is the results that you see. And for a lot of shows, especially legacy ones, that number is going to go down, and potentially significantly down. Which does mean in many cases – you follow the thread there – that you have a smaller business, you have less revenue, you might have to lay people off, that kind of thing.

On the one hand, you're making the integrity of the industry better, because people can trust it more. And it will lead to future growth. But short-term this market correction is going to have an impact.

And I promise I'm not pointing fingers or anything like that. I've just been noodling with that thought the last couple of weeks.

Bryan Barletta: It's not easy, right? But I think that the hard part is in podcasting we don't control the apps. 

Most hosting platforms are IAB certified at this point. Can IAB be better? Yeah, and I'm working hard to continue to push that on behalf of all my partners and behalf of all the space. But at the end of the day, Apple made this change. We didn't know it was coming. We'd escalated it to them. We would have loved to be more involved with them. But that's not how they operate. 

[With auto download, we’ve seen] how Spotify chooses not to really implement it. Or you have to go so many steps deep to actually [use] auto download in Spotify.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, you have to turn it on. 

Bryan Barletta: And we don't have the same problems over there, right? It's a little bit closer in the numbers there. But yeah, the [adoption] of this upgrade, it will reduce total downloads, which will reduce total impressions. 

I encourage people to not have the knee-jerk reaction to immediately add more ad inventory. [Don’t just] add more ad slots or placements. Look at how much available inventory you had. But realize it'll help with performance because those downloads – when you came back at episode 200, maybe you listened to episode 101 through 200, but it's very unlikely. That's concerning on that end because the end result there is less performance.

Jeff Umbro: While we're on the topic, I would love to know what your opinion of the ad marketplace is today, just given the ebbs and flows that we've seen in the last year.

Bryan Barletta: I wrote our three year anniversary article called “Ad-technical Difficulties,” and what I will say is I think there are still hungry buyers, but I think the reason we didn't hit the 2 billion number [is] one, I think that the IAB’s projections were too aggressive. I don't think they had enough data to do that. I think they ran into the hype. But two, I think we alienated a lot of those buyers that helped us get to this place, that really have perfected how they buy ads, integrated or baked-in. They have a very specific model and they're willing to pay top dollar for it because they know how to get performance out of it.

And I think that the technology became a forefront for us because we wanted to push into brand advertising, which meant programmatic, which meant run of show, run of network, and we pushed that tech to emulate. These other solutions – not all of it works.

So what I will say is that I think the buyers that are here are here. They're two feet in. They're committed. We've lost some buyers, and some of those people will never get back, because they're boss didn’t ask them to buy podcasts… or they asked them to buy things that perform, and they're over somewhere else watching CTV numbers go down while they're learning things about influencers and other areas that take as much hands-on time, but maybe hit a little bit harder for them.

So I think that we have good buyers there, but we need to be responsive to them. We need to be respectful to them. We need to understand where they are, what they want to buy, and remember that if you ordered a steak and somebody brought you a chicken, you wouldn't pay for it either.

I think people are spending well. I think podcasting is doing particularly well against a lot of other ad channels. But I think that podcasting is big and there are a lot of people here. I think there are a lot of moving parts. I think there's shifts in agencies. I think there's shifts in brands coming in direct. I think that there's consolidation in publishers. There are [fewer] new shows coming out. 

I think the ad market is strong at a time where the whole ad market, not just podcasting, is coming back around out of a “will they, won't they” recession.

Jeff Umbro: That's the good appetizer to the thing I'm seeing as a publisher in the industry. It's a buyer's market, not a seller's market. 

Bryan Barletta: Yeah. 

Jeff Umbro:  And the buyers all want different things. And it's causing us all kinds of issues when it comes to how we provide these services to these partners of ours.

A lot of the agencies seem to be asking for a lot of things they didn't used to, such as frequency capping, actualization, they want refreshed ad reads more often than they used to… None of those on their own are bad – it's just all of them together that cause a lot of burden for the publishers. It's doable. I guess my broader point is it's almost not worth doing based on the amount of administrative burden that comes from doing it different ways [for] every one of these buyers. 

And I'm wondering if, because we are at this point in the industry where publishers are hungry for new ad units, because of the last year, where we've kind of had a little bit of a drought. Do you see that normalizing at all in the future?

Bryan Barletta: What I will say is that I've been asking a lot of the buyers that we work with – we work with about eight agencies and three brands directly – for their insertion orders (IOs) because I want to read through them. And [there are] some things we need to improve on. 

One of the things that I see on there is offensive content. Like, “hey, Jeff, it's Tuesday. I'm offended.” You have no recourse. That's not great for you as a publisher. But if I say, “I use Barometer, I use Podscribe, I use Sonnet, I use any of these brand safety solutions out there,” if you utilize any of these and you pass the threshold, there's no discussion. I can't be offended. 

And competitive separation [is another example]. I've had to pull a few partners aside and be like, “this isn't technically possible in any way. Like even with a team of 10 people, I could not guarantee the separation that you're asking for here. If you're looking for a whole exit clause, you got it. But this has probably never been securely set up on any of your campaigns. So let's make it more logical.” 

But that's a big initiative we have for the end of the year, is to get all of our buyers together and work on a unified IO that basically says, “if I want this thing, that's very custom and very specific, I am prepared to pay for it. But if you want me to buy your things, there has to be price accommodations for it.”

Jeff Umbro: In a full circle moment, I feel like a lot of the things that you provide at Sounds Profitable are really essential here, because I think a lot of the buyers – and frankly, a lot of the sellers – need to be educated with what they're actually buying and selling.

But what can we learn from other industries? Good and bad? What should we adopt [and] avoid? You mentioned that the IAB has already solved other industries – what did they do right? And what should we pay attention to and avoid? 

Bryan Barletta: So the reason we started The Download was because it's not just [about] the business of podcasting, [it’s about the] pressures that lean on the business of podcasting, advertising, content ,and marketing.

A lot of what we focus on there is trying to educate people about these other spaces. Like there was one stat, it was like 60% or 70% of marketers are confused about media mix modeling. We get push back on that all the time – how am I supposed to fit podcasting in there? It's like, wow. Nobody seems to know how to use a period at the end, so why are we getting beat up for that? 

We get the privacy conversations about IP addresses, when the real conversation is about device ID and cookies. IP is the bottom of the barrel. Let other people fight this…

So I think what we can learn from other spaces is the grass is always greener. There's more competition in those spaces. There are more tech vendors. There are more layers. They're not friendly like podcasting. We are several years, if not more, away from really having to be at each other's throats. Because the truth is, we're not competing with each other yet. We're competing with not podcasting. 

So being able to highlight those other spaces where like, God, Nielsen lost their MRC accreditation – the validity of their model for being measurement for TV. Everybody pounced, everybody pounced, right? Podsites got acquired by Spotify, and everybody started getting into attribution, but like it wasn't negative and competitive. It wasn't people paying to be on the cover of Ad Age to be the first person to smear them for that, right? It was, “here's an alternative, here's something else we can do. Here are these other ideas.” 

Jeff Umbro: So I want to end this with a fun lightning round: you've mentioned several times on this call that one of your focuses is education, making sure that everybody is thinking about things in the same way. So I'm going to ask you a bunch of stuff and ask you to explain the difference. 

[What is a] download, versus listen, versus stream?

Bryan Barletta: Download is from your hosting platform. It's when 60 seconds of the audio file has been sent to the listener's device. So sending from that hosting platform – not necessarily receiving, but it's been transmitted down there.

A listen is an in-app metric and it's unique between Apple and Spotify. They count them differently. The app is saying, “an action has occurred that we call a listen.” Sometimes it's greater than zero seconds. And sometimes it's 10 seconds, 30 seconds, things like that. 

And streaming is not something that exists in podcasting. Streaming is the continual communication between the platform and the player so that in real time, it is being sent a little bit at a time. 

Download is getting the whole file. Listen is an-app metric, and streaming is a direct connection. Think like radio, but digitally. 

Jeff Umbro: What is an impression? 

Bryan Barletta: By IAB standards, an impression would be called “ad-delivered.” It is when the portion of the episode that contains the ad has been sent to the listener's device. 

Jeff Umbro: And just one clarification for you, because I get this question a lot: if you have eight ad markers in an episode and somebody on, we'll say Apple, hits play, how many impressions are they delivering?

Bryan Barletta: If you have ad markers, and it's dynamic ad insertion, and Apple, the way the Apple app seems to download is it asks for the episode in chunks – percentage of the episode at a time. So it really depends on how much of the episode they're able to progressively download when they press play. 

The app is trying to say, “I want to download the whole thing,” but “it's saying, give me 10%. Now give me another 10%, and another…” You could lose signal, you could stop listening. It happens really fast, so we're talking in a minute, maybe two minutes, you could download a several hour podcast immediately. 

But in Spotify, I believe it says,”give me the whole episode in one go. Send the whole file now.” So in Spotify, [it’s more likely] all of them are immediately sent when the person presses play and starts listening to it. [On] Apple, there's a little bit more discrepancy [with] it. 

And again, there's no obligation for any of those players to be certified and adhere to the same standards.

Jeff Umbro: I wanted to highlight that because of the idea that just because somebody hits play or has downloaded an episode, you may be tracking all eight of those ad impressions, but it doesn't necessarily mean that somebody has listened. But at the same time, no one is actually breaking any rules there. So this is just to say that there is no perfect solution here. 

We covered this a little bit, but can you explain baked-in or integrated ads versus dynamically inserted ads?

Bryan Barletta: So integrated would be in the file before it's uploaded to the hosting platform. Dynamically inserted is when a marker is placed where you'd like an ad, and when the person presses play and it calls the hosting platform, it says “I have this marker, what campaigns are eligible,” and it builds a unique file for them in that moment.

Jeff Umbro: Would you prefer a host read or a producer read?

Bryan Barletta: Oh, God, I think I'm time sensitive. I think the shorter the better. [I’m not] real picky [with] that. 

I've been listening to a lot of Maximum Fun podcasts lately, and I feel they get real, real, real long with the host reads, even if they're unique each time. And I find myself skipping, and I feel bad about that. 

Think about it, if I'm doing the dishes, and I have to get my soapy hands into my pocket, you failed. So the faster we get through those ad breaks, the more it sticks with me, and the more I don't skip.

Jeff Umbro: I love that. 

So if you are a new podcaster, you're a hobbyist, [and] you have three hours a week to dedicate to this, what are the three metrics you are paying attention to to gauge your success?

Bryan Barletta: Having fun. You know, Maono sent me one of their mics and me and my son Theo, we just record stuff. It's fun. It's just for us. It'll never get published, but you get that moment, right? You get to have fun. We make fun of “two dudes having a beer and catching up,” but what we're not doing is not that much further than this. Me and you, in our downtime like this, [talking about stuff we probably] annoy our other friends talking about. So I think having fun is a key one.

I think you need to remember how many people 30 people is. Look at the room you're sitting in, and think about what 30 people in that room looks like. Even 500 people – I spoke in front of 500 people once and I almost vomited. So understanding the size there.

And then I would say not wasting time with whatever the next new hype thing is. [If] you don't want to be on YouTube, don't put it on YouTube, right? You don't want to do social clips and build a social media following, don't. Do what works for you. Figure out if it's a business, and then if it is a business, hire people to help you identify the avenues that you will and won't succeed. You may be too broad for some of them.

Jeff Umbro: That lasts like five minutes of this episode is what you all will see every day if you subscribe to the Sounds Profitable newsletter. So thank you all. And thank you, Bryan, for joining us. Really appreciate it. 

Bryan Barletta: Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you again to Bryan Barletta for joining us on this episode of Podcast Perspectives. You can find more from Sounds Profitable at soundsprofitable.com, where you can also sign up for their daily email newsletter. 

For more podcast related news, info, and takes, you can follow me on Twitter @JeffUmbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of the Podglomerate. If you are looking for help producing, distributing, or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at thepodglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com or follow us on all social platforms @podglomerate. 

This episode was produced by Chris Boniello and Henry Lavoie. And thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Vanessa Ullman. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. Thanks for listening, and I will catch you next week.