The Business Side of Podcasting: Insights from Room Tone's Co-Founder Ben Riskin

Jeff Umbro: This week on Podcast Perspectives, Ben is working on building a library of the most impactful shows in podcasting today.

Ben Riskin: The people who are actually committed to the medium that want to make work in audio, right, not be, I need to have a podcast world, but be like, I want to make a podcast because it will be exciting and creative and fulfilling and whatever and lucrative and all these other things.

I think there's more opportunity for the people.

Jeff Umbro: Welcome to Podcast Perspectives, a show about the podcast industry and the people behind it. I'm your host, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of The Podglomerate.

Ben Riskin is the co founder of Room Tone, a podcast advisory firm that helps creators navigate the legal and business side of the podcast industry. He's going to tell us why he created Room Tone, what creators often overlook when it comes to the business of podcasting, and where he thinks the future of podcasting is headed.

Welcome Ben. Great to have you.

Ben Riskin: It's really great to be here. Thanks for having me on Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: I'm going to start by asking you to tell me a little bit about yourself and your background.

Ben Riskin: In 2014, I decided I was done being a lawyer, a bankruptcy lawyer, and I was going to quit my job and start making podcasts. I had a very good friend at the time, she's still a good friend, but at the time, my friend Jenna Weiss-Berman, who's now kind of, you know, kind of queen of podcasts at Audacy, she was going to BuzzFeed to start their audio division and she was like, look, I'll teach you to cut tape, come work in the industry. And she like threw me a freelance job that I was like deeply unqualified for. She taught me to cut tape, you know, help me get my first role and made an introduction to Caitlin Thompson, who at the time was helping Acastt launch in the US and so I ended up going to work. I started kind of producing a little bit, then I went to go work at Acastt.

So my job was to sell ad tech, but in part of that was explaining to people the pipes of podcasting and in turn, I had to understand the business of podcasting because the whole theory of, of Acastt or the whole theory at the time of Acastt and ad tech at the time was, you can make more money. And so then the question is like, well, how do I make money?

Jeff Umbro: And this is only 10 years ago, right?

Ben Riskin: Yeah, this is 2014, but two really big things happened that year, right? So the first is dynamic ad insertion and the second is Serial, right? And so Serial is the first time that it was, you know, you had this medium looked at as a mass medium. But I think the two of those things happening together actually set us on a course for the correction we had in the past year or two, right? Which is to say you had a mass medium hit in serial that was released as a limited run series on its own RSS feed at the exact same time as you had dynamic ad insertion introduced, which is to say, No, no, no, keep your listeners on your current feed and we'll be able to monetize them more than we were.

And so you had an industry that exploded in 2014 and decided they wanted to start making all these limited run series at the same time as it was more important than ever to keep your listeners on your exact feed, right? And continue, you know, like growing that feed.

Jeff Umbro: That's the exciting stuff.

Ben Riskin: Well, so, yeah, when I was leaving Acastt, I was like, maybe I'll go produce.

I was making a show. I made like a six minute show called Hard Pass while I was there that was a weekly kind of short form show. I was like, I want to produce full time. And then I applied for a job at Stitcher, and Chris Bannon was like, come get lunch with me. And I had lunch with Chris Bannon, where he, and he says he doesn't remember this, I mean, he says he remembers the lunch, but he doesn't necessarily remember this specific conversation, but he basically was like, why are you applying for this job? You're not qualified for it. Right?

It was like a junior producer job or something, and I just wasn't. I had no production experience. He's like, But you're a lawyer. You're a business person at a time where this industry has got a business side growing, why are you, why don't you look for those jobs and produce for fun, right?

Like you, you know, he's like, I promise you it's a better life experience to not have your entire income tied to like your creative work. And I like very much took that to heart. I applied, there was a job at Panoply, which Panoply at the time was the umbrella company that owned Megaphone and Pinna. That switched around a little bit.

And I went to go work for Moses Soyoola, doing this development and strategy at Panoply. And so part of that was doing all of the deal work around the Panoply content network, right? You know, both ad sales and an original production work, and the network really grew while I was there.

And part of that was Megaphone. And so initially that was about, you know, as many, you know, large enterprise networks coming onto Megaphone. While I was there, we launched the Megaphone Targeted Marketplace, which was like brand new for a time. And that deal with Edison was totally new.

And then within that, we launched like a whole professional tier of Megaphone. So like, Rae Palermo, who, who works at Spotify is someone who I brought on at Megaphone to like help develop and sell that.

With most business development jobs, like at a certain point, your time is done. But I was also really like, Moses and I worked really well together. And I'm a big advocate for like, choose your boss, not your work. Right? Like a lot of, a lot of the jobs are the same, but finding a boss that really like helps you grow or kind of blocks for you so you can do your thing is key to happiness.

And so I. Moses went to Endeavor. I waited the necessary amount of time and then followed him.

Jeff Umbro: Was that exactly one year later?

Ben Riskin: I think it was six months.

Jeff Umbro: Okay.

Ben Riskin: And then I led business development and strategy for Endeavor's audio division, which was a combination of like an original content network and an ad sales division. And when that was rolled up into Endeavor Content, their movie studio, I did more of a traditional development exec role where I was packaging projects and helping sell them to, to studios.

And in 2020, you know, like most other people, I started really thinking about my relationship with work. And I think for me, I have spent a lot of time building a reputation in audio and building relationships around, you know, trying to, trying to be transparent and honest around what I view of the, what I view about the industry and where things are going.

And at a certain point, I felt like I was constantly selling someone else's view of the industry, you know, to the detriment of my own goals towards transparency. And so, in 2020, the idea was like, well, why don't we start something new? You know, I had gone to a law firm and given a presentation about the business of podcasting.

One of the lawyers was like, you could sell that. And I was like, could I?

Jeff Umbro: Tell me more.

Ben Riskin: You don't say. And so I started talking to a long time friend who's now my business partner, Bianca Grimshaw. She is an entertainment lawyer. She was counsel for Pineapple Street and Transmitter. I reached out to her to be like, what if I came and joined you as a lawyer? She was like, there's really not that much work.

But you know, she, she was like, but most of my clients need guidance on the business side. And, and I found that as well, right? With Endeavor, I was constantly talking to film and television company, to brands, to other folks who were just like, didn't understand audio. They didn't understand how the industry worked or how money was made in the industry or how money flowed around the industry. And so we started Room Tone with the idea that there was this really big gap in professional services. So business development, business affairs, and strategy work. And that's really the bread and butter of what Room Tone does.

And so we launched the company in Labor Day, 2020. So, you know, we were kind of just, we're out of quarantine, but, but like, I haven't, I didn't see Bianca in person until almost a year into the business.

Jeff Umbro: Let's hitch our wagons together, but we'll meet up for dinner to celebrate next year.

Ben Riskin: Yeah. It was like, all right, like we'll meet up soon.

Jeff Umbro: You are kind of like a fixture at every podcast conference that's out there and, and everyone knows you and you're everybody's friend and it's just nice. Like that's the, this is the part of the industry that I do love is that you can exist in this industry. And, and I don't know if that would, if that would be the case in a different industry.

Ben Riskin: I can make a lot of money being a corporate bankruptcy attorney and sitting in my office all day and staring at a screen, and I made the decision in 2014 that that's not how I wanted to spend my day, you know, and I feel like I'd much rather have like a conversation with someone about a deranged pitch that's going nowhere, but like enjoy the conversation and hear about other people's work than, you know, than not, and so, I don't know, the conferences are like, they're really fun and it's just nice to like go and not, I don't know, just to be part of a community.

I mean, I think that we grew the industry. I mean, I used to joke that we have our own like Disney Channel stars. Right? Like, and this was like, before we had like actual stars in podcasting, where you'd be like, Oh my God, Nate Dimeo.

Jeff Umbro: What does it look like to take a new project to different publishers or try to pitch a new show today as opposed to a few years back?

Ben Riskin: So in 2014, right? Like, take like, let's take a decade back. At most, shows were anthology, right? You had shows like Life of the Law or, you know, 99 P. I., you would pitch your single episode into this show that already existed. There were only like 60 podcasts, not really, but like, you know, it was a very limited amount. You would pitch an episode to the heart, to the whatever it was, right?

And you get a tiny amount of money and, and it was definitely not enough to live by, but you know, you had a lot of people kind of working all these different jobs and the industry was a lot smaller. I think, you know, you started seeing the growth of the industry happen in Serial and you started seeing independent like financing for limited run series come about.

And those budgets I think started out to be kind of more, more what we're, what we're used to now. But what happened is you had like, the Spotify had all inflated the value of the industry, right? And it inflated the budgets we were receiving, the budgets people expected to receive. It made budgets really top heavy because you had a lot of, like, people who weren't cutting tape, who were EPs or creative producers or whatever, who were taking all this revenue off the top because that's the way those deals work, not because they were doing anything wrong, it's just that's how those deals work in a waterfall.

But you just can't support that. And so what you saw in, you know, when Spotify pulled out of the industry, which, you know, I mean, they can say we can argue whether or not they have, but let's say they, where they pulled out of their investments in the content side of the industry and that deflated the industry back to the size it was, right? Or where it was growing towards, right?

And so to put a, like, to, to, to give a more direct answer to your question, when we're out shopping projects, there is a smaller market of potential buyers, but it's honestly the same group of buyers that's been for a decade with occasional one or two that come in, right?

But the majors are the majors, and, and, you know, there's, there's a world of like kind of midsize and independents, and then there's a world of financing that's kind of outside of the podcast ecosystem for podcasts. It means there's less buyers, which means we need to be more discerning.

I think the means of monetizing have changed a little bit on what people want from stories. I think people want a twist earlier in a series, season, episode 2, episode 1, because they're trying to gear towards subscription binge. Right? And so it means that like, you know, the kind of hook two turns in a conclusion might shift up a little bit.

Jeff Umbro: That's interesting. I had not heard about that or heard anyone like articulate that before.

Ben Riskin: Where it feels a little like where we came from is there's more opportunity for people who can actually like for our Disney Channel stars, right?

Jeff Umbro: But it's harder to become a Disney Channel star today.

Ben Riskin: It's harder to become one. But the people who are actually committed to the medium that want to make work in audio, right, not the, I Need to Have a Podcast world, but be like, I Want to Make a Podcast, because it will be exciting and creative and fulfilling and whatever, and lucrative and all these other things.

I think there's more opportunity for those people before, like one of the big shifts I'm seeing right now, and, and I was talking to Jonathan Hirsch about this, is a focus on developing talent rather than shows. Right? Which to me is where we, you know, you, it's really hard to back into talent, right? To like, Oh, we have a story, but now we're going to find the host.

Or we have a show idea, but we're going to go and find the host. And then you have a host who's like, It wasn't my idea. Right? Like, even if they're incredible, it's just, there's not a lot of professional hosts anymore.

Jeff Umbro: It's not Dan Taberski, you know?

Ben Riskin: Right. Or even Dan, like Dan, you know, Dan's an incredible writer.

He's an incredibly evocative performer. I don't know how that is for a show that he doesn't care about. Never, right. Like maybe, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know if that would come out if it wasn't his project that he's like, put all this effort and life into. Right? And so like there was a time and I think with, with the connection to radio where you did have more like professional hosts, right? Like people who were just great hosts who kind of came up, you know, in the radio world and then rose to being the host showrunner.

But, but I do think to me that shift in the podcast space means that there's more opportunity to actually develop talent. And I think similarly, at least, I don't know whether this is going to play out, but to me, it portends a little bit of a longer investment cycle.

Jeff Umbro: And that's the big issue with where we're at today is that that requires a lot of money and a lot of people are getting a little squeamish there, I think.

Ben Riskin: But where I think you're seeing like the Wondery Plus of it all, for example, or like the binge, it's like, you know, stuff is no longer eight to 10 episodes. It's six to eight, maybe three to four. Right.

And like, you know, um, maybe it's a sound map that you're selling to Hatch, right? Like it's like, there's really interesting opportunities now where, or even just like whatever, to launch something independently, to, to, to grow it independently, meaning just that there are different ways to recoup that investment. There are different ways.

And the reality of like an investment that is like a five year investment versus three or one, it's like the returns are going to be much higher because you're actually growing an audience rather than, you know, you had, I think what you had was the influx of tech money that came in with Spotify. It's just that those are not long term investments. It's like, you know, like Panoply and Megaphone and Pinno, we're all, they're all Graham Holdings companies, which are like a Buffett theory of investment, which is like basically we'll be money forever and you'll grow and you'll get there and eventually it'll, it'll work, right?

We're, we're really like, that is, that is that theory of investment. But when you had all this like venture capital funding come in for podcast businesses, for tech, tech pieces, all of that. It's like, they need to see a return right away. Cause, and, and the minute, because you're a growth section, a growth sector until market shift, and then you're a cost center, right?

And then the question is, when do we get our money back?

Jeff Umbro: And the scary part is that it went from venture money to private equity money, and private equity has an entirely different, like, you know, way to operationalize a business.

Ben Riskin: So many people in our own industry do not understand how the money flows through this industry, and like what that means for kind of people getting paid and being able to pay their bills. And so I have very little expectation that people outside the industry understand it, right? And you know, it's, but, sometimes that can work in your favor or not.

Jeff Umbro: I want to dive into the idea of like your background as a lawyer and how it impacted what you do today. Cause you're not, you actively claim that you are not a lawyer or like at least a practicing lawyer, right?

Ben Riskin: I am a licensed attorney in the state of New York. But Room Tone is not a law firm, right? And, you know, and I mean, you know, just like the fine point of it is like in any contract, you have business points and legal points, right?

Like indemnities, representations and warranties, those are all legal. They have legal ramifications, right? And you need a lawyer to review them.

Jeff Umbro: There's a governing body who actually can act on what's in that document.

Ben Riskin: Room Tone doesn't handle the legal side of it. We work with Granderson de Roche where Bianca maintains legal practice, and that allows us in some cases where our clients need it to provide those legal services.

The way that my legal background plays into it is like, understanding how a contract is set up and understanding, basically understanding how to contract the deal allows me to understand how to put a deal together, right? Like, think about it, maybe think about it in like a production way. If I have a story I want to tell, right, and I have an idea in my head of how the, how it's going to sound, right?

Oh, you know, it's going to be mostly narration with some actualities, you know, and then there's going to be, um, this one episode in the middle where we do a musical about Free Willy, where I just, I just listened to the Good Whale, right? Which is so good, but right. But like, and then it's going to be, you know, think about that from the business perspective.

Like, all right, we want to do, we want Tinkercast and Atlas Obscura to make, like, a trip together. Okay, like who's providing what? What, you know, who's providing what services, who owns what, like, here's how we're going to structure it so that when we actually go to do it, everyone knows, and I think to me, that's about, that's knowledge that comes about from being a lawyer, being able to understand, like, how we'll actually document it in writing so that the parties can understand what they're going to do in action.

Jeff Umbro: You're confirming my belief that all lawyers are like perfect dungeon masters, by the way.

Ben Riskin: We just did a Dungeons and Dragons podcast deal.

Jeff Umbro: See, it's perfect.

Ben Riskin: It's like a niche area that I had no idea, like blowing up.

Jeff Umbro: Oh yeah. The Adventure Zone was at one point in time, like basically my Sunday church was listening to that show.

Ben Riskin: Yeah. Our client makes the podcast world beyond them, Worlds Beyond Number. It's like four tabletop game influencers and they go to like an Airbnb for a week and like record the whole campaign. And then our client like mixes it and has original music, it's, and it, and it's, you know, quite successful.

Jeff Umbro: I'd love to take like a minute on each of your business lines. Start with strategy consulting.

Ben Riskin: So strategy consulting is, I think, our bigger picture approach. Sometimes that is a, that can, that can take the form of a business that's looking to launch audio as like a, as a new area. Right. And so an example right now, we're doing that with Adweek, right? Adweek is, has had a podcast network that it kind of, like, Started, but really didn't necessarily nurture and is now looking at like, well, we want to add, we want podcasting to be a bigger part of our business.

How do we do that? Right? How do we think about it? What's the best way to do it in a way that like is, you know, lucrative, but sustainable. So we've been helping them. First we, we like went through and did a whole diagnostic about what is the, what is the business now? And then we look at comps for businesses that they want to build, like, and we help think about, all right, If we're going to build in this way, here's how we're going to do it, right? And then it can also be who to work with and, you know, what kind of talent and all of that, right?

Sometimes it can be a bit more nuanced, right? We had a client that was specifically interested in channels and subscription products using channels, right? We happen to have some direct experience with that right now, trying to, trying to get selects off the ground, right?

But it's also an area to me that I've been spending a lot of time thinking on, because I do think, I think it's, it's really a future. distribution mechanism. And so in that case, it was a memo, right? Like a robust memo that said, you know, here's the strategy around these, right? And here's how it's being implemented. And here are the numbers.

And in that case, it's like, I'm spending a lot of time back channeling the people I know who work there, who did work there. And, you know, it's kind of working that book that I like developed in my Acast days and onward, right, of being like, oh, hey, you know, what can you tell me about the time that you worked there? Right? Like, and so.

And that way, so, so the strategy work can be pretty broad. It's really dependent on, you know, who the client is. I mean, we've worked with, we've worked with kind of established audio firms, we've worked with kids, film and television companies and broader film and television companies that are thinking about audio talent agencies, PR firms, you know, technology companies.

And so what the strategy work is, it will be fully dependent on kind of what their goals are.

Jeff Umbro: Cool. And then business development.

Ben Riskin: It's sales by way of partnerships versus sales by way of like spots and dots. And so I think there's like the broad version of that, like when I was doing that role at Megaphone, my job was, business development was bringing people onto Megaphone, right? The same as Acast, right? Or whatever.

I would say my role now is more about saying, understanding who our client is and then what businesses might align well with what they're doing and developing a partnership, you know, in whatever form that needs to be, and that could be something more like, you know, kind of audience growth oriented, right?

Like we, we facilitated a really, you know, a kind of collaborative episode between Freakonomics and Atlas Obscura, right? And that was a situation where, you know, I knew Neal. I was like, what about these two companies, whether they do well together, et cetera.

Jeff Umbro: In essence, is it like creating opportunities for the partners that work with you?

Ben Riskin: Yeah. And that's, I think, where, where we really have some strength compared with kind of other folks that do this work is because we're not, we're not like a walled garden, right? Like we, we don't have just a list of clients. And the question is, how does this client fit into our other clients? Right? The question is, how does this client fit into the audio industry?

I mean, that can be kind of, that can be, it can take a lot of different forms, but exactly that, right? Which is to say kind of developing opportunities either to, you know, spend money or make money. Usually if you're spending money, it's to make money, right? But developing opportunities for our clients to make money, whether that be through, you know, services, you know, or, you know, growth or whatever it might be, whatever their needs are.

There's like a little subsect of business development, which is business affairs, right? And that's where like the actual deal negotiation comes in. So, you know, sometimes we're brought in in that broad way of, can you create new opportunities for us? And other times we're brought in in the way of, we have a deal, can you represent us in that deal?

And that is like, those two things are really the bread and butter of what we do. So, you know, I gave some examples on the business development side, on the business affairs side, that could take, you know, we represented NPR when it licensed How We Built This to Amazon, or we represented Transmitter when it sold to Pushkin.

And in the Transmitter case, right, like we prepared that from early on. We helped them think through what selling the company would look like, who potential buyers were, what was the material, what were the materials that were going to go out, right? And then found a buyer based on the types of partnerships, you know, the types of shows they made and the relationships and kind of the, the bigger picture of like literally the people working in these two places.

And then we're able to kind of represent them in that deal. We represented Jason Hoch and, and his deal with Audiochuck to launch Wavland, you know, in addition to that. So that's kind of like business affairs. That's really contract negotiation, right?

Jeff Umbro: So, and now what does the final tier project representation actually mean?

Ben Riskin: It's commission work, but we have a rule, which is like, we, we won't represent projects unless you can make the thing you're pitching, right? And so that means you're either hosting it, reporting it, or producing it, or all three. But it also means that like what we can commission is often like, we're not, you know, we're not doing the Smartless deals, right?

So that commission is, is lower, but it's a labor of love. I mean, and this is a project, this is about working with audio first creators to help them sell their projects, right, or find a home for their project. And so.

Jeff Umbro: And can you provide an example of that?

Ben Riskin: Yeah. Larrison Campbell's client of ours, she made Devil in the Ditch with Campside and, and Dr.

Miracle with Campside. She had some other projects in the works with Sony. She came to us without having worked in audio, but with like a real desire to create in the medium. It's really audio first creators and, and, you know, in those cases, it's a project where, you know, it's project by project.

It's really about saying, you know, hearing a project pitch and saying, oh, I think we can sell that, right? Like there's a specific buyer or several or whatever it is, and we might help them, you know, write the pitch more, help them flush out the pitch a bit more, and then take it out to, to, you know, execs and see if we can help them finance it.

Jeff Umbro: I love it.

Ben Riskin: There's one last piece, sorry. And so it kind of falls in project representation, although it's kind of our own work, right?

Which is to say, sometimes we develop and package our own projects. And so that the best example of that is Welcome to Provincetown. It was a project that I developed having spent, you know, I guess now 17 summers, 18 summers there and went to Rococo Punch and they were right on board immediately. Went to Mitra, she was on board immediately.

And, you know, we were able to put that project together, help kind of get the development off the ground and, and then find a, find a partner to get it out in the world with Stitcher. And so in that case, or, or in the case like Selects, you know, it's more that we view Room Tone as this big arching business, right?

And then within it, we kind of, we occasionally will launch little kind of other businesses, right? And that might be something like Welcome to Provincetown or Selects or things like that.

Jeff Umbro: Why would someone come to you as opposed to like getting a law firm or an agent or a manager or any number of kind of other relationships that exist in the podcast space?

Ben Riskin: There are some incredible minds on the representation side and in the lawyering side of audio.

Jeff Umbro: All these dungeon masters.

Ben Riskin: All these dungeon masters, right? But you choose the people that are going to help you understand your project and your goals, right, or realize them best. And that's, you know, so to me, people who come to us are, you know, are, it's cause they want to work with us, right?

They view our work in a certain way. We have a conversation that really connects with them in a different way than maybe some, someone else they've talked to, right? I think it's nice because in that way, it's like, we don't really have competition, right? Like you either want to work with us or you don't, but it means that I kind of am very much constantly out being like, hi, I'm Ben.

Like, what do you do? Tell me about, tell me about yourself, right? Why don't you tell me about me?

Jeff Umbro: Do you want to tell us about Selects?

Ben Riskin: The kind of quick and dirty of Selects is it's a subscription channel where we publish canonical works and We right now, it is me and Bianca. The hope is that as we grow, and hopefully pursue some partnerships that we'll, we're, we're in the middle of discussing, we'll be able to like bring some grant money in the, on board and then be able to have an editorial board, right, rather than it being, you know, my decision, but you know, I went through and I spoke with a lot of people who've been making radio and audio docs for quite some time. I got a license through the PRX Exchange.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Ben Riskin: We find old works, we license them, and then we re release them as kind of with robust show notes as kind of these, as like canonical works.

And so, you know, it's sometimes one a month, sometimes it's more than one a month, and the works kind of range. Some of them are things that aired, you know, in the past five years, 10 years. Some things are, we just published a doc from 1959 from WNYC, which is kind of like this guy in the Village interviewing beat poets.

Jeff Umbro: I listened last night to that.

Ben Riskin: It's such a good one, right?

Jeff Umbro: It was, it was a trip. I kept on expecting like Ginsberg to appear or something.

Ben Riskin: I mean, the poetry is so bad, right? Like you're hearing this like awful beat poetry. We were like, Oh man.

Jeff Umbro: Oh, it was, there was a lot in there that was, that made me cringe. But like, it was also like a really nice snapshot in time.

Ben Riskin: There's like a two fold reasoning for Selects, right? I think creatively, it kind of, this was something that, you know, it feels like tough podcasting.

Podcasts are like a collective now, and I never know whether I'm actually using that, that word correctly, or that, that descriptor correctly. I think so. But meaning like, we're just talking about so many different things when we're talking about like on demand audio, right? We're talking about and especially now that we're talking about video in that mix somehow, right?

But like, talking about video podcasts, talking about chat podcasts, talking about documentary and fiction and short form, and it's kind of nuts as to like what we think of as the canonical work, because it's like, you go to these like award ceremonies and you have like, you know, Jody Aberdeen up against like Anderson Cooper. Right? Or like whatever, like, you know, like, like a known celebrity who had a big budget to make a show and like a Disney Channel star that is making it on their own. Right. And you know, like, I should text Jody and let him know I called him a Disney channel star.

It was just this thing where it felt like we were losing perspective on who, on the works that set foundation for the works that we hear today, right? And who made them and why they're good. And, and a lot of the people who are making work today are people who've been, you know, I mean, who are like running production companies now, or maybe they're the lead exec somewhere, we're not, but these are people who built their careers, right?

And I think we talked a little bit at the top, there's been this like creative divide where the podcasting world doesn't really associate itself with the radio world, but it is a large portion of the podcasting, like, certainly the documentary side of the business came out of the radio side.

Jeff Umbro: There is a clear lineage, even if it's not, like, people who started in podcasts.

Ben Riskin: Exactly, right? And so, creatively, the hope was to be able to draw that line a little cleaner, right? To be able to say, like, we published an episode of Life of the Law, where if you listen to the credits, it's like, it's, Sean Cole hosted it, but it's like, Ashleyanne Krigbaum, right? Kaitlin Prest, Jonathan Hirsch, like, all of these people worked on that episode who are now, you know, you look on, you, you look out, you're like, Oh, wow. They're all, you know, kind of incredible audio makers.

So I think that's the creative side. And then there's like this business case for Selects, right? Which is when Apple launched subscriptions, it launched channels alongside it, right? And it was kind of the, the part of it that no one really paid attention to.

And I remember meeting up with Jake Shapiro from Apple and being like, Channels is where it's at. No, one's paying attention to it, but it's the most important thing that you launched in some time. And, you know, um, and Jake was like, okay, you know, Jake and I get along really well. I think he was one of the, one of the very forward thinking people in this business and always has been.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. Go back to PRX and PodFund and RadioPublic and.

Ben Riskin: Matt and Jake built the PRX exchange. And like, so I had been talking to Jake about like Channels forever. Like I kept being like, what do I do? I mean, eventually when, when NPR launched a channel for Car Talk called Car Talk Plus, it was the first time that like people had taken archival audio and put it into new shows on channels, or at least it was the first time I was seeing it, and and Jake pointed it out to me and that was like the bridge of like, Oh wait here's how we're gonna do this.

But the idea the business case for Selects is that like podcast discovery is and marketing is the biggest constraint on the growth of this industry and it's the thing that the industry is thinking the least about. Right? We love to be like, it's an art, not a science. It's barely an art. Right? And I, I mean, except when the podglomerate does it, then it's a science.

Jeff Umbro: We, yeah, we're, we know a couple of things about it, but, but even then it is still, it is still an art because like, you need a good product for it to work.

Ben Riskin: We don't know anything about our listeners. How on earth can we market to them? Like, and like, we only know about our listeners, not the shows of the listeners of the shows we want to market them. Right?

And so, my theory of the case is that, like, there needs to be a layer between the listener and the show, right? And in every other medium, we call that a channel. Right? I mean, not just any, and TV, we call that a channel, right? Like, I, you know, I don't think, I might think there's a show I want to watch, but it might also be like, well, I want to watch something that's a little upmarket. I'm going to go to Max.

I may use, I, maybe I used to think that, but like, I want something a little upmarket. I'm going to go to PBS. I mean, I want something, I want more reality, I'm going to go to Netflix or I want, you know, whatever. Right? So you contain your options first and then choose your show. Right?

And, right now, you have a, you know, God bless the Apple podcast editorial team who's trying to literally promote all the different types of podcasts available on one page until the series launch, which is like that series page is a huge shift for them. But like, there's literally only one discovery element, right, being out on the platform, right? There's only one team who is trying to serve so many different masters, saying, here's what you should listen to, right? And we know nothing about them. We don't, you know, I mean, I know some of them and they're wonderful people. They're smart. They're big listeners. They've, they absolutely should be in those, like, I care and I'm interested in what they're promoting.

But we also know that that's a business, right? That like, people jockey for those positions. And, and those are long term relationships that happen between companies and whatnot. And Apple, Apple, I'm using Apple as an example here. Obviously there's Spotify, there's other promotional tools, but.

Jeff Umbro: Even YouTube at this point.

Ben Riskin: Right, and YouTube and all of that. But I guess my thought is like the channel is, is an opportunity to create that layer and say, you don't need to choose what one of 800, 000 podcasts you need to listen to, right? And you also don't need to just like be a slave to the, like what's next in your feed, right? You can say, I know that I want to listen to something like, that's going to be a banger, and has been like, has stood the test of time, and then go to Selects.

And my theory about it is that channels in general are an opportunity for us to rethink how we distribute documentary audio. Right? And, like, we work in a medium that is so powerful that like, a minute and a half, two minute long piece can be, can like, bring you to tears. Something that's like 20 minutes.

I think The Living Room was really short. I can't remember how long it was, but like a piece of that from Love and Radio, right? It's like.

Jeff Umbro: Isn't it The, like, Hills Like white elephants, the Hemingway, like.

Ben Riskin: Oh yeah.

Jeff Umbro: Short story that's like a page long that like people still read in school today.

Ben Riskin: Totally. I mean, right, we work in this medium that is so potent. It can, it can move you in a minute. But when Serial happened in 2014, everything moved away, like we, and we got away from these anthology styles, shows that could feature magazine, like magazine formats with shorter pieces and whatnot. Everything became long form serialized narrative, and that means that there's no market for the hour long doc, the 20 minute doc, or there is, but that market is literally just This American Life, right, and a few other places, right?

And so it just to me felt like this opportunity to be able to like, create a home for distributing audio documentary of various shapes and sizes, right, and, and in a really sustainable way, and I think we're seeing that across the industry. I think you're seeing this with the growth of Wondery Plus, which is a very big business. You're seeing it with a real focus on the binge at Sony, right?

And like, I think similarly we're gonna see that, I mean you, you know, This American Life just launched its channel, The Daily, or New York Times launched its channel, so, to me, like, the channel products on Apple is new, right? And it is, like, I mean, you know, you'll, you're, you're subscribed to Selects, I will publish a new show on Selects in the next couple weeks, right, and you won't get a new notice, you won't get a notification, because you're not subscribed to the show yet, like, the whole ecosystem is built around shows, right, but that's why it's so hard to find new things. Because every choice is between one and 800, 000 podcasts or whatever, right, and it's like so the hope is that if we can if we can help pioneer this idea of a channel and that product can help grow alongside it like that'll open up a market for a variety of types of docs, right?

Things that don't need to be huge out of pocket spends for eight to ten episodes for something that should have just been an hour to begin with, right? Or right, like, and, and the subscription value is so much more like, it's just so much less diluted than CPM value. Right? And so, you know, we're offering since Selects at 2. 99 a month, yeah I think it's like 30 bucks for a year. If we can get to a thousand subscribers, the whole project is sustainable. We're able to like pay, like we're, we're not there. We're not even close to that, right?

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Ben Riskin: It just gives, it's an example of like, you know, if we were to get to 10, 000 subscribers, we could be commissioning work. We can be, there's a lot of different things we can do. And so, but like, that's a much more realistic audience size than what we need to make money on a documentary and a CPM based ads, right? Like 10, 000 subscribers is significantly more valuable than 50, 000 listeners like right on like a CPM public, like, right?

And it's a little bit of walking that line, you know, everything we're featuring on Selects can be found online. It's not exclusive. It's just a lot of this stuff is buried in web archives and we're trying to make it interesting and available for you to take out and listen the way you listen to anything else.

Jeff Umbro: I think it's a brilliant idea and I hope it works because I hope a hundred people do the same thing. This is essentially the best American anthology that comes out every year. And that's cool. I still buy those every year because I love reading like the, the cooking narratives or the short stories. This is the kind of thing that for the first time in a long time, I'm seeing something that is like a somewhat unique idea and it's really refreshing.

So I wish you all the luck. Everyone listening should go subscribe to Selects. It is only 30 bucks a year. I just did it last night. Well, thank you, Ben. This has been really fun.

Ben Riskin: I appreciate the opportunity. It was really great.

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 Twitter @JeffUmbro. 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 social platforms @podglomerate or @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, and Annabella Pena. And a special thank you to Dan Christo and Tiffany Dean. Thank you for listening and I'll catch you all in two weeks.