How he did it: Interview with James Cridland, founder of Podnews.net

The edited transcript: 

Cromer: So, I have been deconstructing your website and your revenue model, and it’s very different from what our members, typically niche publishers, do. Most came from traditional media, such as magazines, writers, etc. 

I  noticed that you came out of radio with a technology background. 

So, to start, can you tell us about your background as a technologist and a radio guy before you created this sort of stripped-down media that works really well as a business model? 

Cridland: Yeah, my background is radio, but radio from an editorial point of view and a technology point of view.  I was a radio presenter a long time ago on the end of a microphone and enjoyed doing that for quite some time.

Then I moved into helping radio stations understand what the future was in terms of new technology and new platforms.

Cromer: I noticed that your website is stripped down and your newsletter is curated.

Cridland: I should start by saying what, the thought process is behind why podnews.net looks the way it does. 

Back in 2017, I was at a radio conference, chatting to a friend of mine, and he was saying, say James, where do you get your news about the podcast industry?

And I said, oh, that’s interesting. I don’t think there is anything. He said perhaps there should be, and nodded in a very sage way and walked away. And I thought, ah maybe that’s a plan. But what I was very keen to avoid is what I think are the mistakes of legacy media.

That is trying to take something, a full newspaper or magazine, and put that on onto the internet.

 In most cases, you don’t need to do that. In most cases, you need to link; that’s the whole benefit of the internet; you need to link to the news already out there. As somebody who helps people navigate this particular industry, your job is to point to all of the news already out there.

I couldn’t see a business model in the typical world of I get a press release in, I then rewrite that press release, maybe add a little bit of color, and do that 30 times, and and plaster ad banners all over those and hope people visit the website.

I think that’s one of the mistakes that quite a few companies have made. 

So instead, I very much focused on workflow – on how can I produce something which is quick to scan through, where people can click through and find more information if they want to.

The product is the curated newsletter

Cridland: I think possibly the big difference between the Podnews.net’s website and other websites for other media is that I don’t want people actually visiting the website. The website is not what I do. The newsletter is why I’m there, which is why the front page you noted doesn’t really have any news on it.

It certainly doesn’t above the fold, because the thing I want you to do is to sign up to that newsletter. Because without going to advertisers and saying, I’ve got 32,400 people who get that newsletter every single da.  I have a much harder job in terms of in terms of selling that. 

Everything is driven around getting more subscribers to the newsletter. It’s free, but more subscribers to that newsletter, because that is the business model that I have found out works well in terms of numbers. 

It is way better than a website where if you’re a reader, you have to remember to come visit every day.

Push that information out. Make that information available. as glanceable as possible. 

One of the things that I used to do a lot and still do a little bit is to say how long it’ll take you to read this week’s or today’s edition. So you should see in your email inbox that this’ll take you 2 minutes or 4 minutes. Specifically, and that’s completely automated, but it’s specifically to hammer the point that this is a fast glimpse at the industry. 

You can, of course, deep dive more if you want to. But everything is specifically built for that newsletter to come out and for it to be as short and as meaningful as possible.

Cromer: Okay. So, let’s talk about the newsletter because that’s where I started with this. It’s these newsletter models rather than website models. And yours is the, really the quintessential example of that. So given that the newsletter is the content product and you’re selling advertising, What is your primary advertising product, and who sells it? 

Cridland:  Revenue from podnews.net comes in from three different directions.

One of them is the supporters so the supporters are at the bottom of the newsletter and it’s a logo and that’s all you get. And you can be a gold supporter or a silver supporter which is really just a badge for you to show off in terms of that.

And so supporters are a third of all of the revenue that comes into the company. 

Cromer: Is that still through Patreon? 

Cridland: Yeah,   That’s still through Patreon.  I did build my own one of those and it turned out that people trusted the Patreon brand far more than they trusted this random brand from somebody that, that they’d never met. And I think that there’s quite a lot to be said for that. 

So yes, so the majority of that comes in through Patreon.I guess for two reasons. Firstly, because it’s there and it works. Secondly, because of something which is a monthly amount of money that automatically comes out every month from a credit card, you don’t have to go back to a client every single month and saying, are you going to be able to renew for next month?

None of that kind of happens. And I suspect quite a lot of these supporters are people who. Every month when they look at their credit card statement and they see that there’s a small amount of money that’s gone to pod news go, Oh yeah, I should get around to cancelling that at some point.

And they never do. So I have this sort of belief that monthly recurring revenue is a really important thing. 

A third of it comes from the classified advertising which we’ve talked about, which is self-serve.

And then a third of it comes from sponsorships. You can sponsor can be the title sponsor. Or you can sponsor individual sections within the newsletter if you like to. One of the things that I’ve done with the title sponsor is that the the title sponsor gets both advertising, obviously at the top of every single newsletter during that month, but they also get advertising in the podcast version as well.

 One of the things that a title sponsor gets is when I send the newsletter, the podcast doesn’t get sent from Podnews.net right now.

It’ll get sent from podnews.net “with smart money.”  “Happy hour smart money”…” Happy hour”  is our sponsor for this month. So you even get to see that brand name in the inbox of your email, regardless of whether or not you even open that day’s newsletter so that there’s clearly additional value for that brand to be in yourinbox and visible there as well.

So those are the three and they are pretty well third, third in terms of the revenue that that comes in. 

Cromer: You’ve also launched a speakers directory. Is that recent? 

Cridland: Yeah, so there’s a directory of different people in the industry. Yeah, so everything from individual companies involved in everything from podcast hosting to ad sales to production studios and so on.

Really the reason, part of the reason to do that is that each one of those companies will appear in things like Google search and things like that, but the pages within the pod news directory also contain all of the news that we have covered over that particular company. 

So by going to the page for Blueberry, which is a podcast host, you can very quickly see all of the stories that we have covered about that particular company.

So again, it’s pulling you back to the newsletter at every single every single opportunity.

Cromer: And you have acquired Podcast Business Journal. Yes. So tell me how that came down? 

Cridland: Yeah, so I’ve known Eric Rhodes, who has run that business for a long time. But certainly, as an outsider looking in, Podcast Business Journal was the heritage, legacy media way of running a service.

I believe that’s not necessarily a sustainable business model. But it was certainly something that, they ran for a number of years and was very successful for them. I think they were keen to get out for personal reasons because I think Ed wanted something else to do with his life.

But I looked at that, and I thought there was an opportunity here. First, to be candid, of taking a competitor out of the market, but also to grab the readership of that and turn that into a weekly newsletter which is specifically focused on the business side of podcasting. 

One of the biggest reasons people unsubscribe from the Podnews.net newsletter is that they get too many emails. They get emails every single day, and they can’t handle them.

So having a weekly digest of information, which is essentially what the podcast business journal is. Having a curated weekly digest is useful to keep people within the family, to keep people reading the news that we generate and allowing, people to still be connected to that.

So the podcast Business Journal is essentially the current business news from U.S. podcast companies. So I take all of the international stuff away. There is an interview in there every week as well from a from a long form podcast that we put together called the PodNews Weekly Review.

And so we transcribe an interview from that every week and there’s some stock price information as well. And that’s essentially what the podcast business journal is. and it’s wonderful having. 

All of the original archive and all of that data are still on that website. It’s pretty hidden away, but it’s available to Google’s SEO and everything else. And so, one of the things I feel quite strongly about is never deleting anything. Because why would you do that? And so, with a couple of exceptions, all of the data from Streamline’s ownership of that title is still there.

I think I was most interested when I bought it because of the overlap between podcast business journal readers and Podnews.net readers. And there wasn’t too much, to be honest, which was interesting.

Cromer: I thought Podnews.net would appeal more to creators. 

Cridland: Podnews.net is a bit wider in terms of in terms of audience. I call the audience serious podcasters. So they might be creators. They might be people like me in a home office making a podcast or two every week and wanting to get better at that. 

They might be in the business. So they may be working with larger podcast companies or broadcasters, PRS,  BBC, ABC and so on. They might be working in the ad field or the hosting company’s side of it as well. So it’s a good mix. But all of them have one thing in common, which is that they are serious podcasters.

They are in it for a reason. Their reason is to get better at that, earn more money, as most people want to, or raise their influence, which is quite different from the podcast business journal, which is very much focused on companies, particularly around the advertising side of the industry.

Cromer: So now, I poked around on your website. All I could see there from the Podcast Business Journal was the list of podcasts. Does that have a subscription-based model? 

Cridland: No, so the Podcast Business Journal, the one thing that we don’t do is we don’t publish the newsletter on there every week, because the newsletter is essentially, a compilation of news from the PodNews.net website anyway, and so therefore there wouldn’t be an awful lot of point to it.

 But there’s no subscription model there. It has the same job as the newsletter, and goes to 10, 000 people in this particular case.

The benefit, of course, for us from a commercial point of view is that there are obvious synergies in terms of, campaigns across both titles. And we’ve had, companies like Spotify, like the Webby Awards and various others using both of th  audiences that we have to make sure that they get their messages across.

A daily newsletter business in one hour a day?

Cromer:  Guy Kasaka told me that you don’t spend a long time doing the newsletter – I think he mentioned an hour a day that got my attention  – so I’m wondering, in the sort of the one-page newsletter miracle model, how do you curate it? 

I mean I’ve  tried it. And I spent eight hours curating one page.  I have no idea how to do that in a manageable way if you’re doing other things with your time.

Cridland: I’m still a radio consultant for a variety of radio companies across the world and  also, I do an awful lot of Public speaking, and so therefore I still have to do this daily and squeeze it in somehow. 

So therefore, working on the workflow, making sure that it is possible to put this together in just an hour a day if I need to –  which isn’t something that I normally do, but if it’s possible – then that means that I can make this a sustainable business, 

Cromer: But how do you do it? I start in the morning very early. I read through all the things I am checking, and I can’t get them out in an hour or so.

Cridland: Yes. An hour is pushing it. And the hour, by the way, also includes a podcast version of this. If you prefer to listen rather than to read, then there’s a podcast version that has a good revenue model behind it.

But how do I do it? I have to say, for the first year, it was quite hard. I needed about four or five pieces of news a for the classified advertising to work, so I find it actually quite difficult to find that amount of news for the first year or so.  

Quite a lot of it is now inbound, people emailing stories in. One of my competitors recently folded a weekly newsletter called HotPod, which contained an awful lot of podcasting news. So I’m getting targeted by PR companies even more,  which is lovely.

And also I do an awful lot of reading of RSS. Feeds, Google alerts, all of those sorts of things, really spotting some of the stories that won’t necessarily get PR’d, but stories that are still very important for the industry. 

We’re in a different position now. I think this is partially because the industry has grown, and there’s an awful lot more news, and we have an awful lot more incoming emails daily.

So therefore the job now is a case of paring down the information. 

The only reason there’s a self-serve press release section on the website is for me to link to a press release from the newsletter because I get sent a lot. and how do you link to a press release if it’s not on the internet? So that’s the first reason. 

Cromer: I’ve been delving into how local media are using AI, and very little is generative, but I know there’s some software you can put it on your browser, go to a link, and it will capture the link, and put a summary into a newsletter. Then all you have to do is edit.

Have you experimented with that? Or do you write everything into your newsletter or Google Docs?  What is the process for getting from your reading to this daily newsletter? 

Cridland: I write pretty well everything as if it were just a text document. The software I use is called IA Writer.

But it allows me to very quickly write up the information and add links to it. It uses a method of writing called Markdown, which essentially just means that it’s everything is done in text. You don’t have to move the mouse around and click on buttons to add a link and all that stuff.

So that makes life really easy. But because I’m quite technically savvy, I’ve spent quite a lot of time working out shortcuts of ways that I can do certain things. 

For example, there is a section in the newsletter, which is called Podcast News, which is news about podcasts rather than about the industry.

And that section has a beautiful thumbnail image of the particular podcast, and a link to the podcast itself, and a link to listen to a trailer, and all of this information. And literally, that is just my code doing that. As soon as it recognizes that I’ve written about a podcast, it goes off and grabs the the image, it goes off and grabs, the trailer audio and everything else.

So it’s all completely automatic. So I’ve spent a long time making tools that save me time and effort so that I can concentrate on the creativity part, and cut down on the drudgery of pressing any additional button. 

Cromer: And I’m assuming from what you’ve just told me that if I place a classified ad and pay for it, it will wind up on your newsletter without you cutting and pasting.. Is that correct? 

Cridland: Yeah, indeed. Indeed, yeah. So there’s a few things there.

 I do mean to make that a bit more self-service because that would certainly help. 

There is also a jobs board and an events board where, which is self-service service, which people can go and leave open positions or or events.

At the moment they’re not monetized because I feel that’s useful content. And if I make it easier for people to contact me with content, then then we all win. From my point of view, that’s how those bits work. 

But yeah, the classified section is interesting. I’ve run newsletters in the past for the radio industry andI learned a couple of things from that. One thing is that it’s really hard to monetize a weekly newsletter or a monthly newsletter efficiently because there isn’t actually enough inventory to go out and and sell. 

It all of a sudden changes if you’re selling a daily thing.

If you’re selling something that is available Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, that’s five times the amount of money that you can make if you’re only coming out on a Friday. So on a very basic level, daily was important for this. But I looked at the classified section, and I thought to myself okay, I should probably do a classified system.

I don’t suppose anybody will buy any classified ads. I’m sure it’s a complete waste of time. So I will set myself a goal, and the goal was to write the entire classified ad system in a day. 

And I thought to myself, if I can do that, that I haven’t wasted too much time in something that inevitably nobody will buy. So I spent a day.  The morning was spent writing the user registration system, and the afternoon was spent writing the classified ad system. 

And the way it works, by the way, is it that the pricing goes up depending on how many people have already bought that particular day,  because I wanted to welcome as many people as I possibly could into the classified system.

So it starts very cheaply. But it very quickly gets much more expensive because I don’t want more than six ads in there a day. Six is pushing it, and the sixth is quite expensive. So I hit on that idea. I wrote the entire thing in a day. Then I went to sleep.

The benefit of being in Australia, where I am, is that you lot are awake while I’m asleep. So I woke up the next morning to see that there was already an order for Classified Advertising for $500. Which was a great surprise to me.

And I thought to myself.  I should probably spend some time making this look better.

But yes, I’m very lucky that I have that technical background and could quickly whip something up, which vaguely worked. And I’ve made many additions to it since. 

Cromer: For the rest of us who now wish we had done something different with our lives, what software are you writing in?

Are you just doing JavaScript, or WordPress? 

Cridland: Yeah, so I’m writing in PHP which is a computer language that WordPress uses. There’s bits of JavaScript in there as well. So yeah, I mean it’s it’s not the best coding, but it works.

Cromer: The rest of us, the whole media industry really, has really been remiss in getting IT partners or even robust, development teams. We’ve outsourced it to third party companies, and get what we get. 

Now I’ve developed software, but I’m probably the worst project manager. Ever.  I do my best, but I can tell it’s not my forte because I have no idea what people are doing, so I can’t help them, and I’m using Upwork. I can’t afford to hire somebody.

If you have a WordPress site, because I really do think that automating workflow and self-serve is critical for niche media, a lot of the models are different. Some niche media have podcasts,  somebodyelse has a research database, or a credential course in insurance, alll of which require different types of software.

And then every time you use a third-party software, it’s very difficult to integrate. 

If you’re on a simple WordPress site and you want to develop it, what would be your recommendation to somebody who wants to at least try to create some self-serve entry and workflow automation?

Would you start with a plug-in, and then modify that?  Would you go to Upwork? Would you go to a Python meetup in your neighborhood? 

 

Cridland (laughter): I guess I’m one of these people that code for enjoyment, and so, therefore, that’s a slightly different way of doing things.

And quite often, I will be there going, it would be cool if I could do this. 

So, for a long time I didn’t even bother with nice-looking systems, I was just using a very clunky tool.

Otherwise, if I was starting up, I would absolutely use something like WordPress, which has a lot of plug-ins, and a lot of e-commerce plug-ins make a lot of sense and there will be classified ad systems that are built into that. There will be many other tools which are available there. I ended up coding everything myself because I’m like that.

Cromer: you’ve been doing this for a number of years a list of 32,000. is huge. I’m not going to, publish this part. I hope, but I started this company like six months ago and I have 5,000 and it was just, really difficult to do it.

Cridland: 5,000 is a great number in six months. I didn’t get to 5,000 in six months. 

Cromer: Yeah. well, trust me, nobody wants to do what I did because it was extraordinarily painful. So for people that are really trying to build their own audience for email what are your top audience-building tactics? 

Are you using paid social media? Where on your list of things is your “you must do this, add a bit of that”? 

Cridland: So if you are a newsletter for the Blue widget industry, then there will be a Blue Widget Conference and you should the first thing that you should do is go make friends with the Blue Widget Conference.

Give them tons of promotion in your newsletter and in return ask for a little checkbox. 

For the Blue Widget Conference, would you like Blue Widget News every day into your inbox? That’s what I’ve done with a number of different podcast conferences. And so that is a very easy and quick way of growing your list.

You need to be a certain size before doing that, but partnering with a conference is a super easy way. I’ve discovered that you just need to be careful of how you welcome those people in. But most people are happy with it.  I think one of the conferences that I partnered with last year I did a check this year and 92 percent of those people were still subscribed and still getting that newsletter.

So you can see how useful it was to them and how much of a good fit it was. So I would definitely have a look at that. 

Paid advertising I find difficult because there’s so much waste. It’s very difficult to make sure, even from a point of view of seriously trying to get in front of those people is very difficult in terms of paid advertising.So I’ve typically not done too much of that. 

A lot of it is then around conference speaking which is an important side, being seen out there, being seen in the community playing in the communities online, so making sure that you are there.

In my case, making sure that you are there and visible and helping people and not just selling your stuff.

I think the big things are, go to where the people are. And if people are going to a big conference or a big event, then you should absolutely be there. If there are a bunch of smaller events going on are the ways that you can get your name with those smaller events, either by turning up or by sponsoring something/ Yeah, so that, so I’ve grown in a variety of different ways. 

I would also say, and this is, and this sounds a little bit trite or self-congratulatory, but I would also say write good stuff.

That’s probably an important thing too, because if you’re not writing good stuff, nobody’s going to subscribe anyway. 

And so I was very lucky to get a few quite big stories early on which I was able to make the most out of and get some PR for, and that was and that was hugely helpful in terms of growth.

Cromer: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. I still think 32,000  is a  huge number. 

Cridland: I do, too. I do wonder how many of those serious podcasters there are. I’m on 32, 400 at the moment. How many people are there in the podcast industry? Are there 50, 000, in which case I’m nearly saturated because there will be people who don’t like what I do.

Or are there 500, 000? I genuinely don’t know. And I’m fascinated to see, what the deal is there.

Should Niche Media be podcasting and why? 

Cromer:  I think that brings me to my next question.  One of the interesting things in terms of podcasting was that some niche publishers who are members are doing podcasting, but one of them who is a really brilliant publisher that does everything right, says that big scale podcasting is over and podcasting is only for promotional purposes.

Are there other revenue opportunities that you see? 

Cridland: Yeah, I think, podcasting to an extent isn’t any different to a newsletter or any different to a printed magazine in that the idea is that  it reaches that niche audience.  A magazine about about air conditioning units, for example, isn’t going to reach a whole lot of people, but it will reach the people who are buying air conditioning units, and so I think from that point of view, you can see the being real opportunities in that niche. And there’s no reason why you couldn’t produce a podcast for that as well. 

And in fact, there is someone that is producing. A really successful podcast about air conditioning units and he does very successfully out of it. He has made that into his, his job and does that really well.

There’s a show which I’ve I covered about a month or so I was going to say a month or so ago only a fortnight ago, a show called Horses in the Morning and it’s it’s a daily podcast and it’s for people who have horses. Really is as simple as that. And that does,again, tremendously, they’re on their 300th episode they earn, easily earn enough money to live from it to run a business but they also give prizes away and attract advertisers and all that kind of stuff.

So I think really the secret is in the niche. Now, there, there are two niches here. There’s a niche of air conditioning units or people with horses. But there’s also a niche of people who live in the area. 

And I think local, properly local, hyper local stuff is also really important as well. And I’m surprised given the gaps in the market now from, from many newspapers that have either folded, if you’ll pardon the pun, or, or are just a shadow of their former selves, I’m really surprised that there aren’t more people jumping into the local area and seeing what you can do there.

I have a great friend who, Runs a local podcast for a town in the UK, which has 10, 000 people who live there and uses a lot of voluntary help to do that. But it’s incredibly successful, as a way of sharing news and information. And I’m sure that there are more that more things to do there.

On equipment to use

Cromer: So you’ve got your earphones on. I’m assuming you have a lovely microphone that makes your voice sound wonderful. 

So if people are working off a laptop or an iPad, does it really make that much of a difference? What would you suggest for a pared down podcast for somebody that’s working out of their home on a Mac?

Cridland: With a microphone and it will sound closer and a bit better from that point of view. And microphones are relatively inexpensive.  Microphones like the one that I’m using is completely overkill, you can get a decent microphone for, a hundred dollars or so.

But really at the end of the day, the thing that works for podcasts, is the content. Is what is actually in the show. There’s a reason why AM radio is still actually quite popular. And that reason isn’t anything to do with the audio quality which is not particularly great. It’s the content. 

You don’t necessarily have to rush out and, grab a fancy microphone, but I mean it certainly helps and things. The secret is probably making sure that the podcast is nice to listen to, and that the right questions have been used and the questions that didn’t really go anywhere have been edited out. 

There are so many tools to play around with. One tool to have a look at is a tool called Descript, which allows you to do is it will edit an audio interview like this one, from text. 

Then you just highlight the words and you press the delete button and the audio edits itself. Super easy thing to do. And that is democratizing the production of this stuff as much as possible.

It’ll remove the ums and the errs if you think that’s important.  Descript itself has a thing called studio sound, which will, everybody’s microphones and make everybody sound as good as they possibly can. 

I’ve been on a few shows that where the host doesn’t have a microphone at all, but after it’s been through Descript, and they’ve used all of the tools there, then it sounded absolutely fine.

Cromer:  And, if this was posted on YouTube would you call that a podcast? 

Cridland: Now there’s a there’s a whole half-hour conversation. There have always been conversations haven’t there about what is a podcast?

What is a newspaper? I used to joke that the newspaper industry were was actually a set of operators of printing presses trying to find out excuses why their printing presses should still be being used, because they were so terrified of what the internet could actually bring them.

So I think yeah I personally think if you’re being very technical that YouTube isn’t really a podcast. But there are lots of people that think that they’re consuming podcasts on YouTube and who am I to tell them that they’re not?

I just don’t think that it is a good steward of the future of the industry.

 Cromer: You certainly don’t want to tell Ezra Klein.

Cridland: But, the other thing that I would say is that the beauty of an audio podcast, is that it’s just audio. And you don’t have to worry about turning the lights on and turning the, and dressing up and everything else.

You can just do it. And what worries me slightly is people being told that, oh, you need video to succeed as a podcast these days. And being put off because they don’t want to be in front of a camera. They don’t want to have to, cut their hair every week and make sure that, all of their makeup’s on and everything else.

They just want to put content out there. 

And if there’s one thing that I’ve tried to do all the way through the Podnews thing and other things that I’ve been working on is focusing on the workflow.

I am focusing  on the things that are good and fun and creative to do. So anything that you can get away with getting rid of, another little drudgery and boring thing, even if it’s just an extra button press, for example, then, doing that is a good plan. 

Cromer: thank you. I’ve really enjoyed this time that we spent And I look forward to speaking with you again.

Cridland:  Yeah, indeed. Really good to speak. I’ll speak soon Okay. Cheers then.