The podcast business is booming, but few are making money

It's similar to blogging, where are a countless blogs, but almost none make any money. But at least blog posts are discoverable via search and are often evergreen.

Almost nobody searches for podcast episodes. Hell, they're hard to even link to effectively on the web, because when you're browsing the web, you're typically not in podcast listening mode, so you're unlikely to click links to a podcast episode.

IMO ads are the wrong business model for most podcasts. Unless you're very early to your niche, it's just too difficult to get to the size where the ad revenue is meaningful.

If you really want to make money from your podcast audience, I'd recommend cultivating a smaller but higher quality audience, building a solid reputation with them, and translating that into…

• capital for investments (e.g. Shaan Puri raising a $3M fund from his podcast audience)
• more clients for your consulting or advising business, or better job offers
• expanding your network, finding new partners
• funneling people into a paid community or something else with very high ARPU

Same can be said about startups, Indie Hackers or gladiators surviving in the arena 2000 years ago... The pareto distribution applies to success in creative and high risk endeavors: at least 80% will have next to nothing and less than 20% will be very successful.

Thanks, @rosiesherry. Good article.