How This Podcast Makes $18M a Year

In episode #2893, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the financial success of popular podcasts, the ongoing debate about remote versus in-office work, the importance of performance metrics, Amazon's advertising strategies, Google's ranking algorithms, the significance of product quality, and the benefits of using Instagram's trial reels for content creation. Don’t forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube! Check out more of Eric’s content (Leveling UP YT) and Neil’s videos (Neil Patel YT) TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: (00:00) The Financial Power of Podcasts (03:13) The Remote Work Debate (06:04) Performance Metrics in the Workplace (08:55) Amazon's Advertising Dominance (12:09) Google's Ranking Algorithms (15:04) The Importance of Product Quality (18:43) That’s it for today! Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more! Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric’s ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel X @ericosiu

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:38Speaker 01

  Uh, sure.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  So Scott Galaway's podcast, Make 18 Million in Revenue a Year. So basically, he has the Prof G podcast, which makes $6 million. Basically, $25,000 per episode. And he has Pivot, which he does with Kara Swisher, who used to be a reporter for, um...

• 0:54Speaker 01

  All Things Digital.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, All Things Digital, you're right. With Kara Swisher, so that makes $10 million a year, that's 100K per episode. And then he has another one called Raging Moderates with Jessica Tarlov. That one does $2 million a year, that's 20K per episode. So he shared the podcast revenue data on Prof G. And I think he said he'd love to do, like, you see these big deals happening, right? You saw the Rogan deal was a couple hundred million dollars. Call Her Daddy was 80 million or 125 million, something like that.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Rogan was, was that for one year or multiple years?

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Um, I don't know. You can look it up.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Joe Rogan.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  I think, um, he's certainly saying that

• 1:32Speaker 00

  he's open to, I think CNN is a suitor.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Uh, Joe Rogan, $215 million, four-year deal.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's a good chunk of money, right? But I think, um, so their deal with Vox is coming up this year, and then their CNN's like a potential suitor. Cause Swisher's already on air, on on air TV contributor. This is interesting, because I think podcasts are becoming more and more valuable, and we're seeing a lot more of these deals happen. And that's exciting, so.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  What's the other one called? Call Your Daddy?

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Call, no, dude, you keep saying Call Your Daddy, dude, because you, Call Her Daddy.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  I don't know, dude. Call Her Daddy, Spotify deal.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  85 or 125?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Uh, 60 million, three-year deal.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Wow, I was wrong.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  A previous deal, new deal is 100 to 125 million with Cyrus XM three-year deal. There you go. Old one was 20 million a year and new deal is call it roughly 40 million ish a year on the high.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  I actually like the Prof G podcast because he talks about business and so it just goes to like there is an angle there. It's wide TAM stuff where he talks about the economy and everything and he gives his opinions. And so I think, I think there's a bright future for podcasts. I think we're still very much getting started right now.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think podcasting is gonna boom. I think people are consuming it as a new format instead of television.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Who knows? Maybe in the next cycle, we'll have a, we'll have the presidential candidates on this podcast. Who knows?

• 2:53Speaker 01

  I doubt that. I'll make you a bet on that one.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  Well, not if I bring them to leveling up and then publish it here that it counts.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  I still don't think they're gonna end up coming on this podcast.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  You never know if it becomes really big. By the way, oh, oh, this one's fantastic. Okay.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  We have too much of a niche audience.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  We do. But let me tell you this. Have you seen the SaaS benchmark report? So if I were to ask you, which teams grow faster, in-office teams grow faster or remote teams grow faster?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Grow faster in headcount or grow faster in driving results and revenue?

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Median year-over-year growth rate.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  For what? Income?

• 3:32Speaker 00

  On, on basically, it's called revenue.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  For the company?

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  In-house?

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. So how much more do you think it grows?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  60%?

• 3:43Speaker 00

  A little less than that. So, okay. 50% median year-over-year growth rate for in-office and then 39% for remote. And so this was, I was just talking with my CTO yesterday, we're talking about, he showed me this slide. I was like, oh, this is interesting. These are 2024 SaaS benchmark reports. So this is just for SaaS companies. And it says default in-office teams grow faster than remote. And so there's been, I've been trolling LinkedIn with all these like remote posts and then it just gets people so pissed off, right? And I'm like, oh, maybe I found my niche. Maybe on LinkedIn, I'm just the remote work guy, right? But anyway.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  No, no, you're the guy who trolls the remote work.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, we're remote first, right? So like, people think I'm like really against it. We just, in LA, we have like a pocket of people that were just in office. But this is another data point here, because Amazon's mandating its full-time RTO, right? Even though they have, they hit some snags, and maybe they're gonna delay till May. I saw a survey this morning. Ninety-one percent, that mandate out of five stars, it has like a 1.2. Like, people are really pissed off, right? Ninety-one percent of people are really unhappy about it. But when you see this, like, okay, you just see more and more data points. Okay, 70% of leaders are, Forbes reported this, Morning Brew reported this, saying that most people are gonna be coming back. Okay? And then you have this one here saying that, you know, in-office grows faster.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Like, it becomes harder and harder to say that, you know, people are not coming back. I just think most people are gonna be coming back, unless you're a high performer.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  So what is Amazon doing when people have moved to a lot of different states and countries?

• 5:20Speaker 00

  I think you're just coming back to a hub. I haven't read fully on it, but I think you're just gonna, you're either gonna come back to a hub, yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Or you just lose your job.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Or you're gonna lose your job, which I don't think they care about either. Unless you're a high performer, then they'll probably make some concessions and say, hey, you can work remotely. But if you're not a high performer, they're probably okay losing you.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe that.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I don't think it's, like, by the way, both of our companies are remote first. We're not saying we don't support remote. In fact, I love remote.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  But I just think most people are gonna have to come back, because unfortunately, most people aren't high performers.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Most, it's not even about the high performance. I do agree with you on that statement, but it's about, when you look at any big organization, you only have so many experienced employees that are at the top. Majority of your workforce is gonna be less experienced, and they're not gonna be as great as your A players or your executives at the top. If you want all your B and C and D players and being a D player doesn't mean you're bad. A lot of times it could just be you're green and you're new and you have a lot to learn. They're not going to start improving the grade that they're at unless they're around other amazing employees. And that's just not going to happen in a remote first environment. While everyone is in person, people learn so much faster and they grow faster as well.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've noticed that people in their mid twenties or so, they want to be in the office, at least with us. The people that are older, let's say we're older, right? You've you've paid your dues, you're okay working from home. So I think it just depends on, you know, that's an interesting way, that's an interesting way that you think about the D players. As someone that's still learning, I think about an A player, like a D player is just a low performer to me. An A player, even if you're really green, is someone that is doing really well in their current state right now, right? So you gotta look at it, we kind of look at it a little differently.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, I look at as a player as, for me at least, someone who can bring a lot of revenue. Someone who can manage, someone who can execute and get their hands dirty. You don't have to worry about them, they go solve problems and they figure out just ways to improve the business and just generate more revenue.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Remember what, did I tell you what Brian Chesky said about A players versus B and C players?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Okay, so basically Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said this. An A player is someone that is working six months ahead and they're just telling you what they're doing. Okay, remember that? And then the B player is someone that is doing something in the now and they need, they need some direction, okay? A C player is someone that is like, they're doing something that they should have done six months ago and it's like, what are you doing? Right, you should have done that earlier. And so that, those, I think that's a really good way of describing it. And I, here's the thing, next five, 10 years again, we're talking about these McKinsey says 70% of work is going to be done by AI agents. Like, I think Amazon, now that Jeff Bezos is back, he's like working, he said he's working harder than he's ever worked. I don't know if you watched that interview, you watched it, right?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  He's in, what do you think he's saying? He's like. Well, he, all he's focused on is what, what, what right now in Amazon, AI.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yes. And by the way, with people who don't want to come back to the workplace, he's the no problem. They'll replace him with AI and save money and not have to pay severance.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so, you know, you can call him like a greedy, greedy, whatever, but like at the end of the day, he's just doing what's efficient for his business. So.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's just doing what's best for his pocketbook and his shareholders' pocketbook.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  So we got a couple more that we need to do.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  So let's talk about Amazon. Did you know that the, the world's largest advertiser is spending $20.3 billion a year on ads and promotions?

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Procter and Gamble?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  No, Amazon is.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Oh, Amazon's spending, oh.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Amazon is spending more money on advertising and promotion than anyone else.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  No, okay, go on.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  This is according to ad age.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Think about how ridiculous that is. We all know about like Procter and Gamble and Unilever and you know, the Coca Colas or the car companies who spend an arm and a leg, but Amazon has been the largest advertiser, according to ad age, I believe, three years in a row.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Wow. Well, I think the, and the thing is, people talk about Microsoft, they talk about Nvidia, they talk about Google, but Amazon is still so powerful. Um, I mean, I can't stop, I don't know about you.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  I can't stop ordering. So.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  And the interesting part, when I talk to companies, especially when they're looking to market on Amazon, like, man, I can't give them the 15%. This is a rip off. That's expensive. I'm like, you know how much money they spend to acquire a customer so you can generate sales? I'm like, if you want these sales on your website, you gotta spend money on marketing and ads and team members to help you out with this stuff. Sure, on Amazon, you're having some team members and agencies maybe help you out, but Amazon is spending an arm and a leg to attract those customers to buy your product.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  They give you distribution.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yes. And people forget that. They're just like, oh, Amazon's greedy. They just take a big chunk. Well, no, they spent an arm and a leg on marketing to get you that sale.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Distribution's king. I mean, the, the thing is this, right? I think, I see a lot of developers on, on Twitter now talking about how coding is becoming more and more commoditized. I don't think it's going to become completely commoditized, but. Everything points back to you gotta have the attention, right? And also, what we talked about earlier in today's recording, we talked about, okay, search is evolving. All these things are evolving. Attention's evolving. You have to keep adapting your game. Because the meta, in gaming, we talked about the meta, right? Which is the most optimal way to play at the time. The meta often changes. The rules often change, which is why when you think about games like StarCraft, for example, strategy game, they often patch things up and to kind of change things up for, you know, certain, like if a certain character is too powerful or whatever, they gotta balance it out, right?

• 10:44Speaker 00

  So that the meta is changing and you have to adapt as a marketer or else you're gonna be behind. Speaking of adapting, let's talk about this Google exploit that was discovered that revealed 2,000 plus classifiers for click probability, site quality, consensus and more. So, the person that, um, that wrote this, okay, it's Mark Williams Cook. That's his name. So I was completely off. But this tweet was from GoFish Chris. He works at GoFish Digital, I think. So, this is a 36 million, 36 minute video. I would recommend that you just search for this. Type "Google exploit facts for your model" and you should be able to find it. So, go ahead.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Did you read the Search Engine Land article on it as well?

• 11:28Speaker 00

  I didn't. Why don't you go with that? Cause you probably, it probably is more condensed. I have a lot of takeaways here, which I'll go through, but you go through that first.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Well, it's not pulling up for me, cause I'm terrible at copying and pasting on this iPad.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  But, I got it. All right. So, the exploit reveals how Google, uh, how and why Google ranks a website.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  There's query classifications. Google classified nearly all queries into eight refined query semantic classes. Short fact, booles, short for Boolean, yes or no questions. Other, instruction, definition, reason, comparison and consequence. Like consequences like your money, your life, right? Or YMYO, which is the same thing. Um, and then they give different scores for things like brand visibility, user interactions, anchor text relevance around the web, uh, click probability. And this was the interesting one, and this is what I want to talk. Says, "Google doesn't use click-through rate directly in ranking. However, it appeared Google used click probability for every organic result."

• 12:32Speaker 01

  I actually disagree with that one right there, because we've seen studies posted in the past. I don't know if you recall Rand Fishkin doing the one on best steak. I believe it was the keyword best steak. Had everyone go Google, click on the second result instead of the first result, or click on the first result, click the back button really quickly, and then go to the second result and then, or third result was one of them, and then hover around. That result just shot up for, it was, I think the keyword was best steak or something like that.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  He addressed that in the video. I just forgot what he said, but I just remember he addressed it.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  What did he?

• 13:04Speaker 00

  I don't remember. Yeah. I just remember he addressed it. So, I, yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  But, you know, and we're seeing click-through rate data really affect rankings. I get pitched, no joke, all the time from people like, "Look at this bot that I created." There was a company of the UK that showed me this, and I've known about this for years, but that showed me this, and they're like, "Look at the software we built, and look at all these people we got all around the world." And they had a database of like, tens of thousands of people, no joke, with Gmail's real users. And they were paying them to do Google searches, click, and then go to a specific result. And it was impacting rankings, like 110% sure. I was seeing the data. They were doing tests with random URLs, and showing me the like, pick a random URL. Picked one, not mine, not a client. And they're like, "Look what we did."

• 13:49Speaker 00

  Dude.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And it was working. And I was like, they're like, "Do you want this technology for your clients?" I'm like, "No." They're like, "Why not?" I'm like, "This is a short-term hack. This is not long-term thinking."

• 13:58Speaker 00

  This over here is interesting to me. So, on measurement, so there's a site quality score, which is scored, most sites fall between 0.6 and 0.7, so the higher the better, right? This is actually measured at the sub-domain level, which I don't think is the main point of that, but I find that a little interesting. So, this guy Mark went and he found the site quality score patent that Google filed. So, this is measured using factors such as how often people search for your site, how often people select your site. How often people use your site in anchor text? So this is interesting with with a name like single grain, for example. A lot of people search for single grain malt whiskey, right? They just search for single grain. So I think there is a little bit of benefit there, but the main thing here is if you're if you're a brand.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  This one I know directly from a Google engineer.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  You mentioned this.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  If if someone's searching single grain malt whiskey.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Apple, no, no, no, not malt whiskey. A lot of people, I'm not even saying.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Let me rephrase, if they keep searching single grain, they're looking for malt whiskey and they click on the malt whiskey result.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  It hurts you negatively.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, but here's the thing in Google Search Console, our click the rate on single grain is like 60 plus percent.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  They're clicking that, right?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  But that means I don't think most people searching for single grain are actually looking for malt whiskey.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  And which is getting to my point, you gotta be a brand, right?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  And so if we were searching for Neil Patel or MP Digital, that's a brand. Or search for single grain, it's a brand, right? If you become a brand, more people are using that in anchor text and people are more people are selecting your site. Then you're good that your site quality score in my mind seems like here you should go up and everyone should. If you want to, if you want to be a nerd, you can read this pattern if you want, so.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:27Speaker 00

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• 16:02Speaker 01

  Another interesting one is, did you see the Pepsi ad?

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Wait, just to sit on the the exploit thing for a little longer. One of the things, and I recommend you guys watch the video again, but I mentioned that he has a, towards the end of the video, he has a SERP. And it just goes to show you that, because there's a lot of SEOs now complaining that links don't matter as much anymore. There's a, there's a lot of influencers on LinkedIn. There was a thread where people are just like, yeah, what we're seeing is links don't matter as much anymore, right? And I find that interesting because this guy's kind of proving the same thing, too. It's like saying that if you have a brand, after the helpful content update, what happened? A lot of brands won out, right? The non-brands, the ones that really gamed SEO, it showed that they didn't do as well afterwards. But yeah, I just wanted to close off with that, but go ahead.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, have you seen the Pepsi ad where Santa picks Pepsi instead of Coca-Cola?

• 16:52Speaker 00

  No, did you see this on TV?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  No, I didn't see it on TV, but Ad Age had an article about it.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  No, I didn't see it.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  And I looked at it and I'm like, you know, no matter how clever your marketing is, you won't do well if people don't care for your product. And there's a huge trend right now. Whether it's Coke or Pepsi, there's a lot of people not drinking these products because they're just not that healthy. And if you look at Coke and Pepsi as an organization, they may have growth, but their growth is coming from products that they acquired or healthier products, not Pepsi and Coca-Cola specifically. Cause there's a trend, a lot of people are avoiding Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Sugar.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yes. And there's like that drink, what is that? Lollipop or lollapop?

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Lollipop?

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's booming and you're seeing it everywhere.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Sparkling water, yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, people are picking alternatives. And this is like, you can create the most clever advertising or do the best marketing campaign, but people tend to forget if your product sucks, you're just not gonna do as well. You need to focus on creating amazing product and service first.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, they're trying to be clever there because usually Christmas time, the Santa ads and all that is Coca-Cola, right? But that's maybe something you should have done like five or 10 years ago.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  So this is a, this is a C-player ad. That's what it is.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Better than the Jaguar ad?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. That, that's like a, what are you even doing? You're like out of this universe, right? So that's, that's like a D-player ad. So you can, you can.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  D, that's like a, that doesn't even go on a, it's below F, you know, it's pretty much a zero.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's zero?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, oh, one last thing, right? Have you seen Instagram trials?

• 18:22Speaker 00

  The trial reels? What about them?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  It, it's a great way to just test your content to figure out if it's gonna do well with their algorithm before you just release your content. They'll test it out with a random audience.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Or, and, or people who aren't your followers, not really random. And then figure out, all right, if it's doing well and it's getting engagement, boom, you release it to your core audience. If not, you're not wasting your time releasing a lot of junk content. This is very important because the way these algorithms work is if you continually post crap content on your feed and you get low engagement with your followers, in the future, when you post really good content, it doesn't do that well. You gotta retrain the algorithms that you're posting better content now. So using the trial reels will help you save time and it'll improve your overall scores with the algorithm.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and a little mini hack with that one. So the guy that announced, who's the head of Instagram and Threads?

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Adam Mosseri.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Mosseri, I follow him now on Instagram. He often talks about the latest, you should probably listen to what he says. He's like, oh yeah. If you post higher quality stuff, you're probably gonna get more reach. Oh, okay, I should probably do that. Trial reels, oh, you're talking about trial reels. Hmm, maybe I should probably do that, right? And so some of the things like we overcomplicate it, but sometimes it's just like this guy's trying to help you get more reach. So he's also trying to grow his ad revenue, but which is aligned with what you're trying to do too, right? He's trying to align incentives here and you should listen to him.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  The better content people create, more people get hooked on Instagram, more they use it, more revenue they generate. So they want you to create amazing content. Trial reels helps them with that and it helps you.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  He wants you to be successful, so he can be successful.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  More successful. Anyway, that's it for today and we'll catch you tomorrow.