It’s been a busy few months for Midroll, the company that produces a network of podcasts under the comedy- and pop culture-focused Earwolf and Wolfpop, and also sells ads for a large, diverse group of podcasts (including shows from American Public Media).
Podcasts in the Midroll network include well-known hits like WTF by Marc Maron (in June, Maron got President Barack Obama to come on the show) and Nerdist by Chris Hardwick, as well as other niche offerings on everything from board games to entrepreneurs.
Midroll was acquired last month by the broadcasting company E.W. Scripps as part of an effort to branch out into digital audio content, especially for mobile. A few weeks ago, the company relaunched its podcast discovery and listening app Howl, along with a new subscription model — Howl Premium — that allows paying users ad-free access to the company’s podcast archives and original Howl content.
I recently spoke with Midroll Media’s vice president of business development, Erik Diehn (who previously worked at New York Public Radio), about the ingredients needed for a successful podcast, what’s in store for podcasting and public radio, and what might still be holding back the growing medium of on-demand audio content. Below is a lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation.
Then there are some surprise ones. One I can talk a little more publicly about is this show called EOFire — that’s a show with an audience of 60,000, maybe it’s a little bit more now. But [John Lee Dumas] publishes daily and he has an exceptionally engaged audience, and as a result we get a lot of advertiser interest and a lot of advertiser renewal. He is consistently a top earner in our portfolio, even though his show is much smaller than, say, WTF.
That’s why program directors have multiple things on throughout the day. They have Morning Edition, then Brian Lehrer, then The Takeaway. You’re programming around the clock. Podcast listeners have their own clock, and they program their own experience.
Public radio might need to ask, ‘Are we all about producing Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me? Or are we all about taking grant money and other things to dig deep and turn up stories in our local community that nobody else is going to turn up?’
Public radio is pretty good at innovating, but I think that in order to survive, they need to figure out how to make the commercially interesting stuff live alongside the mission-driven stuff, and have one fund the other without stepping on each other’s toes.
It would be nice if we got to a scale where we had a little more infrastructure. We don’t have enough scale to track tons and tons of venture dollars coming in, building ad-tech platforms for audio like we did for video, at least not for podcast audio.
It stinks that there’s not better stuff out there. There are a few things emerging, but we’re still frequently in a situation where we’re like, ‘Do we have to build this? We don’t want to be a tech company! We’re a media company.’
I’d also like to see the audiences grow and diversify. I think they already have, a lot. We’re getting a broadening of content and audience, but it needs to continue to grow. If I could just wave the wand, I would want to have a broader cross-section of the public listening tomorrow, and a larger percentage of the public listening.