As podcasting has become more popular, and moved on from being a niche interest to one of the most important forms of media, many people are finding that the traditional monetisation strategy for podcasts is not for them. While it's all very well taking up time in your show to extol the virtues of mattresses or ingredient delivery services, these adverts can irritate your listeners while not necessarily providing a steady stream of income. 

As a result, more people are looking to find ways to monetise their podcasts in other ways, and one of the most obvious methods is to sell and deliver podcasts to paying audiences. This can provide a much steadier income for your work, while at the same time ensuring that your listeners get a much more enjoyable experience, without the interruptions for sales pitches.

Alongside that, there is also a growing trend for people to create private podcasts, which they might give away for free but which they still want to keep to a select group.

The most popular use for this type of private podcast is for life coaches or executive coaches to deliver private mentoring and advice to their clients, but there are all sorts of other possible reasons for wanting private podcasts. Perhaps you work for a large company and want to have a weekly podcast on your sales strategies that goes out only to the salespeople in your organisation, or maybe you're a political party and want to have a podcast that only your members can access, with the latest campaign strategies and lines to take with the press. Maybe even you want the audio equivalent of a round-robin letter, something just going out to family and friends to update them on details of your life.

Private podcasts like this are a growing sector, but largely uncatered for, and so you may well not know how to get your podcast to its audience. While a free, public, podcast will appear on sites like Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts, and is free for anyone to download, a private or paid podcast has to get to listeners in other ways -- it won’t just show up in your audience’s regular app. 

People have tried many different methods to get their paid or private podcasts to listeners, all with some level of success, but all these different methods have different advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we'll look at some of the most popular methods, and discuss the pros and cons of each, to help you find the best option for your podcast.

 

1) Online Course Platforms

Several platforms, such as Teachable or Thinkific, are designed to be used by people teaching online courses. These platforms have had a great deal of success in that particular market, and so some people have tried adapting them for other uses, notably for podcasting.

These platforms are not, however, designed for podcast hosting, so while it's possible to have a certain amount of success with them, there are a number of disadvantages:

Pros

• They allow you to schedule content in advance, so you can upload several episodes and have them release on a weekly basis.
• They have good analytics, so you have access to a great deal of data about your customers.

Cons

• These sites tend not to be geared towards podcasting specifically, and are more geared towards video delivery.
• Your customers have to visit a website, and don't get the latest episodes delivered straight to them. These sites, by default, don't send out the episodes to the customers as they are released. This makes retention more difficult, as customers can easily forget about your show and let unlistened episodes pile up.
• Most of the better features for these sites are behind a paywall, and if you're on their basic plans they take a large cut of the profits.
• Most people listen to podcasts on their phone, but these sites are geared to people browsing on desktops.

The Verdict

For most podcasters, the disadvantages of using these sites will far outweigh the advantages. They're not really set up in a way that's friendly for podcast audiences, and they're not designed to be used in this way. Unless your podcast is part of a wider multimedia course, involving ebooks, videos, and quizzes, there's probably not much point in considering this option. If you're a teacher giving video lectures, they may be the way to go, but for most podcasters it's the wrong tool for the job.

 

2) Roll Your Own

At the other end of the scale entirely from using a teaching site is the option to do everything yourself, by hand. Some podcasters who want to monetise their podcast will simply use a normal podcast host, set up an account with a payment processor such as Stripe or PayPal (or, these days, accept Bitcoin donations), and then send out the link to the podcast's RSS feed to anyone who sends them money.

This option has a certain appeal to it, as it leaves you in complete control of every aspect of your business, but it also has a number of disadvantages.

Pros

• You get to keep all the money yourself (other than transaction fees from the payment processor).
• You have absolute control over everything -- you can switch podcast hosts and just send out the new URL to customers.
• Requires no new software for your listeners -- they can use any audio software that supports RSS feeds.

Cons

• Requires a great deal of administration -- you have to manually send out the link to every paying customer yourself.
• Most listeners don’t actually know how to get an RSS feed into their normal podcast apps. You’ll have to handhold them through the process. This is not only a tech support burden for you -- especially if the app they’re using is not one you are familiar with yourself -- but also a significant source of customer friction. They may well give up on listening to your podcast, just because it’s too difficult for them.
• People can share the link -- why pay for the content if you can just get your friend who did pay to send you the link in an email?
• If people decide to stop paying, you have to either change the RSS feed (and send out a new email to customers every time an old customer stops paying) or tolerate a non-paying customer continuing to have access to your material. As well as being inconvenient for your paying customers, this also means that you have to constantly keep track of whose payments are bouncing yourself.
• No support -- if you're doing everything yourself, and one of your listeners has a technical problem, you will be their first and only port of call, and you may not be able to find anyone else to fix the problem.

The verdict

This method is certainly an option that could work for some people, but unless you have a real passion both for accounting -- and constantly keeping an eye on lists of who is paying and who isn't -- and for doing tech support as your listeners encounter a myriad unexpected problems, it's probably better for you to use some form of managed service. What you gain in control, you lose in security and in ease of use.

 

3) Emailing Audio Files

For those of you for whom even setting up an RSS feed with a normal podcast host is giving up too much control, another option that some podcasters have tried is setting up a payment processing system, as in option two above, and then emailing the listeners directly with copies of each audio file as it's released. This is perhaps the ultimate in roll-your-own, as all you need is a Paypal account and an email address, but as you might imagine there are additional problems that come with this compared to more traditional methods of monetising a podcast.

Pros

• You have control over everything yourself.
• No hosting costs to deal with.
• Compared to option two above, it's comparatively easy to deal with non-paying customers -- just don't email them the next file.

Cons

• You have to do absolutely everything yourself, spending time and energy keeping track of every paying customer and sending out individual emails.
• If you're sending files as email attachments, you will likely quickly hit the maximum storage capacity of your email provider and have to pay for extra space. If you're sending links using a cloud service, you'll have to pay for storage with that service.
• The files can easily be forwarded to anyone else who might want them, without paying, or uploaded to torrent sites or similar.
• You will have to deal with issues such as your customers' mailboxes getting full up, and the emails (with their large attachments) bouncing back to you. If a customer has already paid you for the next four episodes, but every time you send her an email, it bounces, what do you do then? These are difficult decisions to make.
• Your customers may not even receive your emails. Many large email providers mark all senders of bulk email, even when people have paid for that email, as spam.
• If your customers want to listen to their files in their normal podcast apps, they will have to transfer the files to the app -- and if, as many people do, they deal with their email on a desktop or laptop, they will first have to transfer the files from their computer to their phone. This is difficult for many listeners and will provide tech support challenges.
• Files sent this way are difficult to organise and to refer back to. Unlike other methods, this doesn’t make it easy for listeners to have an organised library of podcast episodes.

The Verdict

This is only really an option if you're an absolute glutton for punishment. You might get it to work for you -- if you really enjoy dealing with angry emails from customers who haven't got their files, making spreadsheets, and providing unpaid technical support, while all the time also acting as a salesperson to drive customers to you -- customers who may understandably be reluctant to spend money on a DIY-seeming organisation.

 

4) Podcast Networks

Many large media organisations have started putting together their own paid podcast offerings, featuring some of their big names providing premium, subscriber-only, podcasts. These have so far had limited take-up among the general public, but they are being heavily promoted by some very big companies, and it may be that one of these networks becomes the "Netflix for podcasts" that they are all promoted as.

Pros

• Everything is done for you. You just produce the podcast yourself, and the network does the rest.
• Heavily promoted -- big entertainment organisations are pouring large sums of money into getting the word out about these networks.

Cons

• Usually invite-only -- unless you're already a big name, either with a hit podcast or with some other form of name recognition, this is unlikely to be an option.
• Requires the customer to install a particular app. This is a con of some other options here, and is a very minor con in the grand scheme of things, but is worth noting.
• Limits your audience -- most people will only subscribe to one of these podcast networks, in the same way that they will choose either Netflix or Hulu but usually not both. So your audience would be determined not by how much people like your individual podcast, but by how much they like your network's overall offering.

The verdict

This is probably a decent option *if* you're already reasonably well known -- say if you have a social media following in the hundreds of thousands or the millions. In those circumstances, you may be able to get a reasonable deal with one of the networks and this may be a possible way forward. But for the average podcaster who wants to monetise their podcast, this seems unlikely to be useful.

 

5) Crowdfunding Sites

Many podcasters have, over the last couple of years, started using sites such as Kickstarter, Patreon, and Drip to crowdfund their podcasts. Of all the options discussed here, this is probably the one that has had the most uptake, but it's still a far from perfect option, and there are some serioud concerns which you should take into consideration before deciding if this is the right course of action for you.

Pros

• These sites are generally well-known, and your customers may well have accounts with them already.
• Customer management is done for you -- there's no need to keep track of who is backing you, whose payments have been declined, and so on.

Cons

• Security -- as with most of the options listed above, private podcasts presented this way rely on the audience not to share the files, which can easily be sent to anyone else who wants them.
• Setup -- none of these sites are really designed for paid-for podcasts, and you can run into all sorts of awkward problems when using them for purposes for which they were not intended. Kickstarter, for example, is intended for delivery of a single product like a CD or book, not a regular recurring sound file. On the other hand Patreon is designed for regular subscription payments, but it's meant to let people pay you for something you're already giving away for free, not to let them pay you for exclusive content.
• Delivery -- while these sites will manage payments and subscriptions for you, you still have to actually deliver the files, and this will still involve either a private RSS feed or emailing the files to clients, leaving most of the same problems we’ve already seen.
• Bouncing payments -- many of these services allow backers to sign up, download all the available content, and then cancel their subscription before the first payment comes due. If you have an archive of two hundred or more files available to subscribers, do you want someone to be able to download all of these and keep them without having to pay a penny?

The verdict

This is probably a better option for the average podcaster than some of the other options we've discussed, but it still has drawbacks, and no crowdfunding site has yet proved itself to have a stable long-term future as a source of income that can be relied upon.

 

6) Soundwise

We come finally to the newest and most exciting of these options, Soundwise. is an all-in-one solution which allows you to sell your paid podcasts, audio books, audio courses and other audio programs directly to your audience, without having to worry about the technical and administrative details. You can sell individual episodes -- which is not an option with most of the other options listed above -- as well as selling subscriptions to your entire podcast, and providing free episodes to give away in order to attract your audience.

Pros

• Listen across devices -- listeners can listen on multiple devices so long as they're signed in to the app. There's no need for them to transfer files between their phone and their tablet; the files are all there in their Soundwise account.
• Access supplementary materials -- PDFs, text files, images and so on -- directly from the same app they are using to listen to your audios.
• Listener community -- your listeners can interact with each other, and with you, creating a community and driving engagement.
• Analytics -- Soundwise has detailed analytics and listener tracking, so you will be able to tell which of your podcast episodes are most popular and which segments of your audience are listening the most.
• Security -- Because it's a standalone app, listeners don't have direct access to the audio files, so they can't give them away to other people. You can know for sure that everyone listening to your paid podcast episodes has paid you for them.
• Flexibility -- listeners can pay for a single episode without having to commit to a subscription, and you can sell different subscription packages to fit different audiences. As well as selling subscriptions to every podcast episode, you could sell subscriptions to multiple different packages. So if, for example, you were doing a podcast aimed at people working in IT, you could sell a subscription to the whole podcast, but also sell packages of just your episodes on web design or computer security, for people who are only interested in those episodes.
• Technical support -- Soundwise provides full tech support for your listeners, so you don't have to worry about this.
• Discoverability -- while Soundwise won't promote anyone else to your listeners, it will promote your own other podcasts and audiobooks to them, and people can easily find your content by searching in the Soundwise app.
• Customer management is done for you, as with a crowdfunding site. You don't have to do the work of dealing with lapsed subscriptions and bouncing payments.
• Total control -- unlike crowdfunder sites such as Patreon, the only way people can get your paid podcast is if they have already paid for them.

Cons

• The one con for Soundwise is that it is a separate app, which your listeners would have to install. This is necessary for the security elements mentioned above -- and in general, listeners are very willing to install new apps if it means they get a great service and unique content. The app also provides an exclusive container in which the audience and content creator can interact, which helps you build your community and keep your audience loyal.

The verdict

Of all the options we've looked at, Soundwise is far and away the best option for the typical podcaster. It allows you to monetise your podcasts without sacrificing flexibility and ease of use, and to combine discoverability with security in a way that none of the other available options do. Check out the different publisher plans Soundwise offers here.