Goalhanger's Mindblowing Stats and the Lighthouse Family
Welcome to the last newsletter before Neil’s summer holiday.
About last week
It’s a rare moment when an error slips through on this high quality newsletter. Every week, I write some searingly incisive and interesting content, Michaela checks for typos and sternly tells me which jokes have the be removed, and then we pass it over to Richard – Director of Pressing Send on the Email – or Nik – Assistant DoPSotE / Head of Darts – to add the formatting and, yes, press send. That sounds pretty bomb-proof as a process, right?
Well, last week I’m sorry to say that there was an error. It was confined to the email version of this newsletter and corrected by the time it went onto Linkedin. The two final sections ‘What Have We Been Doing This Week?’ and ‘What Have We been Listening to This Week?’ were switched around. There was an editorial reason for this which I won’t bore you with, but I felt it was important. This change did not get spotted in the publishing process, and so the paragraphs accompanied the wrong question.
Seems pretty inconsequential, right? Well, unfortunately, it meant that the intro to the first paragraph read:
“What have we been doing this week?
Colleagues.”
I deeply apologise to anyone who was offended, and can assure you that, to the best of my knowledge, this was not true. It made Izzie – Head of Going to Weddings – cry with laughter, so at least this was an achievement.
The Mighty Goalhanger
When I was a school, I totally wanted to be Gary Lineker. My main / only ability in football was to turn up in the six yard box at the right time and toe-poke a goal after everyone else had done the hard work. For the uninitiated, this was also Gary’s core talent which, unlike me, brought him fame and riches as well as very lucrative crisp contracts.
Fast Forward over 35 years, and I would still very much like to be Gary Lineker. His reputation for hanging around the goal led to naming his media company ‘Goalhanger', and it is now by far and away the biggest mover in UK podcasting. This week, they announced mind-blowing numbers for ‘The Rest is Politics’ during the election period. Combined with the spin-off show ‘Leading’ chalked up 21.6 million combined podcast downloads and YouTube views. The integration of the show with Channel 4’s election coverage was a stroke of genius, gaining a million viewers on the night, and their social content was seen 22 million times.
Cleverly, Goalhanger also managed to arrange for Euro 24 to take place at the same time. So at the same time as cleaning up the politics listens, Gary made himself the bloke to listen to for the football too. The Rest is Football got 66 million views on social, and 19.6 million podcast downloads / YouTube views. By my calculations, Mr Lineker has made $8.67 squillion in a single month.
None of this success is a mistake, or luck. It’s about brilliant chemistry, fantastic super-smart producers, deceptively detailed research, perfectly chosen promo clips, and jumping on opportunities when they arise. Is there anything else they can monopolise the coverage of in the coming months? You betcha. Watch out for launches of ‘The Rest is Christmas’, ‘The Rest is Strictly’ and ‘The Rest is Spiders Coming Into The House because It’s Getting Cold Outside’.
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How do you grow a Podcast?
Well, the obvious answer to this is ‘speak to Richard at Fresh Air’. While Rich does indeed have all the answers, I’ll also point you towards this article by Tom Webster of Sounds Profitable.
Tom has put together five strategies for growing a show, which can be loosely summarised as 1. Understand why your existing audience like it 2. Find out what other podcasts they like. 3. Advertise on posters above urinals 4. Use word of mouth 5. Make Your Show Better.
I’ll admit that Fresh Air has never yet advertised any of our podcasts above urinals, but never say never. As we know, podcasting is a medium that you can concentrate on while doing something else, without distracting you from the task in hand, so the parallels are there.
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Vote in the British Podcast Awards
If you’ve got a favourite British podcast, you can help it win an award. The British podcast Awards Listener’s Choice Award is open for voting. You’ve got until the end of the month.
Last year’s winner was Redhanded.
Are There Too Many Ads in Podcasts?
Anyone who saw Richard DoPSotE’s keynote presentation at MAD//Fest knows that the thing most people say they dislike about podcasts is ads. So are there too many ads in podcasts?
James Cridland is a world-leading pointy-headed podcast expert in the podcast world, and has some very interesting analysis on the matter. There are 20% more ads in podcasts than there were a year ago, which is a lot. But does it matter? Maybe it’s a good thing because more ads means more revenue (22% more in fact). As Rich says, we shouldn’t just be stuffing podcasts with more and more ads without being creative about it.?
Brands need to make sure they’re integrating messages and not thinking of podcasting as just another audio channel to run your radio ad on. Have I mentioned that this is what Fresh Air Media is here to do?
We’re all going on a Summer Holiday. No more newsletters for a week or two.
This is the last newsletter before September. I know, sorry. I’m going on holiday, so is Rich, and so is Michaela, and everyone else who’s left behind has enough stuff to sort out in our absence without worrying about deputising on this. You’re probably away too, so you don’t really care.
If you’re worried about withdrawal symptoms, or are short of something to read on the beach, 67 past editions are available on Linkedin. Perhaps we should turn the full three-year library into a printed book. You’d buy that for the beach, right?
Richard Blake goes back to the sixties..
Two contrasting approaches to podcasting this week which we find interesting. The first is Empire, by Goalhanger (previously an audio production company, now a proper media publisher in it's own right). As a budding historian, and a middle-aged man I'm an absolute sucker for history podcasts and I love the combination of voice of the listener - Ana Anad and crumpled, erudite expert William Dalrumple. I love how they've taken the broad topic of Empire and made it relevant to so many extraordinary seismic historical events. What I particularly admire is the shape and profile it gives to historians and history books. You get all the detail, nuance, storytelling that great historians deliver but in a much more digestable, accessible format than a 500 page book. It's a perfect marriage of form and function. And for me, I get all the history I want in the time it takes me to run round the ponds.?
Michaela Hallam is actually on holiday but has left us with this recommend...?
This is Blum. Art History student Clara Torres disappears while working on her thesis about Ursula Blum, a avant-garde painter from the 20th century. Five years later, journalist Emma Clark decides to travel to Switzerland and uncover what actually happened..? It's all?a wonderful example of what can be done when?audio fiction and brands meet. It was a huge hit in Spanish and now it's been translated to English - an investigative podcast set in Switzerland and funded by Switzerland Tourism.? So our heroine, Emma takes dazzling train rides, explores ancient antique stores, immerses herself in art museums and goes to nine Swiss cities - transporting the listener to another place, inspiring them all the way. I'm off to book next year's holidays to Lausanne.?
What have we been doing this week?
It was my silver wedding anniversary on Wednesday. Nicola - Head of Being Married to Me - has stuck with it since August 1999, for which I’m very grateful.?
It was an excuse for my mum to dig out tonnes of photos from the day, and my main take-out is that my wedding trousers were incredibly baggy. Either that, or my legs were much skinnier back then. Probably both. I looked like MC Hammer in a waistcoat.
There was no real audio theme to our wedding, other than I had to tell the DJ off when he decided to play a whole album from the Lighthouse family during the buffet. The painful blandness very nearly ruined the day.
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What have we been listening to this week?
On Tuesday, I drove to Newquay, and on Thursday I drove back from Newquay. I was delivering my daughter to Boardmasters, and this meant that I had a lot of time to listen to podcasts. Do you know what I did? Whisper it. I listened to The Olympics on 5Live.?
There’s been a lot of talk about how the BBC’s Olympics coverage has been limited by their reluctance to outbid Discovery who paid ￡1 billion for the European rights. However, THE place where the beeb has all the rights it needs is on the radio. 5Live can be nimble - catching every single medal event and describing everything with detail and passion. Hearing football commentators like Conor Macnamara suddenly bring you the skateboarding is both fascinating and brilliant. The fact that they don’t know everything means they’re learning at the same time as you, and their expertise in painting pictures with words is worth every penny of the licence fee.?