“A lot of those deals started off really crazy, like where it would be a show that didn't yet exist with somebody who had some level of fame and suddenly they were getting, you know, $8 million a year to make something that they hadn't even decided what it was yet. And that really screwed these networks because they didn't have the download numbers to bring in the advertisers that they needed.”
Freakonomics Radio · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Weiss-Berman, who co-founded and sold a podcast production company, on the boom of a few years ago. Listening was growing quickly then and advertising money was not, she says, yet networks were guaranteeing hosts large advances against ads they still had to sell. She argues the real golden age of podcasting is now.
Transcript
…speculative money and it was venture money. Some of the places that were selling were highly profitable and others were very early in trying to figure out their business models. It was a very frothy time. But it wasn't real money. It wasn't ad dollars. Like the ad dollars really weren't there yet.
So what was it was just getting market share so that when the ad market or some other market matured, that they'd be there.
Yeah, so podcast listenership was growing rapidly, but podcast ad dollars were not growing rapidly. There would be these networks with 200 shows and they were supposed to sell ads on them, but then they would forget about 100 of them. And then there were also on the network sides, there were these huge minimum guarantees is what we call them, which is essentially an ad advance that's structured kind of like a book advance, where you get a guaranteed amount of money from a network and then they have to find the advertisers to actually get that money. A lot of those deals started off really crazy, like where it would be a show that didn't yet exist with somebody who had some level of fame and suddenly they were getting, you know, $8 million a year to make something that they hadn't even decided what it was yet. And that really screwed these networks because they didn't have the download numbers to bring in the advertisers that they needed. So
a lot of shows got shut down. A lot of people were fired.
Yeah, I would say a lot of them, you know, had a great time for a few years and then they were restructured in a way that didn't make them happy, but some of them stuck with it, understanding the actual economics.
What share of podcasts would you consider profitable?
More from Freakonomics Radio
