Founder and CEO of The Radcast Network Ryan Alford on Podcast Audiences, Deals, and Distribution

Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

Jeff Umbro: This week on Podcast Perspectives.

Ryan Alford: I think the first mistake that people make when trying to sell ads is starting a show to sell ads.

Jeff Umbro: Today's guest on the show is Ryan Alford, the founder and CEO of the Radcast Network and host of Right About Now, one of the top business and marketing podcasts in the country. Ryan brings a really fresh perspective to the podcast industry based on his years doing brand awareness campaigns, social media campaigns for all kinds of clients, and how he thinks about the idea of growing and monetizing podcasts today.

Welcome to the show Ryan. Glad to have you.

Ryan Alford: Thanks, Jeff. Proud to be here. Excited. Love what you're doing. I'm a big fan.

Jeff Umbro: Well, appreciate that.

So, how'd you get into podcasting?

Ryan Alford: I started my agency after a crash and burn startup. I worked for agency and marketing world and big marketing land for 15 years for other people. My first startup was in the car business, so go figure, I crash and burned. But I said, you know what I'm gonna do what I should've done was just start my own ad agency. This is about 10 years ago.

And I don't consider myself a futurist. I saw the potential of content my whole agency was sort of started on this proliferation and the democratization of content the ability to generate content at scale affordably. And I recognized podcasting as a way to do that, to build personal brand, personal authority when I didn't want to have a camera follow me around.

Jeff Umbro: I'm curious, 10 years ago, what kind of content were people really focused on making back before what we know of podcasting today?

Ryan Alford: It started in this, I think, false premise of the content is about you. And like Gary Vee made it famous, you know, camera following him around, and you could presume very easily that it was about him. But Gary was just doing a bunch of exciting shit. And so camera following him around was interesting because he's in New York City going to meetings and doing things and tasting wine and all these. And so his lifestyle and and business made it interesting. So a lot of people 10 years ago started doing that.

Just never gonna be the guy that a camera following around, but I did believe in having conversations and doing long form content that could be used in a multipurpose way to grow authority.

Jeff Umbro: In the Gary Vee Barstool world today and 10 years ago, a lot of this was, let's just record everything and then we'll clip the interesting parts, start on social, maybe we write a couple blogs about it. And you're saying that you had this moment where like you recognized the power of that, but you wanted to do it in a different way, which for you was long form storytelling and interviewing.

And how did that fit into the marketing agency that you had built at that point in time?

Ryan Alford: Yeah, I would call it intentional curation of the best and legendary people, and I'm gonna just, we're gonna call it the 2.0 phase. 1.0 phase was learning phase. 2.0 phase of the Radcast was intentional documenting and bringing on legendary people to talk about legendary business advice and marketing advice.

I have ADD. I don't watch a lot of content, but I can get in the zone, headphones on, on the mic with smart people and learn from them. So my first 200 guests were a way for me to do YouTube without YouTube. I learned from them a lot of advice, sage of things, and you know, hot topics at the time.

Jeff Umbro: And what kind of clients were you working with at that point? Who was hiring you?

Ryan Alford: Not mom and pop, but small, "smedium," like, uh, hey, that looks pretty good on you. But we both know that's a medium. Um, clients that look pretty good on the roster, but they didn't necessarily pay five mil, you know, but they, you know, like. Six figure clients that were "smedium" sized. B2B was a big niche for us and actually still is the only niche we're in now with the agency.

We weren't working with Coke or Verizon or Audi like I did in New York with other agencies.

Jeff Umbro: And you were helping them make content for social.

Ryan Alford: Yeah, content for social.

Jeff Umbro: And so you're doing this for these "smedium" companies, and you have Right About Now on the side, your podcast, you publish a couple hundred episodes, and at what point were you like, oh, this is the thing. Like, I can really do this more than I am today.

Ryan Alford: It's funny when it's, when you've got, you know, a spreadsheet and you look at your revenue sources and it was folded under the agency. The revenue pie of, you know, the podcast and what was generating, that bar graph got started getting to a certain height and I wasn't counting every dollar, and I was like, this is becoming more important to what we do. You know, we get in those meetings, review the numbers, and those same people go, This is not a waste of time, is it?

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. I'm very impressed that you were able to monetize it to that point. We work with a lot of folks and even this show that you're on right now, a lot of the reason that we do it is it's content marketing, it's general awareness, engagement, and education for myself and the staff.

And it's lead gen. Like I get in a room with cool people like you that I can hopefully do work with in the future. And monetization is a huge part of this, but it's not like the reason that we're doing it 'cause it's just. For us, like we're back where you were two years. It's just not a big enough vehicle for it to make sense for us to monetize via advertising. So kudos to you, and I'm sure that all the rest of this stuff was a big piece of that up until that point for you.

So Right About Now started making some real dollars and that you were doing this as like a larger part of your day to day. And then at what point did you sit down and say, What if I replicate this for other people?

Ryan Alford: I had that thought probably four years ago. We were doing a lot of video production. So we were a 12 person boutique digital social agency, and five of my employees were videographer/editors, you know, and we were traveling around. We produced 10,000 pieces of content a month. So, yeah, we posted it and managed it too, but we produced it. We had in-house. As a 12 person digital agency, we had a killer in-house video production company. And I had, you know, five 20 to 25-year-old ninja shooter editors doing stuff that would've cost 20 to 50x 10 years earlier, you know, like 2010. This is 20, this is like right around COVID time or a little before it. I lean into the video affordably with social management. That was a big part of what we did the first four years. That work started to got harder and harder to retain those ninjas. And I was looking for a place to pivot. And I always believed we could do the podcasting for others. I would've done it seven years ago 'cause I saw it, but it wasn't time for that to replace the capabilities we already had.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, you had a good business. It was making money.

Ryan Alford: And I didn't want to be a 35 person agency with podcasting services and what we were already doing. Like I did that, I've already done that. I didn't manage a hundred people in New York. I don't, I gotta build a hundred person agency seven years ago. I didn't want to do that.

So you had two things. Timing right for us going higher. Knowledge, awareness, mass desire for podcasting going higher. And those two, opportunity meets capability.

Jeff Umbro: It was like 2022 that you officially launched Radcast Network. Right?

Ryan Alford: Yeah.

Jeff Umbro: And what did that look like? Who were your first clients? Were you producing and monetizing and growing like a traditional network or was there a different vision there?

Ryan Alford: We piloted five shows. We brought them on full service. Soup to nuts, production ads. They were all self-help or business shows similar to ours. Brought 'em on for a year contract to do all of that, management, production.

Jeff Umbro: They were paying you at that point to?

Ryan Alford: Yeah, full service. It was 80% production/content development/administration and 20% marketing of the show.

Jeff Umbro: 2022 comes around. You have five clients. You are producing, you're growing, you're monetizing. How long did that go for? Because you're not producing stuff today for clients, are you?

Ryan Alford: We edit a couple shows that aren't our own.

Jeff Umbro: So you have a small post-production house, but for the most part, what does the network look like? Is it, you're licensing a bunch of shows out there? What is the Radcast niche?

Ryan Alford: I would say the Radcast niche is we grow your show. Well, first it's setting expectations. If your budget is zero, we're gonna give you the list of 30 things and 30 ways to grow your show that we can do for you that are organic.

Jeff Umbro: So what are some examples of that? You know, you have cross promos, you have guesting on other shows, you have pitching the podcasting apps, you have publishing to social. Do you have any silver bullets there that you really pay attention to on the organic side?

Ryan Alford: I like to fish where the fish are. And so like to run ads or organic insertions on YouTube or social media, on other shows or other, you know, you go after the audience, right? I don't chase podcasts. I chase the audience. If we're talking organic, non-paid, just sweat equity. It's getting mentioned, getting inserted. How can you become a thought leader so that then you get invited on a show that's a newsy show on something. And so your name and your podcast gets mentioned a bunch, people that are your audience. I think there's some of that that's sounds cliche and is being done. I think there's some ninja tactics underneath all that that are a little harder to do.

Jeff Umbro: I think you're right. There's a million ways to describe all of it. It boils down to just you need to be where your potential listener or viewers is.

Ryan Alford: Your show is as big as you are resourceful. It's all resourceful and grit. And look, yes, you gotta have a good show. So table stakes. You need Podglomerate to produce your show. once you have good production, then it's about grit and resourcefulness.

Jeff Umbro: We talked a little organic. When it comes to paid, what can you do to supercharge a show's growth when it comes to having a budget? If I had 20 grand to give you right now, where would you put it?

Ryan Alford: I have no problem using high reach, high frequency, medium quality. Some people call television "pray and spray." I agree and disagree with that statement.

Jeff Umbro: And they say that because you're buying a zillion impressions based on forecasted viewership, but half your audience might be in the kitchen making dinner.

Ryan Alford: Yep. I'm gonna make up some figures. For example, I'm gonna spend a thousand dollars and reach a million people 10 times. Don't know that you can do that. That's probably way out of bounds, but let's just say.

Jeff Umbro: It's a little aggressive.

Ryan Alford: Yeah okay. 100,000 people, 10 times, and maybe only 14 to 20% of those are your perfect, ideal, likely subscriber. I'd rather get reach and frequency at a low cost at affordable cost than hyper targeted, hoping that I spent three grand on 10,000 perfect people and hope that they subscribe. I'd rather 10 or 20x my reach and frequency because I believe in the power of brand and the power of word of mouth, and that people that may not become your subscribers might talk about it.

You do get mindshare when you get enough frequency.

Jeff Umbro: You're essentially saying if you throw a bigger net, then you're gonna catch more fish.

Ryan Alford: Yeah, that's right. And I like to uncover audiences that aren't always known. And look, I love to be specific. I might not be targeting a soccer mom that's 34 with three kids and you know, like, and makes $100,000 a year. Like that's an expensive target, 'cause it's hyper specific.

If I can grow a show with an affordable, wide ranging, wide reaching, more listeners, more people trying, generating programmatic ad dollars, other ad dollars so that people getting their messages heard and you're not overcharging CPMs 'cause maybe your audience isn't perfect yet, but like you do have people listening, you have people consuming the money made from that, or money from leads. Whatever those that generates money for you, reinvesting into some higher quality strategic surgical tactics.

Jeff Umbro: It is the case that 10 years ago you could launch a show and kind of no matter how good or bad it was you were gonna find an audience, because there just wasn't that many options out there. And that is no longer the case; you're competing against millions of other shows out there, and you need to do something to stand out and you need to make a good quality product, and then you need to bring people into find it.

So I love talking to you about this because I think that it's a unique vantage point that I personally don't hear a lot. And there's a second piece of this that I think you do extremely well that I want to talk through because you are really good at flooding all of the platforms with like really great quality clips and like full episodes and short clips and social clips and everything in between.

And you do this both for Right About Now and for the Radcast shows, and you just launched a trading card podcast. And the clips that you have out there are beautiful. They're relevant. They're fun to watch. Talk about how you think about that side of the industry, how people should be thinking about that for their podcast.

Ryan Alford: I would bet I'm the number one business show on the planet and I'm just about business, definitely marketing, if you add up every view of 15 to 45 second content. So, and you count that. That counts to me. That's an impression, because my goal isn't just to have a popular podcast. My goal is to have authority and have attention and to have leverage. The long form podcasts generate short form content that I can then. I have a million people that never, ever tune in to the show, but they watch 10% or 50% or 100% of all my, because I'm in their algorithm. And they see me every day talking about something. That's a win.

Jeff Umbro: And this has been a big question over the last year or two. It's like, if somebody watches an Instagram reel, are they a listener or a viewer? And my opinion of that is, yes, they are. But the caveat being you can't monetize that.

Ryan Alford: You're being monetized right now, Jeff. You don't even know it. How many things do I have on that I get paid for? How many things are behind me that I will clip and get paid for?

You can monetize anything. You can monetize 30 seconds, 15 seconds, and if you really pay attention and go look at all our clips, we had like four brands on the page, on the screen that at the entire, every time we sold, every second.

Jeff Umbro: So the hats make more sense now.

Ryan Alford: This is Branded Bills. They make the best custom hats in America.

Jeff Umbro: For the listener, every time I've talked to Ryan in the last few weeks, he has a different hat on and he always makes sure to change his hat before he gets on camera.

This is new. I didn't know this, so walk me through a little bit about how this works. Are you selling that based on a CPM? Are you selling that on an affiliate situation?

Ryan Alford: I don't do any affiliate deals. You gotta pay for a top of mind awareness, not bottom. You don't just get to pay for bottom of the funnel sales. You gotta pay for the whole funnel. There's a funnel for a reason.

Jeff Umbro: When we started this interview, I said to you before we were recording that I feel like you represent this new version of podcasting. I'm gonna refine that and say that you represent an old version of marketing that podcasting doesn't have because anybody or a lot of people in podcasting got into it because they love This American Life or Heavyweight or something, and then they had to learn how to run their organization's marketing or their show's marketing from there. Whereas there's a hundred years or more of marketing know-how that's out in the world that has been applied to everything for a very long time that a lot of people are just now introducing into the audio and video space.

And so this is why I find it so fascinating to talk to you because I think you're really good at it. But I also think that it represents something that you don't see all the time in podcasting.

Ryan Alford: 100% agree. No, we built this world of podcasters and influence everything else that, that are giving away free awareness. And you know what you can say, well, Ryan sells everything. He's a salesman. No, I am gonna, you're gonna get your money's worth when you work with me. I'm very discerning in who we work with, but I'm gonna make it valuable and no one's gonna make, and you making a sale doesn't make it more valuable to me.

These podcasters are like, we're still in this generation of non-sophisticated, non-professional like systems because they think it's a hobby. Podcasting is not a hobby anymore if you're doing it in a professional manner.

Jeff Umbro: I would push back a little bit on a lot of people thinking that it's a hobby, 'cause I think people want this to be a very professional setup. I just don't think a lot of people have the background necessary for them to get beyond the idea of it being a creative endeavor. Whenever I'm having conversations about sales for any of our shows, it's very much a conversation of how many impressions can you give me? What is the CPM that you're offering? Here is what I'm expecting the conversion rate to be, and if we don't hit it, we're not gonna renew. I think that has become the defacto conversation for most agencies because they have a spoils of riches in terms of like what shows they can buy on. So if something doesn't work out for them, they can move on to the next one.

If you listen to my episode with Adam McNeil, he's very much of that school of thought and he is I think one of the smartest people in the podcast agency world. That said, there's a million situations like the ones that you were just talking about that are still gonna be incredibly valuable for anybody who wants to operate in the space that just aren't getting the time of day, because it's not a quick and easy, we're gonna get a hundred conversions if we spend $10,000.

Ryan Alford: Yeah, everything changes. People come and go. Things that have nothing to do with us, but some of the most loyal directs over time, that world's changed a little bit with programmatic and other things, but you gotta adapt and pivot like anything else.

But I do think I'm a radical guy that in some ways you would think it would be like radical believer, I don't know if I'm a radical guy or not, but a radical believer, a wife and four kids and coach basketball every week. I do think there's a really bad thing happening with the performance marketing side of things, like you have to build brand. You have to build top of mind awareness. I've seen some of these companies that come and go into the podcast, like brands. They come to us and they want these performance deals and I've never heard of them. And I, and I know why, because they're doing this where they're trying to grab the bottom, like, you know, if there's a thousand people, they're trying to grab the 10 people that will buy today, 'cause not everyone's buying at the exact same time. So you have to have reach and frequency to be top of mind. And I know why, because they're a startup their investors want a quick return and they're just trying to scoop as many sales as possible to stay alive. But the best companies and the ones that last didn't build it that way and don't today, like it doesn't work that way to build a company that stands the test of time.

Jeff Umbro: What is the future of Radcast? What are your plans over the next couple years?

Ryan Alford: Well, I'm glad you brought that up, Jeff. The Collector Nation, you know, I've gotten into trading cards in collectible space, the hobby, from a media perspective, and it's a booming industry, 50 billion, something like right now it's supposed to be 236 billion by 2034. And I'm gonna build the ESPN of the hobby.

Jeff Umbro: This makes me so happy. We talked about this the other day, but Pat Flynn, who is another big podcaster, he runs an Instagram account called Deep Pocket Monster, and it's one of the largest Pokemon trading card things in the world. And I know you're doing sports, but same idea. Collectibles, trading cards, and.

Ryan Alford: Pokemon will be a part of it.

Jeff Umbro: And that's the thing, it's like this organization, Pat Flynn, I haven't spoken to him, but I imagine that he's spending a lot more time on Pokemon than podcasts these days.

Ryan Alford: And this is an affluent money spending audience and big brands need to pay attention. And so we need to aggregate the best and the brightest of the creators and the content in the space. And then we need for them to get recognized by the brands for the power that they wield because they move the market. These are true influencers.

Jeff Umbro: Very cool. Well, where can people find you?

Ryan Alford: The Collector Nation is where you're gonna see everything that we're doing under the hobby. Ryan Alford. You can always Google that. I've been verified before you could buy it, for a number of years. So yes, the blue check there, don't care about it, but it does mean it's me. I'm not telling Ryan Alfords and anywhere on social media. You Google that name. And my fancy dancey, Wikipedia, whatever the hell that is, that comes up. I don't know how that happens. Some magic happened and hey, there's a picture of me and I that's at least 80% right of things I've done.

Jeff Umbro: Very cool. Well, thank you so much. This was awesome.

Ryan Alford: Yeah, happy to do it.

Jeff Umbro: For more podcast related news info and takes you can follow me on LinkedIn at Jeff Umbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of the Podglomerate. If you're looking for help producing marketing or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at podglomerate.com.

Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com or follow us on all socials @podglomeratepods. This episode was produced by Chris Boniello and myself, Jeff Umbro. This episode was edited and mixed by José Roman. Thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Erin Weiss, and Sheeba Joseph, and a special thank you to Dan Christo. 

Thank you all for listening, and I’ll catch you all in a few weeks.