The exciting part about the rapid evolution of podcasting and YouTube is that new ways to monetize your show are constantly appearing. We wanted to cover some of the most interesting ways people are monetizing their shows through private podcast feeds and YouTube premium features for creators.
In this episode Tiff and Christine share the current best ways to use private podcast feeds and YouTube premium to monetize your podcast.
“The big perk of having a premium podcast is that you can have access to your audience’s name and email address.”
Christine Baird
Topics covered:
- (1:20) What a private or premium podcast is and how to use it
- (9:40) What YouTube premium is about how to use it
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Links mentioned:
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- Tiff Tyler
- Christine Baird
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Many thanks to our production team
- Worthfull Media for audio editing
- Mosaico Productions for video effects
- Amela Subašić for artwork
Transcription of this episode:
(auto-generated, please forgive typos)
Christine (00:04):
Welcome to Think Like a Producer podcast. I’m your co-host Christine Baird.
Tiff (00:09):
And I’m your co-host Tiff Tyler. Being in the podcast industry, being in the content creation industry. This is what we learned, and this is how you can get out of your own way and get started.
Christine (00:20):
You name it. We’ve probably done it. This podcast is about bringing all the wisdom to you. Tune in weekly, to learn how to think like a producer.
Christine (00:33):
Going to my notes. Okay. Welcome to this episode of think like a producer. Today, we’re talking all about premium podcasts and premium YouTube options, and this is kind of the new and exciting field for podcasters and YouTubers, creators in general online. And it’s something we really haven’t talked much about in the podcast so far. And it’s honestly like the frontier of how people are monetizing their shows. So we’re going to do kind of a high level overview today of premium podcast options for creators and premium YouTube options. And obviously there’s a world of opportunity here. So this isn’t going to be comprehensive like everything everyone has ever done with this, but it hopefully will get you thinking in new and creative ways about how you can use these premium subscription models that platforms are offering now to monetize your show. And we’ll try and give you some really helpful ideas of how to do that effectively instead of like putting in a ton of work to a paid subscription that nobody buys, okay, I’m going to start with by guessing, because that’s what I know about.
Christine (01:43):
Tiff’s going to talk about YouTube, cause I don’t know anything about YouTube premium and she doesn’t know much about podcast premium. So we’re going to play to our strengths there. Like we always tell you to, okay. So what is it premium podcast you might have also heard of these called private podcast, subscription podcasts. This is an option that’s been around for a couple of years, but it really started to hit the mainstream in 2021 when apple podcasts and Spotify both launched this option. And now there’s third-party platforms that have already had this available to people for a while. But you know, it’s kind of getting bigger now that apple and Spotify are on board. So what you can do is if you want to have a podcast that people have to pay to subscribe to, you can now do that. And you know, a typical subscription could be anywhere from like three or $5 a month.
Christine (02:32):
It could be 10 or $20 a month. There’s really no limit because everyone is using this option in a different way. So let me give you some examples. Um, big major networks like CNN, NBC, uh Wondery these kinds of networks obviously have an interest in having premium subscribers, paying directly for a subscription, just like you would on TV, right? We’re in the world of streaming. So now you can buy like an NBC podcast channel subscription. I don’t think it’s more than $10 a month. It’s probably cheaper. And you could have ad-free listening to all of NBC’s podcasts. They did a really cool thing around the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. And now they’re called the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but they haven’t this year. So I’m not sure. I feel like I’m trying to say that. Right, but it was confusing. So during the Olympics in Tokyo, NBC put out some daily podcasts, you know, covering the Olympics.
Christine (03:30):
Those were all included. If you had like a channel subscription to the NBC channel, um, something a little more BP close to home for most of us who aren’t producing NBC podcasts is something like Wondery, it’s a big network of podcasts that got acquired by Amazon this year. And for a long time, they had a wonderful plus option, which meant you could get a paid subscription to all of Wondery’s shows ad free. Now you don’t have to be a part of a network to take advantage of this option. Any independent creator can make a premium show or they can make part of their show only accessible to premium members. And this could be a really cool way for you as a creator to start making money from your show, totally unrelated to sponsors. That’s the big perk for the audience, right? They’re getting add free content or exclusive content that they can’t get for free by paying a pretty reasonable monthly subscription.
Christine (04:28):
And obviously in today’s world, we’re all very used to paying monthly subscriptions because that’s kind of how everything’s going in the streaming world. So let me kind of give you a realistic paradigm to put this in so far. This is kind of still emerging data because this is still an option that not a lot of creators have tapped into so far. The industry average is only about 3% of your free audience will likely convert over to your paid feed. If you do the math. Yes, that was mean very few people. Unless you have a really big show with, you know, tens of thousands of subscribers. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider a premium show. Anyway. Here’s why there are so many cool ways that podcasters who have existing brands with other existing products are using premium feeds to speak to their pain members. Like let’s say you run a membership group or a mastermind, or you have an online course or community that people pay to be a member of because you’re teaching them, you’re coaching them.
Christine (05:35):
You’re giving them great content. You could just build in a premium podcast so that those members can hear all of your content if they don’t want to go look at it. And this is actually like a really exciting part of podcasting, it’s kind of taking the traditional model and putting it into a whole new territory where audio is becoming way people are learning on the go and the technology is catching up really quickly so that anyone can create these kinds of private feeds. I’ve started experimenting with them. I have clients who are some really great platforms to check out if you’re like, wow, I would love to be able to have great audio content available to my pain members and kind of, you know, any of the course content I have. I can just put it into a podcast that they can access on their favorite listening platform.
Christine (06:26):
You see where this is going. So some really cool platforms that let you do that, or hello, audio supporting cast super cast. I mean, there’s a lot of them and some of them have been acquired in the last year by major companies, but some of them are still just directly accessible to the public. And I definitely recommend checking those out if this is kind of getting your ideas spinning because the big perk of having a premium podcast is that you can have access to your user’s name and email address because they need to actually subscribe and sign up to your show and they need to be able to have, you know, an email address where they can be sent their private link. And that means that you could actually have that information, which is historically been totally inaccessible to podcasters. So it’s kind of taking the traditional concept of podcasting and merging it with paid courses and memberships.
Christine (07:19):
And it’s this new beautiful frontier and that’s accessible to anyone. I mean, you can have a very small audience and start to use the power of a premium podcast. If you already have a paid product that people want. And they would really like to be able to access it on a podcast app. Um, and you could also just start your paid product as a premium podcast. You know, if you’ve never started like a coaching community before or an educational community to teach what you’re an expert at. I mean, you can talk about gardening, pet care at the sky’s the limit, right. But you could have your initial product actually just be like a $20 a month premium podcast where you do great coaching every week. And that could be the beginning. And it’s so exciting to me because up until now, it’s been pretty exclusive to like these, you know, video first on your desktop, uh, online course platforms like Teachable or Kajabi.
Christine (08:20):
That’s where we’ve been for the last 10 years. And now it’s like, oh yeah, audio is really here to play and you can use it in so many ways. So just to recap, the big perk of having a premium podcast is you can have it be ad-free if your other option was sponsors and your audience can start paying you directly. Uh, even if you have a small one, if you have something really valuable that, you know, they want, um, the other big perk being, you can actually have access to their names and email addresses, which is awesome to build a better relationship, offer them more and be able to stay in contact with them through email. So the big thing to remember here is that successful premium podcasts are creating the content that their audiences already want and already are paying for somewhere else. It’s very hard to get an audience to just want what you’ve already created.
Christine (09:18):
If you’re like, well, I want to create this and I’m just going to make my audience want it. I think we all know that it’s really ineffective. It is super effective to get really clear about what your audience needs by listening to them, asking them, tracking the information they’re giving you, being like, oh, I’m really seeing a pattern here. Everybody seems to really want more info or more of this kind of episode. Okay. How can I make more of that for them? And then I can monetize it and fund it by offering a premium feed. And then just know that obviously there’s only a percentage of your free audience who will be interested in that, but I mean, you can start small and it can grow. Like there’s no problem with starting with a really small paid audience. If that’s where, you know, you want to invest over the long-term okay. That was the high level introduction to premium podcasts. Tiff.Tell us about YouTube premium,
Tiff (10:12):
YouTube. Love it so much. Okay. So I just wanted to make sure you guys know that YouTube has been great about being very open about the different ways that you can join what they call the YPP, the YouTube partnership program. And that’s when you’re eligible, when you have enough subscribers, enough views actually be able to monetize and make money off of YouTube and a little research just so I’m like, I’m sure there’s way more ways than just the YouTube premium membership that we’re going to talk about and just monetizing ads. And there are, so I’m going to go through a couple of them, a very, very brief overview. My suggestion is to Google it. If you don’t know, Google owns YouTube, so there’s nothing but support pages like over and over and over again, um, on just what these partnership programs are doing, how the percentages that people are making.
Tiff (10:58):
Everything’s a little bit different. We know that people who are really smart and just really had no ambition and 2006, 2007 to go all in on YouTube that now have 10 million plus subscribers. They can make a life living off of just what they’re getting paid for YouTube, but for anyone new who’s growing, you know, things have been changing. So overall what we’ve seen the most and what you’ve probably seen the most, if you’re, um, just using YouTube in its free version is monetizing with ads. So, you know, those ads that you either have to watch, or you skip in the beginning of the videos sometimes in the mid middle point of the video, and then now a lot also at the end of YouTube videos, that’s a way to monetize those advertising dollars. Some go to YouTube, some go to the creators. Um, and it, you know, it depends right, how many ads are in there, how long people are watching.
Tiff (11:47):
And then of course, if someone actually clicks on the ad and goes and buy something from that sponsor, there’s just different levels of how you can get paid out. But overall, the views are where the money is really made. Now the alternatives to that, there are now available separate channel memberships, where your fans can actually decide to be a member of your channel. Almost kind of like if you see Facebook memberships or Kajabi memberships, or, you know, just all the memberships out there, you’re paying a monthly price, not to YouTube itself, but to just the channel itself, just the, uh, a member of that channel. And you’re paying a monthly fee and you’re able to get just certain exclusive content or perks. That word means so many different things to me, but perks that you could be getting from that channel. So some of it can just be custom emojis and stickers that you can add.
Tiff (12:36):
Some of it can actually be exclusive content. So it’s kind of similar to what some people might’ve heard of when it came to like Patreon, um, when people were just paying a little bit more and getting things before everybody else did on the free version of certain things, there’s, there’s ways that you can use it. It’s interesting because all the features that I’m going to talk about are all the programs that YouTube has. It depend on the area, the country that you’re in, what’s actually available. So again, don’t just use this podcast as a resource, use this as a stepping stone to continue to do your research, as you’re seeing how YouTube can help make money for your business and your just creativity. Overall. Another one, which is interesting that I will admit, I didn’t even know existed is called us super chat and super stickers.
Tiff (13:20):
So if you notice a lot of people go live on YouTube, they can actually purchase particular stickers or custom emoji’s and things that they can add to the live chat. Um, some people kind of similar to Twitch are like live streaming when they’re playing games, they’re live streaming when they’re renal reacting to other videos and different things, or they can just do what we do on Instagram sometimes, and just go live and just talk to the audience for an hour or so, it’s really no limit. So just being able to interact in a different way and show that you’re a super fan because your comments and everything in messages to the creator stands out. There’s a way you can make money from people just wanting to show you that they care and that they support you another great way, the merch shelf. So we did get a question about this on season one of our podcast about just the benefits of having merchandise to me from, I don’t know if you relate Christine, but I feel like everybody has a t-shirt or a saying, or a sweater or a sticker or something that you can buy.
Tiff (14:16):
So typically people are doing that, you know, drop ship, all these different things, but, um, you can actually have a merchant shelf. So the cool thing about this is that it’s still on YouTube platform. So instead of you, I’m sure when you purchase, you’re probably going off the platform, but you can actually see the person’s merch right on their channel. Kind of like listed out. Almost. It almost looks like an ad when I saw the screenshot again, Google this, but it comes up on their page. So while you’re watching their video, see t-shirts and stickers and everything pop up, you can almost like browse through and shop while you’re watching your YouTube video, which is really cool. All of this is available for people who are not paying what YouTube, because YouTube premium, which I’ll get into, but this is something that on the free version of YouTube, you can have as just these paid upgrades for people to be able to see in purchase.
Tiff (15:05):
And you, as a creator, don’t have to depend on someone who’s paying a different membership fee to YouTube, to be able to see all these things that they can see all these ways that they can support your channel and support you as a creator. One more. This one is interesting. Okay. The last one I’ll mention is YouTube brand connect. So it’s a way for brands on YouTube and creators on YouTube to partner together and create branded campaigns. Again, I highly recommend you go down a little bit of a rabbit hole and do some research on what that means, but overall, it’s a way for brands and creators to get together and get paid. And we’ve seen, you know, I don’t want to name names because some of it’s very controversial, but we’ve seen YouTube creators do amazing things as far as drawing in big audiences, because they have so many followers across YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, all the different platforms.
Tiff (15:56):
We’ve seen YouTubers box and like put on Showtime events with Floyd Mayweather and all these different things, you know, just able to bring in a large audience. So brands pretty much see YouTube creators as we would call kind of like influencers on Instagram. They just have a way of drawing people in. So it’s great for brands and creators to be able to connect, but to be able to actually have a contract through YouTube, to make sure that everyone’s being taken care of certain standards with rates and everything. It depends on where you’re at, but it could be a better way of campaigning with someone as opposed to having an individual contract on your own. Just making sure that you’re taken care of. Again, I, we are not sponsored the YouTube, so I’m not pushing any of these, uh, ways that you can make money. It’s more, just a good idea for you to know what is capable what’s possible.
Tiff (16:45):
And if you feel comfortable, you have, you know, your whole lawyers and accountants and everything set up for you to do individual brand contracts. Go ahead. But if you’d rather have some protection in through a third party system, this is offered through YouTube and the last thing, which I’m sure everybody is seeing just those YouTube premium ads pop up. So YouTube premium, right? So this is now a general population of people who are just deciding, I don’t want to have any YouTube ads. I want to be able to download YouTube videos. I want to have just more control over how I browse YouTube. They’re paying a monthly fee to YouTube, right? Not directly to the creator, but if you happen to have a popular channel, you know, people are watching who, people who are in YouTube premium they’re members of YouTube premium. They’re watching your videos over and over again, you as a creator, actually able to get percentages of those monthly fees coming into you through your YouTube dollars.
Tiff (17:40):
Something I didn’t even really know happen, which is really cool. And to say, I think YouTube has so much power. I don’t think they really have to do that, but I think YouTube uniquely wants to constantly encourage creators to create and to get more views and more people over to YouTube. So it makes sense. They’re like, Hey, if people are paying premium, we still want to give some money to the people who are still attracting more and more people to our platform. So like I said, they don’t have to directly become YouTube premium members by clicking on your link or having any kind of affiliate necessarily linked through YouTube that they know that, oh, I was watching this person’s video. And that’s when I became a YouTube premium member that doesn’t really count. It’s just the more views that you get overall because you’re a popular channel and you’re doing great on YouTube.
Tiff (18:27):
The more money that’s coming into your pocket, whether they’re YouTube premium member or not, you just get paid for the views. That’s the great thing about the platform. So again, do some research, you know, Christine and I love to just open up your minds to what’s possible because so many people are able to retire and able to actually just sit there and go, Hey, I’m going to create videos online and create content online. I’m going to educate people. I’m going to inform by being able to make some money off of what they’re doing by serving a very unique audience. So even though publicly, we see people every once in a while making money in certain ways, there’s so many things on the back end that you can be doing. You can be researching. And of course, nothing replaces time and practice and hard work and, you know, really getting to develop and get better and better as a creator, but knowing what your options are, is always important. Christine, is there anything else that we think they should know about premium channels?
Christine (19:25):
I think the big takeaway for me from today’s episode, which again is pretty high level, there’s obviously a ton more research you can do like to have said is this is a business model. And so a lot of what we talk about on think like a producer is creative ideas, content strategy, you know, production tips, but now we’re kind of dipping our toe in this episode to actual business models. And that’s what this season is about. You know, making money from your podcast, attracting your dream customers through this medium. So take it all with a grain of salt and really think about, do any of these revenue generation models actually make sense for me and my longterm goals? Because the one thing we don’t want you to do is get distracted by like the shiny object, all of these monetization opportunities that would actually take you off course of where you want to go with your brand, your work, your audience, how you’re serving, what content you’re creating.
Christine (20:19):
So this is purely to inform you and inspire you. It’s not meant to distract you. And, um, we are always happy if you do have more questions, if this is really inciting a lot of curiosity, and you would like to do a consultation with us and really, you know, dive into this for your brand and explore the possibilities. This is the kind of consulting we do with our clients. So if you are interested in consulting with Tiff or I, or both of us on any of this, just click on the link in the show notes, we love doing this kind of work with clients and we have more awesome content coming to you this season all about how to make money from your podcast. So be sure to subscribe to the show if you’re not YouTube, any podcast platform, and we will see you on the next episode.
Christine (21:08):
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Think Like a Producer. This has been a Worthfull Media production. Massive thanks to our team who makes the show possible. Worthfull Media for audio editing, Jorge and Veronica from Mosaico Productions for video effects and Amela Subasic for our amazing artwork and graphics.