🎧 Why Podcasts Make Sense for Me Right Now
The way I make sense of my world these days is primarily through audio podcasts.
I’m a dad. Podcasts are a godsend. Most days I’m doing dishes, washing or folding laundry. I’m driving to and from activities and trying to put the kids to bed in a dark room without blasting ‘can I see?’ light from my phone.
On a lot of these occasions, I’m listening to Podcasts.
📈 The Scale and Growth of UK Podcasting
It seems that I’m in good company. ~40–45% of the UK population listens to podcasts. Of those that do, they’re listening for 5–7 hours/week. The core demo is 18–34s, and the rapid growth is in my cohort of 35–54s. The podcast industry as a whole is growing 15-20% year-over-year. As of 2025, it seems as if the UK podcast market is generating £800M in revenues.
💰 The UK Podcast Revenue Landscape (2025 Estimates)
Right now, most of that money is coming from ads.
I generated this by working with ChatGPT.
These figures feel a bit off to me. I feel like The Rest is History live tours might generate the bottom end of the live event value on their own… and Patreon reckons that podcasters on its platform generated $472 Million in direct subs worldwide. But the overall percentages feel about right — and it’s a fine starting point for this conversation.
🧪 Why Ads Make Sense — Until They Don’t
You can see why ads, right?
In a world where the natural instinct is to commodify stuff, all those juicy earballs listening for all that time screams one big source of revenue for creators: advertisers!
And sure, that makes sense to many audiences too… but it can also be a shitty way to treat people who really care about your stuff.
🚩 When Ad Models Break Trust
My favorite non-podcast example of this is
He has a huge list and famously doesn’t monetize via paid subs. What he does do is run brand deals — only for people and products he trusts and uses of course. Which led to him running ads for FTX — remember FTX? Miraculously, and thankfully for him, Packy got his crypto out — as in all of it — before FTX was discovered to be stealing everyone’s deposits. But I totally soured on Packy as a commentator after that. I thought I was part of a club. But I was just an eyeball for sale.
I don’t hate advertising by the way. It’s just that I don’t think it’s the only way - especially for budding projects.
💡 Why I Pay for Podcasts — and How That Changes Everything
This is where my experience differs.
I directly subscribe (=pay monthly or generally annual fee) for almost all the pods I listen to on a regular basis.
It creates a bit of a virtuous loop. I pay because I listen and I listen because I pay. There’s a mutual commitment there. There are a ton of other pods I listen to for free that I dip into every now and then. My commitment is lower cos I figure they don’t really need me, and I don’t need them. I treat them differently.
🎯 Niche Podcasts, Committed Audiences
As for my paid ones, the ones I seek out and prioritise, many are extremely niche and probably wouldn’t get made — or made with the same frequency or in the same way — without my support.
is a good example of one that I love dearly, and find to be extremely good. But I couldn’t exactly recommend it to you because it’s frankly unfair of me to plunge you into cultural commentary through a lens of aesthetics and ontology if that’s not your thing.And who’s thing is that? Not a critical mass for advertisers. But a critical mass for a community that cares.
🚫 Not Built for Ads: A Case Study
Cracks in Pomo is a great example of the last kind of podcast I’d launch if I were trying to make money from ads. The ad model really works for certain podcasts — here’s Acast’s definition of minimum criteria to be eligible for ad insertion:
REQUIREMENTS
2000 monthly listens
Targeting listeners above 13 years old
Comply with our Community Guidelines
From what I’ve heard from podcasters, payouts are CPM-based, and you pay ~30% of the ad rev that Acast books and injects into your podcasts, and the same cut of any host-read ads they book for you. And the same for any host reads you book for yourself - because you sourcing your own ads eats their lunch. And how much do advertisers pay per thousand impressions to advertise on Acast?
On Acast, the CPM (Cost Per Mille, or Cost Per Thousand) for podcast advertising generally ranges between $15 and $50. This rate is determined by factors like the type of ad, audience size, and targeting criteria. Acast specifically mentions that pre-recorded ads up to 60 seconds can have CPMs between $15 and $30, while host-read ads might range from $25 to $40.
(I googled this)
So, 2000 monthly listens is actually quite a few. But described in CPM terms, it’s ~70% of $15–$50. So $10.5-$35.
So, if you were charging £5/month, you could make the upper end of that money off 8-10 paid subscribers (remember Substack takes 10% and there’s Stripe fees). And if you’re doing an ep a week and getting 2000 monthly listens, that means about 500 listeners an ep. What if 50 of them were paying?
🧵 A Substack Case Study: Paid Subscriptions at Scale
I think
are a great example of a super-niche pod that does pretty darn well out of paid subs.“Not all of our subscribers are paid subscribers – it’s roughly half and half.”1
You’ll see they have ‘over 2000’ subs, at ~50% paid at ~£55/year the minimum they’re earning ain’t bad.
🤔 So You Want to Start Something… Now What?
So if you’re thinking of starting something new, how do you monetise?
Everyone’s first instinct seems to be ads. I get it. I pitched and made TV in New Zealand for many years and we lived and died off viewership figures which translated directly into advertising rate cards.
Even weirder was the process of writing a proposal for a new show on a piece of paper, giving it to a network producer and them deciding if people would watch it and therefore ads could be sold off it and therefore if they would give us hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds to test that hypothesis.
In fairness, that was how things worked for lots of reasons. We couldn’t write the scripts, hire the talent, film and edit the stuff without significant injection of upfront cash.
But Substack didn’t exist back then.
🏗️ A New Playbook: Substack Live Video Podcast
Today, if I were launching something new… I think it might be a great idea to make it as a Substack Live Video Podcast.
🎬 Why Live? And Why Substack?
Why live? It’s just about recording it. It’s a cool buzz to have some live viewers, but there won’t be many. The important thing is that production costs are ZERO. It just costs people’s time and not even much of that.
High audio quality
Much easier to book guests as it’s effectively a FaceTime call
Immediately publish the replay as a video podcast that distributes across Apple, Spotify, YouTube and everywhere people get their podcasts
Even though I personally listen to stuff in audio — the video component gives it a lot more chance to be seen by a lot more people
Cos you can generate clips to aid awareness and discovery across all social media platforms
🚀 A 6-Week Prototype That Proves the Concept
I’d run it for six weeks or so. That way the show finds its feet, a direct audience finds the show, and maybe some will even pay.
Then you’ve got a property. You’ve got a proof of concept, with a baked-in audience to then shop to BBC or whoever. You’ve got a large enough audience to make sense of direct injection ads via Acast, or Spotify or so on.
Or heck, you might even just keep cranking, making it week in week out as Substack Live.
📣 From Zero to 200K: A Substack Success Story
That’s how
does it and he is making a TON of money.He went from zero to 200,000 subscribers on Substack in one week.
He’s now scooting round the mainstream media telling everyone he makes more on Substack than he did on CNN. Yes, he was already famous, and he’s probably more an exception than a rule. But what I like most about his story is that when he started on Substack he literally didn’t own a laptop. He just did it on his phone. He just talked into his phone and now he’s a bajillionaire or something.
🛠️ Just Start: The Tools Are Ready
I’m not promising that, in fact I vibed with this quote about ‘best practices’...
But if I were prototyping, proving a hunch about a show or a pairing, I don’t know why I would waste a moment doing anything other than spinning up Substack pub, texting the talent and scheduling my first Substack Live, then telling everyone about it.
From there… the audience, direct subscriptions, and opportunities for additional rev through ads, live shows, even miserable merch (I’m sorry I loathe merch).
✅ TL;DR — I’d Just Do It
It’s not even a matter of build it and they will come.
It’s already built.
I’d just try it. I’d just try it as a Substack Live Video Podcast.
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