How Gary Arndt built Everything Everywhere, a podcast with 1.5 million monthly downloads
He's already published 1,400 episodes since 2020.
In early 2020, Gary Arndt watched his entire business collapse almost overnight.
For more than a decade, he had built a career as a travel photographer and blogger, amassing millions of followers across platforms and traveling to over 200 countries and territories. His site, Everything Everywhere, had become one of the most recognizable travel blogs on the internet. But when the pandemic shut down global travel, that entire ecosystem—affiliate revenue, brand deals, events—vanished within weeks.
“Within two weeks… I lost 95% of my income,” Arndt recalled. “Traffic to the website dries up. Affiliate sales dry up. All the contracts I had canceled.”
What came next wasn’t just a pivot—it was a complete reinvention. Within months, Arndt launched a daily educational podcast. Today, that show, Everything Everywhere Daily, generates roughly 1.5 million downloads per month and earns significantly more than his previous career ever did.
In a recent interview, Arndt walked through how he found his audience, where he gets his ideas for new episodes, and why he weaned himself off the social media platforms that once delivered him huge reach.
From Early Internet Entrepreneur to Travel Blogger
Long before podcasting, Arndt was already a seasoned internet entrepreneur.
In the mid-1990s, he co-founded a web development consultancy after his college roommate helped create ColdFusion, one of the earliest tools for building database-driven websites. Within four years, Arndt had scaled the company to 50 employees and sold it to a division of British Telecom.
He then built a network of gaming websites that reached 50 million monthly pageviews—an impressive feat in the early 2000s. But when the dot-com bubble burst, his ad revenue disappeared overnight.
“Our revenue literally went to nothing,” he said.
That experience would later shape how he thought about platform risk.
After a brief stint studying geology, Arndt made a radical decision: he would travel the world for a year. That year turned into 13.
Building a Travel Brand Before Social Media
Arndt launched Everything Everywhere in the mid-2000s, before the rise of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. At the time, blogging functioned more like a newsletter ecosystem powered by RSS feeds.
“People would read your site every day. So it was more like a newsletter,” he said.
His breakthrough came when he realized that travel content wasn’t primarily about utility—it was about aspiration.
After analyzing travel magazines, he concluded that readers weren’t planning trips. They were fantasizing.
“It was basically travel porn,” he said.
That insight led him to focus heavily on photography, publishing one image per day. Over time, he became an award-winning travel photographer and built a large audience across his website and social platforms.
But even at its peak, the business had structural weaknesses.
The Problem With Platform Dependency
As social media platforms grew, Arndt leaned into them—building large followings on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Google+. At one point, he had 2 million followers on Google+ alone.
But he began to notice a troubling pattern.
After investing money into building a Facebook audience, the platform reduced organic reach and forced creators to pay to access their own followers.
“They pulled the rug out,” he said.
Meanwhile, most travel blogs became heavily dependent on Google search traffic—often accounting for more than 90% of their audience.
Arndt drew a critical distinction:
“You don’t have readers. You have traffic.”
That realization became even more concerning when he recognized the inherent limitations of travel content itself. Unlike politics, sports, or technology, travel isn’t a daily habit.
“People don’t care about travel unless they’re about to go on a trip,” he said.
The result: a business model built on one-time search intent, not recurring engagement.
By 2019, he was already questioning the sustainability of the entire ecosystem. The pandemic simply accelerated the inevitable.
Reinventing the Business With a Daily Podcast
When COVID shut down global travel, Arndt knew he needed a new model—one that didn’t depend on travel itself.
He had already experimented with podcasting for years, including a long-running show called This Week in Travel. But this time, he approached it differently.
Instead of launching a traditional weekly podcast, he made a bold decision: he would publish every day.
“I met a guy who had been very successful… He launched a daily podcast,” Arndt said. “And I realized… this works out much better.”
On July 20, 2020, he launched Everything Everywhere Daily.
The show would be:
Short (around 12 minutes per episode)
Highly produced but simple in format
Covering a wide range of topics: history, science, geography, biographies
Published seven days a week
Crucially, it was no longer a travel podcast.
“I wanted something that people would be interested in all the time,” he said.
The Power of a Daily Format
At the core of Arndt’s strategy is consistency—and volume.
Each episode requires writing roughly 2,000 words, effectively producing a full essay every day.
He maintains a running list of nearly 1,000 topic ideas and selects subjects based on interest and familiarity. Some episodes require deep research; others draw on his existing knowledge.
The format itself is tightly structured:
30-second cold open
Theme music
Two ads
Main content
Outro
This consistency has several advantages:
1. Habit Formation
Daily publishing creates a listener habit similar to newsletters or morning briefings.
2. Massive Content Library
With over 1,400 episodes, the show generates a vast archive that continues to attract new listeners.
3. SEO Flywheel
Each episode targets a different topic, creating a long-tail discovery engine within podcast platforms.
“I am throwing an extremely wide net over a wide variety of topics,” he said.
Paywall incoming…
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