How Project Brazen builds huge audiences for its narrative podcasts

The startup operates almost like a movie studio in how it produces shows.

You may have noticed recently that most of the podcasts generating multi-million dollar paydays are chat shows centered around star hosts. Meanwhile, many of the major platforms and media outlets have pulled back their investments in narrative podcasts, mostly because they’re expensive to produce and more difficult to monetize.

But at least one company remains committed to narrative shows: Project Brazen. Founded by two former Wall Street Journal reporters, the startup operates almost like a movie studio in how it produces shows, and it’s launched several narrative series that went on to top the podcast download charts.

In an interview, co-founder Bradley Hope walked through every aspect of its marketing strategy, including Project Brazen’s pre-launch checklist, its approach to public relations, and how it leverages its own growing network to boost a new show:

When we first started, we really didn't have much experience in podcasts. And we just learned everything from scratch. Unlike most people who produce podcasts, we distribute it on our own network, which is called Brazen. We distribute on Apple and Spotify and everything like that.

But under the brand of Brazen, we only ever sold one podcast. Every other one is our own podcast. And in taking on that risk and taking on that challenge, you learn a lot more about podcasts because there's nobody else taking it from here. It's all up to you.

And so we've learned a lot and we created something that we call the big machine. And we have a big machine for every project. And it's essentially a very detailed checklist that's created at the beginning. It goes hand in hand with a calendar of everything you have to do from the beginning to the end. And it's dozens and dozens of steps. And as you kind of get towards the end of the series, that would include creating a trailer. We always create a visual trailer, an audio trailer, sometimes multiple versions of ads depending on the audience.

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Transcript

Hey Bradley, thanks for joining us.

Hey Simon, how are you?

I'm doing great. It's great to have you on. So we've had you on before where you talked about Project Brazen and told the story of the founding and everything like that. We don't want to rehash all of that here, but just to bring people up to speed on what Project Brazen is, what year did you launch Project Brazen?

It's been three years now, so I guess, yeah, whatever year that was.

Yeah, and you launched it with a partner. You were a Wall Street Journal reporter and you launched it with another former Wall Street Journal reporter.

Yeah, that's Tom Wright. He's based in Singapore and I'm based in London.

Yeah, and it was kind of like you were building off the momentum of a major investigation that you had done at Wall Street Journal, and then also both of you teamed up to write a book about it.

Yeah, that's right. That was the beginning of our partnership. We worked together at the Wall Street Journal for several years, really extensively every single day. And then we wrote a book called Billion Dollar Whale.

And you launched Project Brazen three years ago. What's kind of the elevator pitch for what Project Brazen is? Because it's not a traditional media outlet as most people think of it.

No, I think of us as a commercial business that's very focused on finding and creating original stories that unfold in different mediums. We've done a lot in the podcast space. We just are about to do our first audio book. We're working extensively in documentaries. And then on top of all of that, we are working on the adaptations of some of our work into film and television as well.

Yeah, it almost operates like a movie studio in the sense that the studio is like funding different projects. And yeah, it owns some of the IP, but it's not like a top down media outlet like the New York Times, where everybody's like a full time employee or something like that. Instead, you're funding individual stories and kind of building up teams around those individual things.

Yeah, that's right. And we work a lot in partnership with other people. So, for example, we're very journalistic. And so we work really well with documentary companies who are more focused on the production of a documentary, but they're not that journalistic. So we do all the journalistic work and we work together, you know. And so so I think at the core, journalism is really journalism and storytelling is our strength.

And how many shows have you produced approximately? 

I think it's more than 13 now. Almost all of them are limited series. Some of them were seasonal ones. So we did a lot of limited series. So things like Fat Leonard, most recently one called Fur and Loathing. We did a few seasonal ones. We did a business show called The Closer about deals, and it came in groups of seasons. And we have one ongoing show right now called Whale Hunting, which is an offshoot of our newsletter, also called Whale Hunting.

And I think you mostly do narrative shows, although I think you've since kind of gotten into more regular chat podcasts as well.

Yeah, that's right. And we also built our own recording studio here in London. And it's a video and audio recording space. Quite an interesting place. Like the entire back wall is a series of screens that together make one big screen. So it's a very visual space. And so we always have a very visual aspect to everything we do, including podcasts.

So in terms of a show that would be good for Project Brazen, like when you're evaluating pitches and ideas and stuff like that, what is the quintessential elements that it needs to have for it to be a good fit for Project Brazen?

I think we're basically very focused on long form storytelling. So we're looking for projects that have really interesting worlds to explore through narratives involving great characters. A lot of what we do is we surveil the world, looking all the time for what we would consider good waters for fishing. So that might be that, for example, one time I read the front page article about how Antwerp was the new center of the drug world. It's no longer Miami, it's Antwerp. And I thought that's such a fascinating change. I wonder what the story is. So we partnered with a great journalist who had an interest in this area already called Mitchell Prothero. He relocated to Antwerp for like six months, really getting deep into the story, recording, meeting people. And then that's how that project came about. And so we're always looking all the time and we're doing a little bit of reporting, a little bit of developing and seeing if it has what it takes to be compelling. And obviously we're always looking for stories that are so good That they feel like they could be told in different formats as well.

So you would never produce a podcast that's just about an industry or something like that. You would have to find a specific compelling character within that industry, whether it's a hero or a villain or something like that. And kind of telling the story of that industry through that character.

Yeah, I think the way I think about it is we never worry about a topic. So we're never saying, oh, we really want to do a project on this topic. We're just looking for, oh, have you heard the story of this guy or this woman who went through this experience? That's our entry point.

And then in the process of evaluating that story, we say, oh, wow, this is so much fun because it also takes us inside the world of X. And we get to learn all about that. So like, for example... We have a great partnership with a journalist called Nicky Woolf, and he did a project with us about Havana syndrome, and he was the host of our most recent podcast called Fur and Loathing. And he had, as a Guardian journalist, heard this little snippet of news about this chemical weapon attack on a furry convention in Chicago. And it always stuck in his mind. He told us about it, and we saw there was a lot of room to dive into the world of the furries and it turns out it also has an alt-right aspect and so it's like a true crime story in this completely unexpected world, and that was really exciting for us.

And is  the thinking there, at least in the back of your minds, is if you have an actual story then it's easier to adapt it possibly in the future like for a tv show or a movie?

I think the answer is probably yes to that, but I would say we're not super cynical people. We do things all the time that don't yield a derivative production. We just love doing this stuff. And people, when they go to listen to a podcast – there's only two podcasts people listen to. There's 

something that's entertaining or something that's helpful to you, meaning you’re learning something, you're bettering yourself. And so those are the only two categories that really work in my opinion. People don't want to listen to an encyclopedic entry about furries. They want to be drawn in by a person, an ordinary person or whatever it might be, and let that be the way they learn about the subject. So humans have always learned through stories. So it's not like we're reinventing anything here, but we just have a very tight focus on what works. We're not making lots of things all the time. We're making a few things well. And so as a result, we can be a bit choosy about what we work on.

And is it usually the dynamic that is someone is pitching you on a show?

No, I'd say a lot of it comes out of discussions. So we like to meet with other journalists, especially magazine writers and people who are freelance. Those are our best collaborators. And we also have our own ideas. We do a lot that is internally developed. And of course, almost everyone here has a journalistic background. So it's just innate to us to just produce organically. But we also work in conjunction with other journalists.

So when you're developing a show, that's probably a multi-month process. Do you tend to complete an entire season before it launches? Or is the show still coming together as new episodes are coming out?

Well, I wish I could say that we were organized enough to always be done in advance, but it's inevitable that it's such a kind of chaotic process that sometimes we're not completely done. We try to be pretty far along, almost done by the time the show launches. But in an ideal world, it's completely done.

By the day one launch, it's completely done because it gives you more options. You can make it bingeable to people, which is really important for driving subscriptions, but we haven't always met the deadline, you know?

Is there always a process where you're creating a show trailer, and what is that process?

When we first started, we really didn't have much experience in podcasts. And we just learned everything from scratch. Unlike most people who produce podcasts, we distribute it on our own network, which is called Brazen. We distribute on Apple and Spotify and everything like that.

But under the brand of Brazen, we only ever sold one podcast. Every other one is our own podcast. And in taking on that risk and taking on that challenge, you learn a lot more about podcasts because there's nobody else taking it from here. It's all up to you.

And so we've learned a lot and we created something that we call the big machine. And we have a big machine for every project. And it's essentially a very detailed checklist that's created at the beginning. It goes hand in hand with a calendar of everything you have to do from the beginning to the end. And it's dozens and dozens of steps. And as you kind of get towards the end of the series, that would include creating a trailer. We always create a visual trailer, an audio trailer, sometimes multiple versions of ads depending on the audience. So like this one, for example, for Unloathing, we had a kind of true crime version of the ad. And we had another one that was a bit more artistic in a sense. So we learned a lot through the process of continuously making it from the beginning to the end.

And is the trailer mainly a kind of bookmark, just kind of like a landing page? So if you're building up advanced buzz around the podcast, then they have something they can go subscribe to, because obviously it takes a few days for the show to start appearing on Apple and all the other apps that pull from the RSS feeds. So if you're starting to build buzz in advance, they need something that they can go subscribe to that’s a landing page or something like that. Or do you think the trailer does anything else?

Well, I agree with everything you said. It does serve that role because there's nothing harder than putting momentum into a new feed. A new feed is a very tough thing to get going. And so you should do everything you can. So we typically do a trailer. We do a pre-show bonus, which is more of an interview with the creator. And that's actually even almost more important than the trailer sometimes because it's so clear. When you just have a conversation with someone, you can ask questions like, how did this story come about? How did you get into it? People really comprehend that really well.

And sometimes it's easier for them to understand the show that's about to come if they have this pre-show bonus. The trailer is like the cinematic version and it's useful. In fact, for us, we actually almost make the trailer before we make the show. Because what we do here is we make a sizzle at the very beginning of the project to start to understand what the show is going to sound like, what it’s going to be like, what the people that we're interviewing sound like in serial order. So we always make this kind of sizzle in the beginning.

And then at the end, we make a trailer. But they're very related in a sense. There's the most basic rough version, and then the final version is the trailer. So it's an important North Star for the production to have something like that that's crystallized from the very beginning. So we use it for that reason as well, too, just to kind of get to the answer faster rather than fooling around and around and around. Then your trailer can also be the basis for ads that you're creating. You can cut out a slice of it. So it's one of those things that serves a lot of purposes.

I feel like the philosophy five, six years ago was every narrative show needs its own feed. And then a lot of companies pivoted, realizing how difficult it is to build an audience for a brand new feed. And so they created basically some kind of narrative feed where every single new podcast they launch is a season of that show, even if it's different guests or different subject matters and stuff like that. What's your approach in terms of just marketing each new podcast as a new as a season versus actually launching it on a new brand new feed?

Well, ironically, when we first started, we did the thing that nobody was doing. We put everything in one feed. Then we started to dislike that because of the discoverability and also because our shows were so different that one another, the audience didn't necessarily translate. So we started to break them out.

So initially we did all one feed. Then we did all one feed and we broke out vanity feeds so that you could have the album cover in a network. So you actually had it in two places, initial launch in the same feed, and then it spun out into its own feed. And then over time, we actually started doing the thing that everyone used to do, but they don't do anymore as much, which is just use new feeds. And it's largely because it has an aesthetic quality – I want to see all the album covers in the store. And if Apple, for example, or Spotify would allow you to create an album cover for a show that ran in the same feed, I would love that and I would put everything in one feed, but because I care a lot about the long term of this network, I decided to do them one by one.

Now we have a couple exceptions to this rule. We also really believe in short form series, so we did a show earlier this year that was four parts. It seems like a big stretch to have a new feed for a four-part show. So we rebranded that original feed that we had that had all the shows initially. We actually deleted the back catalog because they now exist in their own feeds. And we rebranded that to Hidden Worlds, which is a feed where you run shorter series that have great characters and storytelling like we always do. We're doing a kind of a hybrid strategy at this point. And I think we would like to do more thematic feeds. For example, we want to do one that's business themed, sort of like narrative journalism for business. So that's something we're working on next. And that will keep using the same feed. But in general, if you're launching these huge productions, you want them to have their own aesthetic quality to them and everything like that, it seems like a waste to keep putting them in the same feed because it almost takes away their heft and their value.

And as part of your checklist, are you building a landing page on the Project Brazen website or are you building out a separate URL for a new show?

Yeah, so it may be a little confusing, but our company is Project Brazen. That's the engine of what we do. Our network is called Brazen and it has its own front page as a website, brazen.fm. It also has its own front page in Apple, and Spotify doesn't allow you to have a network front page. But we're very design focused too. So for example, on Apple, we use every inch of designable space. Like every time there's a new change to how they let you design it, we design that component as well. So our store is very designed and that's very important to us because I think it's hard to exist in a purely audio world. You kind of need a visual cue to guide you. And even for myself, I like to see the faces of the people that I'm listening to. I want to see that in some format. 

So how do you start building anticipation for a show in advance? Like what's the way to get people excited and subscribing to the trailer feed, even though there's no actual content on it?

Well, we've been very experimental in this space. So I'd say early on we did more lavish efforts, you know, and then now we have a more focused and honed version. But one thing we've always believed in is to do one outside the box thing for every project. So, for example, we did this really big series called Corinna and the King  about the King of Spain, a big scandal. And it was really a juicy story. And we have this exclusive access to the woman that had the affair with the King of Spain. We made it in Spanish and in English.

And we did three things for that project, which were non-typical for audio. One of them is we created a fake advertising campaign in Spain, in Spanish, distributed on Instagram. There was a fake fashion advertisement, but you could tell there was something like a joke to it. And there were all kinds of inside jokes about the story, which was somewhat familiar in Spain. And it built a lot of anticipation. We got tons and tons of signups to a newsletter that was attached to the coming project. And we got a lot of media attention as well.

We also invented a perfume with a local perfume maker. And we sent it in the media to all the different journalists. And the box description was kind of like a trailer for the podcast, but in a roundabout way. And we also had a big launch party here in London where we invited all the media to come and hear about the project. So that actually worked really well. It was an explosively downloaded podcast, especially in Spain, because it just lit up like wildfire. And we really do credit the campaign to helping get that ignited. But anyways, that's a lavish version.

For every single project, we'll always have a detailed marketing strategy. And for limited shows, what we learned is too much anticipation can actually fizzle out. So what we'll do is in the one-month run-up to a new show, we'll start a kind of teaser campaign. Something abstract that we distribute on all of our platforms because we have multiple newsletters, multiple podcasts. We have a YouTube channel. We'll start to put something out that says something's coming. So our core listeners know there's something coming. And usually we'll direct them to the feed so they can start pressing the plus sign and start following, waiting for that show to come out.

And then the majority of our anticipation building is really the few days running up to the launch because that's when there's an actual follow through. If you listen to something two days before and then two days later it comes out, great. If it’s 30 days before, you’re already onto something new by the time the show comes out. So we really focus on that. We have a very concerted marketing effort where we reach all the reviewers a long time in advance if we can. They have a busy schedule. They don't review a show that they hear about a week before it comes out.

How big is the podcast critic ecosystem?

Interestingly, it's actually much bigger in London. So the Financial Times and a bunch of newspapers here review podcasts when they come out. And they review it in print as well. In America, I would say it's a little bit more focused on the influential newsletters. So you have to try to get the word to them and they may or they may not include it. Pretty in-crowd kind of vibe. If you're in the in-crowd, maybe you get covered. If not, we've always been a little bit more outsider. We try organic press coverage too, even though it's not as important. But if there's an opportunity, you don't want to leave it on the floor. And we run ads across the network.

Do you have an in-house PR person or do you hire a freelance PR person? 

We used to have a PR firm, but what we've realized over time is we can actually handle that pretty well ourselves because it's not rocket science. It's a press release. And then sending messages out to the right people. We do a lot of research at our company. We have a head of research. She's based in San Francisco. And we have all these research products we invented for our own purposes, and then increasingly for other clients. One of our research products is a marketing-related research where we look at a project like Corinna and the King, and we say, who are the little but very valuable audiences for this project? It could be, for example, a YouTuber who covers royal families and has 5,000 subscribers, but they're like the most diehard 5,000 royal family subscribers in the world. We really try to get to know them.

We write them a personal message and explain about the show and offer them to hear it early and whatever else they could ever want. Same thing goes for Reddit and all these different things. We tend to put more value on that kind of thing than on the conventional press because it doesn't seem to be a huge driver. It's nice to get reviewed and get reviewed positively, but it doesn't really change your download dynamics. It kind of changes how you can talk about the podcast in other venues. So we try a lot of different things all the time, and we're always looking for a new experiment to try as well.

We've also had a lot of events. So we did two events at the Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., where we did a big event where they invited the entire mailing list of the Spy Museum to come and hear a talk. We did two different espionage-related projects. So we're always on the lookout for something that's real world as well.

Yeah. Does every show get an ad budget or anything like that in terms of promotion?

In the very beginning, I bought ads, and it was the biggest waste of money in my life. Because you can say, oh, my ad budget's $5,000, $10,000, and it will just be like lighting that money on fire. It just does not convert. The only time you should have an ad budget for a show is an ongoing show. And you're very targeted and very smart about it. But even the smartest people of all, like, for example, Jordan Harbinger – he has a very big podcast. He used to buy a lot of ads. He was one of the smartest people about buying ads. But over time, he just started doing cross promotions because he can trade cross promotions with anybody. He's got enough inventory and he gives them like 50 000 impressions and then it runs for like 10 seconds on his podcast and then on their podcast it runs like an ad for like four weeks or or two months .

So the way the swap works is based on if I have a much larger audience, and in order to do the swap you have to run several promos to equal my one promo or something like that?

Yeah it's just about impressions, so if you say 50,000 impressions, there's a way to track how many impressions you’ve traded, and you can only do that if you already have shows. We have lots of shows that we own and we can trade that inventory any day of the week. So we trade all the time and we like to trade with our friends too, we even do favors to our friends. We say, look we'll give you a promotion 50 000 and then later on if you get somewhere and you can trade us back, great. So that's the best because it's all free, you're just giving impressions to each other and you're trading them, and there's a way to track it so it's really scientific too.

So even if it's a new show of yours that doesn't have an audience, because you have a large network, you're agreeing that they promote the new show, but you're running their promos on your already existing shows.

Yeah, it runs in every show. Yeah, exactly.

And is that just an informal system oft relationship building, or is there some kind of back end formal thing that's happening that most people don't know about?

So there are people whose job it is to do this. So you can hire them and they can really figure out the most strategic ways to do it. There's some really talented people out there. And if anybody wants to hear about who they are, they can email me and I'm happy to introduce them.

There's also just like friends. Like we're friends with Campside Media. We're friends with Kaleidoscope. And sometimes we can do a trade with other similar organizations where we all speak the same language. And then there's actually other places like there's a Slack channel. It's called Podcast Promo Exchange, where lots of people from the podcast industry are all part of this Slack channel. And they can say, hey, I'm looking for this. I'm looking for that. And there's a bit of a community where you can access that as well.

And for that, are you just handing over your trailer to them? Like, are you giving them the assets and they're just running them? Is that how it works?

We do like 30 second ads. So like we will make a 30 second ad and we'll give it to them and then they'll give us the same. Ideally, we could record a little intro. Like the best thing you could do to help somebody else out is to record a little intro as yourself and say, hey, this new show is coming out. It's really exciting. Here's the ad, because really what it comes down to, if you're thinking about marketing anything, it comes down to one thing: people want a shortcut to high quality things. They want a shortcut. They don't want to have to find things themselves.

That's why people like myself, we love to look at top 10 lists, top 10 podcasts of 2024. That's a great service to me because I don't want to actually find those myself. I want somebody else who I trust to give me that advice. So if you're doing something in marketing that doesn't give somebody a clue that this is actually a good thing – like buying an ad is the exact opposite, an ad is this something you put out and everyone's like, oh do i want to listen to this or not? They don't know from the ad because they're not trusting it. What they would rather have is some reason that they should listen to the show in addition to it being interesting. That's why personal recommendations are so important. One person with 5,000 followers who writes an impassioned support for a podcast is worth 100,000 impressions of paid ads. That's how I feel.

So sometimes shows like This American Life will run a podcast episode from some lesser known podcast and This American Life gets some great content out of it. And then obviously that podcast gets some promotion. Do you try to do anything like that where maybe another large podcast feed wants to run your first episode or something as a standalone episode?

We have done that. We did that once, I believe. I mean, I'm sure we would love to do more of it. It's not the easiest thing. It's hard to coordinate. Yeah, This American Life, too, is in a super elite public radio world. And if you're not a public radio person interacting with them through the public radio ecosystem, it's harder. Also, we're a little bit outsiders in terms of podcasts. We didn't come from podcasts. We didn't come from radio. So we don't have all the credit in the in-crowd of podcasts. But we would love to do that anything that helps people find shows we would love to support other shows too any way we can. We're always looking for ways to support people trying to get off the ground. Even in our podcast studio, we have something called pilot season where if people have an idea for podcasts we'll make your first pilot for free just to help you get started, and we hope that we develop a relationship together, but if not we're just happy to have helped.

From a social media perspective, does each new show get its own social media feeds?

I think over time we've really honed that down because that can be pretty confusing. So we now have a Brazen FM-focused social strategy. For example, our newsletter and other podcast called Whale Hunting, it has some of its own feeds, but it has its own voice. It's so distinct and ongoing that it makes sense. We used to even have different newsletters in anticipation of a podcast, but now we've really just kind of honed it down and we're trying to keep it more simple.

And then in terms of promoting shows within your own network, is it just part of the process of the producer that every single episode of every single show they have to pull in promo at X minute break or something? How is that built into the actual process to make that efficient?

It's just ad breaks. So you can just designate those ad break slots as ads or house promos. It's just like something you can customize from the back end. We've been using Megaphone for our last few shows. Before that, we used PRX's internal system because we had a great relationship with them. But yeah, that's as simple as that.

So we build ad breaks into the shows. We hope we get some ads, but we don't assume that it's going to be full of ads. The most sought-after spots are obviously the pre-roll, and we do a lot of cross-promos there for other shows. We give them the first slot, which is the best one.

And like in an individual episode, how are you choosing which other podcasts within your network to promote in that? Is it just like in a rotation or is it more strategic where you're specifically wanting to promote this show on this podcast or something like that?

I think we have some room to improve there. We typically are promoting the new show that comes out. But we just had the idea today, actually, to make a kind of general network ad where it's like, you're listening to this show, but there's all these other shows out there. You don't have to hear an ad for every show. Just explore the Brazen network to find other shows you might be interested in. So we're going to make that ad as well. If you're really good at this, which we're trying to be, is you really have it be someone's job to constantly think about the redirection within the whole network ,whether it's from the newsletters to the social media to the audio network to the video network, and it has to all be cross-referencing and redistributing people as often as you can.

And as you get bigger and bigger, generally, how does it feel in terms of whether it's getting easier or not to build buzz for a show now that you have a stable of different properties and reach and distribution compared to where you were three years ago when you were launching your first one or two shows?

Yeah, I think we're more efficient now. It's less chaotic, but it's still hard to make something a big deal no matter what you do. If you're not part of a big network that can just stuff ads down the throats of gazillions of people, it's very tough. But we've always believed in being independent. And so we accept that it's not going to be as easy. And so every time we're successful, we feel very gratified because we earn that, you know. I would say, though, for people thinking of creating podcasts, PRX is a great ally for that. And they were really important in our business

origin story, because they have access to certain levers that can really push your exposure up. And one of them is an amazing relationship with NPR One, the app. NPR One, you can't promote that if you're just iHeart. You can only get to them through the public radio network.

And that app can really drive a huge exposure of a new show because it basically pushes out new shows to its entire audience every day, so people can listen to podcasts like the radio and they can hear a new episode and they can hear another episode of another show and then some of those people become your new unexpected listeners.

You always hear ‘distributed by PRX’. I still don't 100% understand what PRX is, like what is it doing for you specifically?

PRX is essentially a utility of public radio to distribute podcasts. So they needed a technology platform to do that. They couldn't just do it themselves. They pooled together to make this nonprofit to be able to do that. So PRX is what makes it possible for public radio stations to distribute podcasts. And so PRX can distribute it. They can sell ads with you and share it with you. And they can do other things too.

Sell ads where? On public radio or where?

On the podcast. So like they have a whole platform tech stack for distributing podcasts, including insertion of ads. They have an ad selling partner there. And so they sell ads on all kinds of major shows on behalf of those public radio stations.

So I upload my podcast to Libsyn and then Libsyn distributes it to all the major podcast players. Is that kind of what it does?

It's not dissimilar. So you would upload your podcast to PRX, their system, which is called Dovetail. And you have your way to look at metrics, the internal metrics thing. You have your way to manage the ads on it. So it's more of a public utility version of that rather than a commercial business that you're working with. It's more of a nonprofit. So they have a bit more of a mission about journalism and podcasts and things like that.

So obviously you pick stories that are kind of evergreen in nature and a lot of them you're hoping to adapt into IP and stuff like that, but also your staff is small, so you probably are constantly focused on the new shows. Do you have a plan in place for, okay, this show is ending we're moving on to new shows but we need to find new ways to drive new audiences to this older show? How much do you think about that? Like you have a show that's called Fat Leonard that's a few years old at this point. Like what are you doing to drive new people to Fat Leonard?

fat Leonard is interesting. We also made it into an audio book. So we re-recorded it as an audio book. We also made it into an e-book. So we really tried to make that into different formats. It's the kind of thing that every now and then we'll just do as a kind of marketing push to revive that feed. Or in that case as well, there's been a lot of updates online. on the actual case. So we'll use that as an opportunity to do a refresher. We also have this weekly podcast called Whale Hunting. If something's happening, we can talk about it in that podcast and revive interest.

But other than that, we're not really doing too much. We call it back catalog refreshing. We did some videos about old shows to kind of reintroduce them to audiences, but beyond that that's all we do.

I've noticed with some networks, a show will be over but they'll just keep on running promos for new shows in that feed and I guess they're like, well, if people are subscribed to this feed anyway might as well squeeze whatever we can out of it still. Do you do anything like that? 

We do. Yeah. So your feeds still do propagate into people's phones, although there's been some changes because of technical stuff that's happened with Apple phones. We still do that and it probably drives a little bit of interest. It’s a way to just run the trailer or something of a new show in an old feed and some people will just get to hear the trailer automatically. It's good to get that out. I do think it's kind of a clunky thing to do because people get a little annoyed because they're lik,e why am i still subscribed to this feed, it's just like lots of random trailers.

Well, do you go and delete the trailer later? Because let's say I heard about this podcast from a few years ago, Fat Leonard, and I go to the feed and it's just a bunch of  trailers for other shows. What's the kind of thinking there in terms of new audiences finding the show?

Yeah, I strongly advocate using a kind of gardening metaphor for your network and just maintaining it and getting rid of things. Don't feel scared to delete things. Some people are scared to delete things because it actually deletes your data. So if you have like 10,000 downloads of that ad and you delete it, it's just not part of your dashboard anymore. But to me, that's silly. That’s a silly reason to keep it. But yeah, I think you should delete it after a while.