Monetizing Podcasts with Ryan Estes

eorge grombacher 0:02
Ryan Estes celebrates good conversations. He is the co founder of Kip caster and wild caster org helping, reaching, helping and reaching the world’s most valuable tech and business audiences through b2b advertising host rads. Ed, welcome back to the show, Ryan.

Ryan Estes 0:20
George. So great to be back. Thank you so much for having me on.

george grombacher 0:23
Yeah, excited to have you back. Tell us a little bit your personal life more about your work, why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Ryan Estes 0:29
You bet I live in Denver with my family, I’m married, I’ve got two kids in high school, I’ve got a cat named bird. She’s a little bit traumatized right now because my parents dog is actually staying with us. So there’s a little bit of contention in the household. Aside from that, I I’m a sportsman and probably just kind of a, if you looked up the Coloradan, in the dictionary, you’d see me in a flannel shirt driving my pickup truck. So that’s kind of a little bit about me. And professionally, I’ve worked in podcasting. What I’m here to talk about is a company called Wild cast, which you kind of gave me a great introduction. So wild cast really is a b2b, kind of influencer platform. And I’ve kind of actually gone back and forth with the language of how to talk about this. Because truly, like, there are b2b influencers, as I’m speaking to one today, it’s just depending on who you ask, that might be kind of like a maybe a contentious word as well, you know, so basically, what we do is we connect brands, who have products to audiences who are influenced by by podcasters, by YouTubers, by creators, our platform allows the brand to deliver creative, qualify the shows, and do payouts in one place, one of the challenges for b2b is you’ll have a lot of different little niches, which is to say that the creators for these niches are never going to have like, you know, called Joe Rogan size numbers. Rather, they’re going to have, you know, a great podcast might have 10,000 monthly listeners, it might have 200,000. Well, in aggregate, what we can do is allow access to those audience as one batch. So, you know, for influence managers, people managing those kind of marketing campaigns, it can be a challenge in the past, to kind of wrangle a dozen or so creators, and wild cast essentially brings that to one place. I love it.

george grombacher 2:45
What about how long is bird gonna have to tolerate this? This this horrible treatment? through Wednesday? Okay. All right.

Ryan Estes 2:54
Yeah, a little disappointed I was she’s kind of sitting in the window, you know, overlooking the backyard. So when I’m in the backyard, she’s looking down on me judging me.

george grombacher 3:02
Yeah, buddy. What are you doing to my hair? Get this frickin dog out of the way?

Ryan Estes 3:09
I know that the dog, the dogs? Not that, you know, just curious. But Bird. Bird doesn’t really like dogs, you know, just can’t even tolerate them at all. Right? Are we gonna do? What are you

george grombacher 3:20
going to do? So, the word influencer, the term influencer, the term creator, I, you know, I don’t? These are not bad words. These are not good words. It

Ryan Estes 3:32
just is what it is. I know, I know, I wish there was that we need a new terminology. And George, I’m counting on you to be at the forefront of this creation process. But the fact is, yeah, it’s like, you know, for people in a professional sphere, we, there’s, there’s a lot of them, you know. And usually, it’s kind of a secondary thing where, you know, they’re their media person, because they’re interested in it. It’s not necessarily they’re not an actor and entertainer. So that’s our sweet spot, those kind of folks. And I

george grombacher 4:07
remember learning about influencer marketing in 2017. I, we interviewed somebody on my first podcast way back way back in the day, and I didn’t know what that was. And I don’t think anybody knew what that was. And now if I had to sort of put my finger on it, it would be that category of person that you just sort of talked about. It’s not a celebrity. It’s not a professional athlete. It is somebody who, through our current media available, platforms and outlets has developed some kind of a following that people are paying attention to. And interesting that you look on LinkedIn. And they’re starting to now allow influencer posts to actually make money and things like that. And that’s some it’s been going on on other platforms. But I think that that strikes me as being relatively new. So are more businesses sort of waking up to this. Is that a stupid question?

Ryan Estes 5:01
No, yeah, I think more are, you know, I think there’s something like every quarter, there’s probably another 2000 people, or 2000 companies that are coming to podcast advertising, and realizing that these are really, it’s really good way to sell honestly, one thing that’s kind of unique about podcasts in general, is that every time somebody listens to to a podcast, they had to seek it out and hit play, you know, as opposed to other kind of media channels and distributions, where it’s just kind of the algorithm is putting stuff under your nose. Podcast is a selection every single time. And so the value of the listener is very high. You know, because people are there to listen to the podcast host very specifically and intently, they have to subscribe, they have to seek it out, they have to listen. So what we do to capitalize on those kinds of endorsements is our host read ads, which are considered like, you know, host read, as opposed to like digitally inserted, you’ll hear a lot more digitally inserted ads and podcast now because it technology has really come a long way. So it feels a little bit more like radio, he listened to a podcast, and then suddenly there’s a GEICO commercial, you know, which is very very skippable. But with host read ads, honestly, and particularly in b2b with, you know, tech and business shows, chances are, they’re, they’re listening to that content, because they’re trying to improve their professional life. So they really are really, you know, in a good position to take a recommendation, particularly from a trusted source. So, you know, the sweet spot for this kind of advertising and marketing is just when there’s a kind of a no brainer type product that fits right in with what the audience expects, and what the host feels really enthusiastic about endorsing. So that’s kind of our quest, you know, from a podcaster perspective, you can really see wild cast is just kind of a sales arm, kind of delivering them opportunities.

george grombacher 7:05
So 2000 businesses, roughly speaking on a quarterly basis, coming to the realization of recognition that wow, okay, there’s this massive medium is out there, and maybe we should take advantage of it, which is certainly a shift. And the challenge from podcasts perspective, from your perspective, is how do we get organizations the the head of sales, Head of Marketing, to divert dollars away from more traditional sources into this new medium? And what is the pushback? What are the challenges there?

Ryan Estes 7:43
You know, a couple of years ago, we started on this project, I kind of thought podcasts advertising was ubiquitous enough that we wouldn’t have to sell it, it sold itself. And to a large part, that’s true. But you know, particularly right now, what I didn’t see coming a couple of years ago, was all of the AI tools. So you know, if you’re in marketing right now, you’re starting to notice that SEO is wavering, you know, you’re starting to notice that pay per click on Google is suffering, you’re starting to notice that you’re getting choked out on Metis products, you’re getting choked out on social media products. Yeah, there’s there’s not a lot of lead gen opportunities now. At least new ones. So you know, where influencer, you know, started maybe five years ago, podcast advertising really took shape, maybe four or five years ago. Now people are coming around and be like, Hey, this is a little bit off of my spreadsheet. But let’s try it. You know, I think especially in business and tech, because most of those, our clients, you know, listen to handful of podcasts, you know, and they’ve always got kind of like a, they’ve got a little list in their head, you know, hey, what, what would really fire you up to be on this podcast? Like, oh, well, you know, if you got me on This American Life, that would be amazing, that kind of thing. So, you know, I think because the other marketing channels are either saturated or suffering. It’s really opening up a lot of opportunity for podcasting. Is there a way to

george grombacher 9:14
certainly there’s a large volume of businesses that are moving towards podcasts, is there a way to measure how much advertising dollars are being spent?

Ryan Estes 9:23
Yeah, there’s a couple of tools actually, I’ll name a couple of them. There’s one called Magellan AI that is doing a good job tracking, advertising spend and people in the market and there’s another one pod chaser that pulls data, there’s winmo that pulls data on advertising spend. So you can definitely see who the major players are. I think there’s probably no big surprises BetterHelp athletic greens, you know, that have gone all in, you know, and scaled to a massive size using podcast ads. So I mean, I think one challenge for people getting in to podcast advertising, especially performance marketers that are able to establish, you know, their CAC to the 17th decimal point is this is more branding. And there’s attribution, you know, you know, last touch attribution for sure with podcasting, but it’s a different way to think about it, because Because podcasting goes so broad and in tracking attribution all the way to sale, you can’t really do it. It’s kind of like having that nice, you know, magazine on your on your, on your table there, you know, it gets a lot of us. So do does podcasting. So there are some challenges in the business specifically, but because the efficacy of of host read podcast ads, you know, is is so strong. We’re seeing a lot more people in the market.

george grombacher 10:58
Interesting, right? You think about your People magazine, or whatever magazine is on my coffee table. It’s not People Magazine, Brian, I’m not gonna read that trash, buddy. Come on, give me a break. It’s something way more sophisticated. It could be back in the day that I would actually rip out one of those little reply mailers and mail it in, and then they would know Oh, look, George bought this because it was in that magazine, but more so it was, there was an ad for, you know, some vacation spot or whatever. And I was interested in going and I ended up going a year later. But then you look at you think about advertising on television. And that’s very expensive. And there’s no way that you could track that. So yeah, I find it to be interesting, sort of a conflict.

Ryan Estes 11:43
Yeah, one television, especially if there’s 350 channels now. You know, I mean, podcast numbers are way higher than television, in most cases, but there’s also prestige in television, you know. And so, there there is a certain value associated with like, I’m on a TV show, you know that that feels good and actually passes the sniff test. And we’re starting to see the same thing in podcasting as well. Got

george grombacher 12:10
it. I like it. So are you excited about artificial intelligence? Nervous?

Ryan Estes 12:18
Not sure. I am all in, in artificial intelligence. To be totally honest, I kind of mourn the death of art a couple of years ago, when I saw it come in, tell no get just because I could imagine a time that I could be like, well, I’d like to see a movie. And I want, I want a band of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley to do the soundtrack. And what I’d like is George Clooney to star it in a police chase movie with aliens. I want to hook in there about halfway point go make it for me. And we’re almost there. You know, 10 minutes later,

george grombacher 12:57
you got your popcorn, you’re ready to go? Yeah. Yeah. So

Ryan Estes 13:00
you know, looking to the future. I was like, wow, you know, why would you ever spend time with a new artist? I’m saying if you’re like, like a label or a production house, when you already can have the tried and true forever. I mean, you can make, you know, Mission Impossible movies with, with Tom Cruise’s avatar until you know 2537 Why, why wouldn’t you? So I, it was a process really of like, Man, this sucks. And there’s some innate innate dangers as well. But aside from the existential angst of like, certain mutual destruction, I think it’s really cool. You know, I think I use the tools all the time and, and find them very helpful in a bunch of different ways. And I think what I’m excited about is to really see the deeper integration into all of our tools we use daily, right now, everything’s kind of a toy, you know, shiny new toy, like, what else can this thing do? But I think we’ll start seeing it integrate into tools in a more interesting way.

george grombacher 14:06
Yeah, I was thinking the other day. I hadn’t heard the word NFT in some time. Like, okay, that’s interesting, doesn’t mean that they went away, but a lot of them did just go away. And perhaps to degree, there is a lot of enthusiasm around artificial intelligence, the way that there was around NF T’s. But seems like there’s a lot more practical application. So we’ll just have to wait and see. Do you see us moving more towards live events? And with that in mind, live podcasting and like live chats and stuff like that just more interaction in the podcast space?

Ryan Estes 14:44
I think so. I think so. Absolutely. I think that what we’re kind of in a weird time in place, right kind of post COVID Everyone got, I think, pretty accustomed to being in our own little areas away. So you know, At the apple try to wrap our head and in TV screens, meta tries to wrap our head and TV screens, they both kind of flopped, you know, so there’s kind of a containment that people are comfortable with, which is basically, I want a big screen TV and I want a laptop at the same time, and I want to look at my phone, there’s like this multi screen thing going on. And there, it does seem like people are enjoying being more isolated. But at the same time, let’s say you just look at, like the rise of like, the summer festivals, you know, so it’s like, people want to gather in mass, and do like these big huge events, and then kind of retreat to their corners. So I do think that like, you’re gonna see that trend to continue. So podcasting is obviously something very, very solitary, largely, people are listening to their car in traffic, or they’re listening to their headphones. There’s not a lot of shared podcasting experiences. So I think there’s a big opportunity there. Now, I was actually kind of validating the space a couple of years ago, and was reaching out to different venues in Denver, and was like, Hey, what’s your experience with podcast events, and every single one of them were like, they’re awesome. They sell out. They’re very polite crowd. It’s funny. You know, they order a couple of drinks, they get out of there. And what do you need two mics on a table. So you know, I would love to see more podcast type events. In fact, what I was kind of looking at back then was a podcast cafe, so to speak, where you could have, like, kind of take it as like a rock club or a punk rock club, as a model where you could have like, local podcast, you can have touring national podcast, create a podcast environment specifically for it. I think that would be really fun.

george grombacher 16:48
Just shelved it. It wasn’t the right time. You were thinking about doing this. It sounds like a great idea.

Ryan Estes 16:53
Thanks, man. You want to go go? 5050? With me?

george grombacher 16:56
Yes.

Ryan Estes 16:58
Ultimately, I you know, I still have a lot of enthusiasm for it. I just don’t have enthusiasm about cleaning bathrooms and ordering the bun might for the you know what I mean? Right? Like? Yeah, actually having a physical location. There’s a time and place for that. It’s really I think I’m just looking for the right co founder if somebody wants to, to is interested in actually managing a bar in a coffee shop. That’s, that’s the tricky part. Yeah.

george grombacher 17:30
Yeah, I love it. I love I love the salons that still happen around. But I think that they’re popularized with Hemingway. And during that kind of era and time, and people are gonna murder me because I’m probably saying this all wrong. But just the idea that people would get, get come come together and listen to an intellectual or a smart person talk about something and they would get a chance, like a book club, kind of, and that’s sort of what sounds like you’re describing to me. And who wouldn’t want to do that? So

Ryan Estes 17:59
Oh, yeah. Or you? Can you imagine like, the like Benjamin Franklin and France wearing his raccoon skin cap, you know, acting like old country boy with all these French cheese. That was fun. That would be exactly.

george grombacher 18:15
Exactly right. I love it. Nice. Okay, more to come on that. So your opportunity is to find folks on both ends, you need to find podcasters and great podcasts. And then you need to find the brands that want to advertise on set podcast. Absolutely.

Ryan Estes 18:36
You know, the easier said than done, of course, but it’s it’s a two sided marketplace. It’s kind of a fun conversation to have with podcasters. Because it’s like, Hey, do you want this bag of money? And they’re like, sure. I’m like, okay, great. But of course, there’s there’s fear. You know, if you’re talking about advertising spend, you’re like literally competing against every single YouTube channel there is. So yeah, it’s a challenging aspect, particularly when you’re talking about the ubiquitous Tech brands or like big enterprises. There’s another kind of market that I’ve been very, very interested in that I’ve been working really hard lately, which is early stage startups that are looking for what we’ll call an audience, co founder. Are you familiar with this term? No. Okay, so the idea is, is you have a b2b influencer, that has a large audience? Well, if you’re like a new AI tool, you know, and you’re like, wow, I got the coolest tool, but also there’s 20 different tools in the category. And when Chad GPT five comes out, who knows if that’s just gonna roll up my whole business model. It’s like we have this one moment. And we need distribution like that. How are they same kind of problems emerge? Like okay, sure. I think podcasts advertising would be great. But you know, we can’t afford that right now. We don’t we don’t have the cash. You know, we’re an engineering team. So we have the best product in the world, we got no, no cash, we got a ticking clock. Well, these are the influencers we work with, because they’re b2b, they’re SAS, they’re tech, they’re in a position right here that they might be willing to take equity in that company, as a form of payment. So basically, what you’re doing is coming on, as an audience, co founder, we’re basically like, Hey, man, look at, I’ve got 250,000 monthly listeners, I’m doing this on YouTube, I’m going to talk up your product, I’m going to wear your hat and your tank top every time on online video. Like let’s make this thing pop. So I’ve been doing shopping a lot of big deals like this. And we’ve we’ve done some big 360 deals. And I think this one in particular could really benefit, you know, the right influencers, and certainly the right companies. So I’ve been having a lot of conversations around with startup founders. And I think, you know, if I know startup founders listen to this show, and it’s, it’s, it’s been a little harrowing, because, you know, if it’s your first or second business, you can be kind of precious about it and being like, hey, how much of you this company, would you be willing to give up? It’s kind of a shark tank moment. And they’re like, what, how dare you ask me that? But you know, if it is Shark Tank, and Mark Cuban is like, hey, I’ll do this. But I want 90% of the business. You’re like, dude, yes, of course. Because now you got Mark Cuban’s phone number that’s worth 99% of the business in most cases. So So these kinds of deals, I think, are going to become more common. And it’s going to create explosive growth potential for early stage. startups because they can differentiate themselves so much more quickly. And we’re seeing a lot of overlap again, particularly in AI tools.

george grombacher 21:52
That’s very cool. An audience co founder, I love it. Beautiful. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Where can people learn more? How can they how can they get engaged?

Ryan Estes 22:02
You bet I would love to talk to anybody if they’re curious. I’m, I’m on LinkedIn. And Twitter’s probably the best place to find me or X, Twitter X. If you just search Ryan Estes, you should be able to be able to find me otherwise, the company we’re talking about is go wild cast.com.

george grombacher 22:21
Perfect. If you enjoyed as much as I did show, run your appreciation share today show the friend who also appreciates good ideas, track them down on LinkedIn and X, link those in the notes of the show and then go to go wild cast.com. And if you are a brand if you are an influencer podcast, or if you are a tech startup or an enterprise business, whatever, sounded interesting, get in touch and see if there’s an opportunity to put your heads together. Thanks again, Ron. George,

Ryan Estes 22:50
I work in podcasting. And honestly, I could not do have a career without folks like you in this awesome show. So thanks for everything you do. I know this takes a lot of work to produce this awesome show. So I just want to extend my gratitude and just tell you how much I appreciate it.

george grombacher 23:09
You’re welcome. You bet. Until next time, remember, do your part by doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.