According to conventional wisdom, 5,000 downloads the minimum threshold that ad rep firms want to see before they’ll consider adding a podcast. I tested that theory and found it to be true. But even so, it still may not be worth it. Here’s what happened:

Over the last few months, an ad rep form has been trying to book ads on one of my client’s podcast. The firm has sent me around 35 offers. I have to vet each one, ensuring it’s a good fit for my client and the advertiser.

One of those potential advertisers converted into a real offer. One. If one-in-thirty odds sounds bad to you, welcome to advertising. I’ve been in this world for the better part of two decades, so I’m not surprised at all.

With an actual offer, I contacted my client to work out the plan for getting the product shipped, giving them enough time to try out the product, and target a publishing date for when the ad would run. 

Yes, THE episode. It’s not uncommon for advertisers to run a single ad on a single episode as a test.

I take all of that back to the ad rep firm who then generated an insertion order, a document that spells out the particulars of the deal, like length of the ad read, must-have elements to be included in the ad, in which position the ad would run, and, the money offered in exchange for the ad.

Once I sign off, they advertiser shipped the product, my client gave it a test run, and dropped the ad the proscribed episode. 

It didn’t go well. Twice. So the ad ran three times before it was finally accepted. Details, yo. Now I’m waiting on payment which I should get in the next 30 days. 

Does that sound like a lot of time? It was. I’m estimating around 12 hours of my time and about four hours of my client’s time. Much of that was fixing the screwups. But even without those unfortunate mishaps, it stil would have taken each of us about half that time. 

So what did we get for those collective 16 hours of work? $250. Some quick math done at the initial offer stage showed the advertiser was offering a $35 CPM on the ~7,000 downloads projected for this single ad placement, which is quite good! 

Only, we didn’t even get the full $250. That was the “gross” offer that we accepted, before the ad rep firm takes their 30%. They’re keeping $75 and sending me $175. And then I’m keeping 20% of that, so I’ll send the client $140 and line my pockets with $35.

Of course, we do this in the hopes that the advertiser likes the performance on their end and sticks around for a while, running ads with us for months at a time that require very little additional work. This is where scale comes into play, though it takes time to work through the rough parts before the benefits of scale start showing up.

I’ll leave it to you to decide what your time is worth. 

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Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

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