The Truth Behind Huge Celebrity Podcast Deals

Podcasts are what I call a 1-1-98 platform — 1% make good money, 1% make great money, and 98% don’t.

Podcasts are incredibly hard to:

• Build an audience (listenership is hard to build and harder to keep listening)

  • And keep that audience engaged - it’s a huge time commitment

• Find guests

• Organise and edit

• Make money from

  • Finding sponsors

  • Find partners who are willing to be placed against content they can’t control

These are just a few reasons why podcasts have been flooded with celebrities and influencers creating podcasts and joining ad and media networks. They have the audience already built in (the superfans will go anywhere they go), they have a phone book full of friends for guests, they have an inbuilt team creating, editing and helping with distribution and ad deals are factored in upfront.

So let’s dive deeper into these major deals and why brands compete on huge deals for “podcasts”.

The Mega Deals

There have been 4 huge deals worth over $100m this year for popular podcasts: 

1. This week; The Kelce brothers (NFL players) have signed a 3-year $100m deal with Wondery (part of Amazon). 

2. Last month; Call Her Daddy co-creator Alex Cooper signed a new 3-year deal worth $125 million with SiriusXM (for her podcast and her new network of podcasts) leaving Spotify. 

3. In February; Joe Rogan renewed his Spotify contract for another 4 years for $250 million.

4. In January; SmartLess (with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, & Will Arnett) left Wondery for a 3-year deal worth $100 million with SiriusXM (Warren Buffet famously invested heavily earlier this summer in SiriusXM). 

This is (US) Podtrac data from July with the podcast publishers and the size of their audience with downloads. Many have huge networks of shows that enable a bigger deeper ad offering.
Wondery which is part of Amazon signed The Kelce brothers podcast and joins their 625 roster of podcasts.

Above data and screenshot via Chartable - The majority of the top ranked podcasts are celebrity fronted and are on media or ad networks -- independents really struggle to rank and then monetise outside of the top 250 podcasts. 

So What? Why Is This important? 

• Costs: There are now millions of podcasts but very few are independent and few make money if anything they lose money with the cost of tools and time

• Fees First: Celebrity fronted Podcasts (in-built audience and superfans) have become incredibly popular, especially a-list podcasts, celebrity pods dominate the podcast rankings and hold typically huge bi-weekly audiences, so much so these podcasts charge 5 to high 6-digit rates for ads, some smartly charge huge figures to advertise on the back catalogue. 

  • These stars have the option to go out and create a podcast with a team and a network behind them or go and join YouTube like Ronaldo and Tom Brady have in the last few weeks 

• Reach - Audience - Spread: The influence celebrity podcasts have is far-reaching, especially what is being shared and the stories being told (untold elsewhere), these are then flipped into news stories and create headline stories in mainstream media who struggle to build relationships with stars like they used to. Podcasters and their teams know this and play to this with deliberate clips that are seeded or “leaked” from their teams  

  • Pay To Play: Many smart PR firms are pushing their clients to host and cohost and paying large sums of money to appear on tier 1 podcasts and vodcasts (video podcasts)

• Deeper Connection - Owning The Narrative(s): Podcasts are the new way to build audiences, host & control debates and are being used to rebuild careers, recent examples include: the 2 hours of Candace Owens interviewing Andrew Tate, President Trump on Theo Von podcast was something else, Peter Thiel on Joe Rogan was painful to watch — all leading to huge listenership/views and driving huge awareness to brands sponsoring 

• Ranking Dominance: (Shown above) Big ad & media networks back the majority of the top 200 podcasts and have big talent fronting the pod - stars come with an existing audience and advertisers will invest massively into these pods

  • Sponsors demand ad reads by the hosts and are charged a premium for doing so as it feels less like an ad and more like an endorsement

  • Product Placement Becomes Product Play: Some are now negotiating with hosts and guests to show, drink/eat the products and discuss within the podcast

• Big Bucks: Acquired a popular long-form podcast on how companies were built and the strategy behind them charges $500k for 4-episode midroll sponsorship or $750k for presenting sponsor

• Ads! This is why SiriusXM, Spotify and Amazon are investing millions in 3-year+ deals on these podcast advertising deals and actively negotiating against each other for these huge podcasts

• New Ad Networks: Tech giants like Amazon & Spotify and Podcast networks are moving away from exclusive shows only on their platforms and moving towards owning the ads inside the pods (and connected to the pods) and inserting ads across the feeds onto Apple, Spotify and YouTube. 

• Ads = Paid Brand Moments Brands are looking for the best possible advertising options, whether that is brand-side to find a new audience or creators looking for ad partners to monetise their latest moves.

  • Brands are looking for reach, celebrities have reach & superfans are willing to support, ad networks can insert more ads (ad load aka the number of ads is up and increasing)

  • Existing sponsors of the athletes or celebrities will feature and become marketing moments for these brands

• The Vodcast Evolution: The recent move to video-first podcasts allows their audiences to select the platform they prefer, however, importantly enabling different ad offerings from audio (podcasts) to video (vodcasts) and video can earn from views via AdSense.

  • The vodcast format lends itself to celebrities and influencers, seeing the celebrity (or hate watching which is common) and will lead to more ad slots inside

  • Over the last six months: Joe Rogan has published 1,998 videos (with his move back to YouTube he has uploaded old content onto YouTube from Spotify), with 400k subscribers racking up 1,857,540,158 views (via VidIQ). Joe Rogan has a total of 17.2M subscribers and a back catalogue of 3.2K videos.

The TLDR

• Like all other platforms and channels - Brands will open up their budgets for popular podcasts and be associated with their huge reach.

• Celebrities love the new format as do their PR firms and the ad-exclusive deals are huge and will continue to be while celebrity podcasters attract their celeb friends and major names to tell stories while brands can piggyback from an ad inserted into it

• Media will continue to write about their pods, and their appearances and drive listeners and viewers

• Fans will give them a listen and superfans will love, promote and even pay a subscription if there are PPV podcasts

• Expect video to become a key part of the celebrity podcast industry and be able to charge an additional premium to be a sponsor or featured within the vodcast and then ads being inserted in to the back catalogue

FYI A more condensed version of this article was a dedicated segment from the August drop of my Must Reads newsletter.