Podcast awards are supposed to recognize great work. But what are they actually worth to the people who win them?

In this episode, we speak with John Leschinski of the Canadian Podcast Awards about what podcast awards are really for, how nominations and judging work, whether winning can actually lead to money or opportunities, and why some awards can start to look a lot like pay-to-play.

We also get into celebrity podcasts, popularity contests, the $2,000 course you could apparently create about winning awards, and some surprisingly important advice.

And if you’re wondering whether your podcast is “ready” for an award, John has some thoughts on that too.

Guest: John Leschinski, Canadian Podcast Awards

Learn more about the awards at:

https://canpodawards.ca/

Monetize This! is the podcast that takes a contrarian look at podcasting, questions the conventional wisdom, and occasionally admits that the gurus have a point.

Find more at monetizethispodcast.com.

Rob Riker, who generally writes about relationship building, is definitely worth a follow. He wrote an article recently, The Substack Growth Skill Nobody Ever Thinks About, where he introduces a system he calls Make Friends Get Clients.

For those of us where “get clients” is not our ultimate goal, that’s actually the least interesting part of the system. The underlying mechanism is relationship-building around a shared interest or mission. That makes it surprisingly transferable to nonprofits, community organizations, independent creators, advocacy groups, and even podcasts.

You should definitely check out Rob’s post cited above. In the spirit of “Steal Like an Artist” a modified version of his “system” that removes the client metaphor entirely might look something like this:

Make Friends, Advance the Mission

1. Build Your Foundation
   Get clear on what you do, who you serve, what you believe, and what you want to be known for. Attention is more useful when people can quickly understand why you exist.

2. Find the Right People
   Identify writers, creators, organizations, communities, journalists, experts, supporters, and people who already care about the territory you’re working in.

3. Become Recognizable
   Show up consistently in their world. Read their work. Leave thoughtful comments. Share things you genuinely find useful. Become a familiar name rather than another account trying to get noticed.

4. Start Real Conversations
   Move beyond engagement metrics. Talk to people. Learn what they’re working on, what they care about, and where your interests overlap.

5. Create Opportunities
   Eventually, relationships create possibilities: a collaboration, introduction, interview, guest post, event, volunteer, donation, membership, partnership, media mention, referral, or simply someone who tells ten other people about your work.

And the important bit is the same:

You aren’t networking because you want something from people. You’re building relationships with people you actually value.

Connecting this to other conversations we’ve had around platforms and ownership, a key thing here is: the real asset isn’t the audience you temporarily accumulate on Substack. It’s the relationships you develop with actual people. Substack can disappear, change the algorithm, change the economics, or decide you’re doing something wrong. The people you’ve actually gotten to know are portable.

The “How to consistently find the right people” part of Rob’s system is behind the paywall, so I don’t know what his secrets are on that. You can become a paid subscriber of his to get those details.

I could be way off, but what I’d say is some combination of finding people who already have the audience, interests, and behaviors you want to be adjacent to.

Some of these are probably obvious, but here’s a few ideas:

1. Find the writers your ideal readers already read.
Search Substack by topic, then look at who consistently appears in recommendations, Notes conversations, and comments.

2. Mine the recommendations graph.
If Writer A recommends Writers B, C, and D, and B recommends E and F, you’ve got a little interest graph. Follow it outward.

3. Look at commenters, not just authors.
This is probably one of the more valuable tricks. Someone leaving thoughtful comments on five newsletters in your niche is potentially more interesting than a giant account with 200,000 followers.

4. Find “adjacent” audiences.
Don’t just search for nonprofit. Search for the topics your nonprofit actually lives in. A food bank might want to find writers covering food insecurity, poverty, local government, community organizing, mutual aid, restaurants, philanthropy, etc.

5. Find people who are already talking about the problem.
The best prospect isn’t necessarily someone who follows your organization. It’s someone who has demonstrated that they care about the problem you’re trying to solve.

6. Follow the people who interact with the people you want to know.
This is the second-order network. If a writer has a particularly interesting group of commenters and recommenders, those people are often worth exploring.

7. Look for small accounts with unusually high engagement.
A 300-subscriber newsletter where the author knows half their readers may be much more valuable for a relationship than a 30,000-subscriber publication where you’re invisible.

8. Identify “connectors.”
Some people seem to know everyone in a particular niche. They may not have enormous audiences themselves, but they’re disproportionately valuable because introductions travel through them.

9. Start with people you genuinely want to read anyway.
This may actually be the real secret. If the process requires you to spend two hours every morning pretending to care about 50 “ideal accounts,” you’ve built a new job.

Funnels talk about conversion. For those of us that don’t have a course to sell, but have a mission and message to promote, conversion can mean almost anything.

Someone reads your newsletter and becomes a donor.
Someone introduces you to a foundation or industry organization.
A journalist discovers your work.
Another organization proposes a joint project.
A volunteer joins.
A researcher offers expertise.
A local politician notices an issue.
A much larger newsletter mentions you.
Someone simply becomes the person who tells everyone else about you.

Attention is not accomplishment. Presence is not product. Somewhere in the last decade, an entire industry forgot the difference.

I’ve spent four decades watching companies get built, and helped get many sold. Sixty-four exits. Over $9.5 billion across 45 of them. Buyers like Google, Cisco, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, Citrix, Visa, Nokia, Symantec. Nobody writes a check for a following. They write it for a business.

Yet the loudest voices in tech, sports, and startups today aren’t the ones who built anything. They talk about building. That’s not coincidence. It’s inversion.

Used to be, you did the work first. You survived a failed launch, a customer who walked, a market that turned overnight. Then, maybe, you wrote about it. Expertise came first, platform second. Now platform comes first, and expertise waits to catch up. Most of it never does.

Podcasting is the clearest evidence of the swap. Long before the term existed, Ken Rutkowski and I ran “The World Technology Roundup,” a daily streaming newscast that hit 300,000 daily downloads at its peak, from 1998 to 2011. I’ve watched voice technology evolve since carriers insisted the internet would never carry a phone call. Real disruption is quiet and unglamorous while it’s happening.

What passes for disruption today is hosts, founders, investors, and coaches interviewing each other in a closed loop, congratulating each other for “bringing value to the community.” I call it the Echo Chamber. Nobody learned anything. They traded audiences.

The advice inside that loop is interchangeable: wake at five, meditate, cold plunge, protect your calendar. Fine, if your customers live in your time zone and Asia agrees to wait for your journaling session to end.

The real work never follows a script. Building Flyers Hockey Central, before “fan development” was a category anyone had named, taught me the only test that matters: does the product live inside the moment, or does the brand just stand next to it. Everything else is decoration. Guru culture is decoration.

Certainty sells on social media. It’s useless everywhere else. Every operator I respect answers hard questions the same way: it depends. Markets don’t read LinkedIn. Revenue never appeared because somebody got called a thought leader.

Ask the only question that matters: what did they actually build, and who paid for it.

The companies worth studying were too busy building the future to explain how everyone else should build theirs. The rest got really good at booking podcasts.

Stand-up comedy looks effortless until you realize every laugh has been engineered.

This week, comedian, veterinarian, and author Matt Evans joins Monetize This! to talk about what actually goes into writing comedy. We get into joke structure, storytelling, callbacks, and why making people laugh is a lot more like learning a craft than waiting for inspiration to strike.

Along the way, we accidentally wander into some surprisingly useful advice about creativity, overcoming resistance, and why the hardest part of making something is often just sitting down and starting. Don’t worry—we make fun of ourselves for it.

If you’ve ever wondered why some podcasts feel effortless, why some stories stick with you, or why every creative project seems to begin with procrastination, this episode is for you.

Guest: Matt Evans — stand-up comedian, equine veterinarian, and author of Chomping at the Bit.

Find Matt at: mattevanscomic.com

Learn more and follow us at: monetizethispodcast.com

Monetize This! is the podcast where podcasting best practices come to die. Host David Beckemeyer takes a lighthearted, contrarian look at podcasting, creator culture, and the endless stream of advice telling you you’re doing it wrong.

Welcome back to the only podcast newsletter where growth is optional, monetization is suspicious, and “content ecosystem” is considered a cry for help.

Upcoming Guests in August

• Matt Evans - A stand-up comedian about comedy, creativity, and storytelling

• John Leschinski at Canada Podcast Awards about (surprise!) podcast awards

In Case You Missed It

Here’s some stuff we covered in July:

Small Win Of The Month

I landed a guest from a real podcast conference. You know, the kind that would never have me as a presenter. Should be fun. I’m looking forward to it.

Hit reply with your small win.

Ask Monetize This!

Q: How long should my podcast episodes be?
A: Long enough to say what you wanted to say. Short enough that you don't start repeating yourself because you saw a recommendation saying episodes should be 42 minutes.

Got a podcasting question, dilemma, or petty grievance? Send it in and I may answer it with varying levels of wisdom.

This Month’s Recommendation

My recommendation this month is the book is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Know a podcast, creator, tool, or weird little gem worth sharing? Send it my way.

Quote To Ignore This Month

You do not have an inspiration problem.

You have a strategy problem.

Maybe you do have a strategy problem. But maybe you really do have an inspiration problem.

Maybe you’re tired.

Maybe you’re bored.

But I can pretty much guarantee the the person diagnosing your strategy problem has a strategy they will sell you.

Seen an absurd guru quote, hustle cliché, or advice-post masterpiece? Forward it for possible public ridicule.

Until Next Month

Join In

Reply anytime with questions, wins, complaints, bad advice, or things podcasting people should be embarrassed to say out loud.

Like many of the topics we cover here, I was inspired by an email I received from a vendor who, not surprisingly, provides tools to create clips, explaining why your reels are not working, which they claim is “Something they keep hearing:”

“Your clips are getting views but they’re not converting.”

But is that even a problem.

In this case, it’s important to the vendor. They sold a service on the premise that it would convert reel watchers into podcast listeners. And now they’re worried you might notice it’s not delivering on that promise.

And beyond this one vendor, almost every podcast guru assumes the purpose of a Reel, Short, or TikTok is to drive people somewhere else. But there’s no law that requires everything to be a funnel.

Funnels, Funnels, fricken Funnels everywhere.

I was on a creator community call this week and someone asked what I have against funnels as an “effective marketing strategy.” In some sense, nothing. Funnels can work. My objection is how funnels become a way of seeing people.

If every blog post exists to sell the newsletter...
If every newsletter exists to sell the podcast...
If every podcast exists to sell coaching...
If every interaction exists to move someone to the next stage...

...when do you stop and ask whether this piece of content was worth their time on its own?

There’s that old line about niching down, how if you’re speaking to everyone, you’re speaking to no one. I think there’s a similar truth about funnels: If you’re always selling, you’re never really selling.

You’re just teaching your audience that every interaction has an ulterior motive.

Meet People Where They Are

But getting back to clips, I talk a lot about meeting people where they are. Not everything has to be a lead generator.

Someone opened Instagram because they wanted Instagram.

Someone opened TikTok because they wanted TikTok.

Why are we trying to convince them they really wanted a 45-minute podcast?

For my serious work, I try to deliver a version of what the Outrage Overload brand is on every platform. If that’s all someone ever consumes, I’m okay with that.

And here’s the irony of the whole thing. If your reels are delivering value, if people fall in love with your brand, guess what? This approach produces the very thing the funnel advocates are chasing.

Trust.

The hard-sell won’t do that. Delivering value, over and over again, does. The content itself has to earn trust. And trust often produces the outcome the hard sell was chasing all along.

I accepted a LinkedIn connection request recently from someone in the podcasting services space. Before accepting, I spent a couple of minutes looking at his profile and company. I assumed we had enough overlap that we'd have a worthwhile professional relationship.

Instead, within minutes I received a message that indicated they didn’t think they connected with a colleague in their mind. They saw me as nothing more than a prospect.

What struck me wasn’t just the pitch. LinkedIn is full of pitches. It’s that it showed they couldn’t take even a few minutes to see who they had connected with. My profile tells a pretty clear story and there’s plenty more on google.

We could have had a real peer-to-peer professional connection. Instead, I got dropped into the same outbound pipeline everyone gets.

To me, it signaled a lack of judgment.

Experienced pros ask questions. They want to know who they’re talking to so they don’t blow an opportunity.

I even gave them a chance to redeem themselves and reset the relationship. They didn’t take the hint.

The irony is that this person sells coaching around visibility, networking, and growing an audience.

If this is the advice they’re giving clients, I would be cautious.

We spend all this time and energy trying to get someone to accept a connection request, reply to an email, or agree to a meeting.

The last thing we should do is then go into script mode.

The “Connect” button isn’t the opportunity. It creates the responsibility to figure out what the opportunity is.

Maybe they’re a potential client, sure. But maybe they’re a facilitator, a mentor, a collaborator. Or, heaven forbid, maybe they’re someone who could use something outside your sales funnel that you could help them with as a colleague.

But you’ll never know if your first instinct is to treat everyone exactly the same and simply dump them into your sales funnel with the same standard script.

Everyone wants to sell transformation.

In podcasting, it’s “Launch in 30 days.” “Grow your audience.” “Build a six-figure business.”

In leadership coaching, the promises aren’t all that different.

This week, I sat down with executive coach Kathy Hadizadeh to talk about something that quietly challenges both industries: the idea that real change can be packaged into a weekend workshop, a seven-step framework, or a single blueprint.

Kathy doesn’t coach podcasters, and she isn’t trying to sell you the latest podcast growth strategy. Instead, she works with engineering and technology leaders, helping teams navigate change in the real world. Along the way, we discovered that leadership coaching and podcast guru culture have more in common than either of us expected.

We talk about why one-size-fits-all frameworks fall short, why “transformation” is often oversold, why ambition can become a runaway train, and why the best coaches ask better questions instead of pretending to have all the answers.

If you’ve ever felt like every creator newsletter is telling you to post more, hustle harder, and optimize everything... this one’s for you.

Guest

Kathy Hadizadeh is an executive coach who works with engineering, product, and technology leaders to build stronger teams and more thoughtful leadership practices. Rather than offering cookie-cutter solutions, her work focuses on understanding people first and designing approaches that fit the challenges they’re actually facing.

Connect with Kathy on LinkedIn and let her know you heard her on Monetize This!

Also Discussed

• Bill Monty - Tales From South Florida Podcast

• Dave Campbell’s Meetup Community

Monetize This! is the podcast where podcasting best practices come to die. Every episode takes a lighthearted look at podcasting gurus, creator advice, and the strange pressure to optimize everything—because sometimes the best thing you can do is ignore the blueprint and just make something worth listening to.

Here in 2026, when you ask people “What is a podcast?” the first thought for many is about the aesthetic. It’s a podcast if it looks like a podcast.

I recently wrote about a new platform where ‘Start a Podcast’ means schedule a two-person video conversation where others can watch and comment.

And now, here I am again with a related question. I can’t let it go.

There’s a creator now doing a series of reels asking folks to respond to the question ‘What is a podcast?’ and it just reminded me so much of what I’ve been seeing lately, particularly among traditional media.

They take everything they have always done with, say, a TV interview, throw same the people on a couch, shove a microphone on a boom stand in their face, give them a set of headphones, and whammo! Now it’s a podcast.

It’s legacy media in podcast drag.

I watched a news segment recently where they had a guest, no visible microphone etc. Then I saw the same guest, same backdrop, same room, same everything except now he has headphones on, because now he’s on the podcast.

Make sure they notice the headphones — they’re the podcast version of the eyepatch that tells you “pirate.”

This podcast cosplay is out of control.

I even saw a TV commercial recently framed as a fake podcast.

I think what I find particularly annoying about it isn’t just that it’s ridiculous–it’s a form of theft. It’s specifically borrowing a reputation that podcasting spent about two decades earning the hard way.

Podcasting’s credibility wasn’t handed to it. It was built by default, almost accidentally, out of constraint.

No gatekeepers, no format police. Indie podcasters don’t have network execs trimming things to fit a slot. Limited budgets and limited time might mean unscripted-ness — messy tangents, long silences, real disagreement.

Low production value read as honesty. A show recorded in a closet with a modest mic couldn’t fake slickness, so the roughness itself became a trust signal. You were hearing something, not watching a performance of something.

Time investment as a filter. Two hours of audio is a big ask. People who put in the work to make something worth two hours tended to actually have something to say. The format selected for depth just by being inconvenient.

Parasocial intimacy earned through repetition. Weekly, in your ears, for years — that’s a different relationship than a single TV hit. Trust accrued slowly, episode by episode.

None of that transfers by copying the look. That’s the con.

And it’s a clever con, in a bleak way. It’s not stealing the credibility by claiming “trust us.” It’s stealing it by triggering the visual shorthand your brain already built for trustworthy-long-form-unscripted-conversation. Couch+boom mic+headphones equals “ah, this is the genre where people talk honestly for a long time,” before a single word gets spoken. It’s credibility by association, laundered through set dressing. Advertisers chase this too. “Podcast-style” ad reads outperform traditional spots partly because listeners have been trained that this format means a real person telling me their real opinion, not a script. Podcast cosplay borrows that exact trained response.

Real podcast credibility was earned through inconvenience — time, repetition, low production value, no gatekeeper. Cosplay tries to buy that same credibility through convenience — one shoot, minimal risk, full script, full edit control. The moment you notice something bringing all the control of traditional media into the costume of a medium defined by giving up control, you’ve spotted the cosplay.

Here’s who actually pays for it: indie creators.

They spent years doing the unglamorous, unpaid work that made “podcast” mean something — recording alone in a basement, building an audience one word-of-mouth listener at a time, staying consistent for 200 episodes before anyone noticed. That labor is exactly what podcast cosplay skims off the top. A network doesn’t have to do any of it. They just buy the props. It’s the content equivalent of a chain restaurant putting up reclaimed-wood siding to borrow the credibility of the actual farm-to-table place three blocks away that’s been grinding for a decade. The indie did the work. The costume-wearer gets the association for free.

And this doesn’t stay a victimless appropriation. Once “podcast” becomes a look anyone can buy — studio, couch, boom mic, a name-brand host — audiences and advertisers start pattern-matching on production value instead of substance. That quietly punishes indie creators for the very thing that made them credible in the first place. The low-budget, one-person-and-a-mic setup that used to read as authentic now risks reading as cheap, sitting next to a glossy network version wearing the same costume. The market can end up rewarding the cosplay over the source material, simply because the cosplay has better lighting.

There’s a discovery problem baked in here too. On platforms and charts, an indie’s 45-minute solo show and a network’s produced “podcast” segment get bucketed into the same category. Indies aren’t just being imitated — they’re being crowded out in the same feed by things wearing their clothes but backed by marketing budgets and existing audiences.

Here’s the hopeful part, though, and maybe the thing worth saying loudest: everything about the costume is copyable. The mic, the couch, the lighting — anyone with a budget can buy all of it by next Tuesday. What isn’t copyable is the trust that only comes from doing it the inconvenient way — years of consistency, actual creative control, the willingness to be unscripted because there’s no PR team in the room. That’s the indie’s real moat, and it’s worth saying out loud instead of assuming people will just notice.

So don’t compete on the ground cosplay is contesting. Don’t try to out-light them, out-guest them, out-polish them — that’s a game the networks win on budget alone, every time. Compete on the thing that actually made this medium mean something: depth, unscripted risk, and direct trust with an audience you actually built.

They copied the costume. They can’t fake having nothing to lose.

Somebody recently pointed me toward a platform for conversations that's still finding its footing. I’m not going to name it yet. I might do a whole episode on it later, but here’s the pitch: you and a co-host hop on something that looks a lot like a Zoom call, people watch it live, they drop comments in a chat window, and the button you click to make this happen says “Start a Podcast.”

And I sat there looking at it thinking, okay, in what universe is this a podcast.

Then I caught myself, because I’ve had this argument before, on both sides, and I already know where it goes.

There’s a camp of people who will tell you a podcast is only a podcast if it comes out of an RSS feed. Doesn’t matter what it sounds like, doesn’t matter if it’s two people rambling for ninety minutes about baseball or true crime, if there’s no feed, it’s not a podcast. It’s something else wearing a podcast costume. And look, I get the appeal of this argument. RSS is genuinely the reason podcasting didn’t turn into another walled garden back when it had the chance to. Nobody owns the feed. You can listen in Apple Podcasts or Overcast or some app built by a guy in his basement, and the show doesn’t care, because the show isn’t asking permission from a platform to exist. That’s real, that matters, I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But I’ve also got to admit, it’s another kind of purity test, and purity tests are exactly the kind of thing this show exists to make fun of. Real podcasters use RSS” is first cousin to “real creators post every Tuesday at nine.” It sounds like a technical fact but it’s doing the same job as every other guru rule, which is making somebody feel like they’re doing it wrong so they’ll buy the fix.

Then there’s the other camp, the one that just goes by feel. Two people, big headphones, long conversation, and it’s a podcast, full stop, doesn’t matter if it’s sitting on Twitch or locked inside Spotify’s app or streaming on Rumble with no download option anywhere. This is basically how the entire public already talks, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Language moves the way people use it. I’m not going to correct a hundred million listeners on etymology. But this camp has its own blind spot. It’s all about the aesthetics. Microphones and a couch and a slow, meandering conversation register as “podcast” regardless of what’s actually happening underneath, which means a company can borrow every ounce of goodwill the word has earned over twenty years without touching any of the architecture that earned it.

Which brings me back to the platform with the “Start a Podcast” button, and here’s what actually bothered me about it, once I got past the reflexive purist reaction.

It’s not that the RSS crowd is wrong that something’s missing. It’s that they’re pointing at the wrong missing thing. The feed itself was never the point. The feed was just the mechanism that happened to guarantee something people actually care about, whether they’ve thought about it in these terms or not: you hold your own list. Your audience is yours. You can pack it up and move it to another host tomorrow morning, and every single subscriber comes with you without lifting a finger. That’s the whole trick. RSS matters because of what it protects, not because it’s some sacred technical ritual you have to perform to earn a merit badge.

So when a closed platform hands you a “podcast” button, the question worth asking isn’t whether it counts by some dictionary definition. It’s what happens the day that platform changes its terms, or gets bought, or decides your kind of show doesn’t fit their new direction anymore. Where does your show go. Who has the list. If the answer is “nowhere” and “them,” you didn’t start a podcast, you started a tenancy, and you’re renting the thing you think you own.

You don’t need an RSS feed to be legitimate. You also don’t need a webcam and a chat window to be relevant. What you need to know, before you get attached to a platform or a format or a button that says the right word, is whether you can leave. That’s the only best practice in this whole mess that’s actually worth following, and it’s got nothing to do with what a podcast technically is.

What happens when a Hollywood storyteller discovers podcasting?

Alan Katz spent decades working in film and television, including creating and writing for Tales from the Crypt, where getting a story from an idea to the screen could take years, endless approvals, and giving up a lot of control along the way.

Podcasting changed that.

In this episode of Monetize This!, Alan talks about why the microphone might be the ultimate storytelling tool, why authenticity matters more than formulas, and why the best podcasts come from creators who understand the story they’re actually trying to tell.

Alan also shares the story behind his podcast How Not to Make a Movie, his approach to honest storytelling, and why some of the most interesting stories are the ones traditional media might never have let through.

Maybe the thing worth optimizing isn’t your downloads.

Maybe it’s making something worth listening to.

About Alan Katz

Alan Katz is a writer, producer, and storyteller who has worked across film, television, and podcasting. He is the founder of Costard and Touchstone, a storytelling company built around the idea of using stories to make the world a better place.

Learn more about Alan:

https://costardandtouchstone.com

Monetize This! is the podcast where podcasting best practices come to die. A skeptical, slightly ridiculous look at the advice, rules, and “growth hacks” surrounding podcasting — especially the ones that deserve a little roasting.

Full episode:

Podcasting exists in this strange space where creators are told the medium is exploding, the opportunities are endless, and success is right around the corner — usually after buying one more course, one more microphone, one more strategy, one more growth framework.

Meanwhile, most podcasters are making little to no money, fighting discouragement, staring at download numbers, and wondering whether anybody actually cares.

This week on Monetize This, I talk with Rory Paquette — podcaster, coach, self-described “podcaster advocate,” and someone with very strong opinions about how the industry treats creators.

This conversation moves between satire, frustration, philosophy, and practical reality — which honestly feels pretty true to podcasting itself.

About Rory

Rory Paquette hosts multiple podcasts including:

• Power of Man

• The Podcaster Nation

• Wake Up the Lions

He works with podcasters on monetization, growth, and creator mindset, while advocating for what he sees as a more creator-respecting podcast ecosystem.

Find him on Facebook: @rory.paquette

Final Thought

One of the recurring themes on Monetize This is that the internet loves success stories because they sound clean and repeatable.

Real creative work usually isn’t.

Most creators live somewhere in the middle:
building things,
questioning themselves,
trying ideas,
working side jobs,
figuring it out as they go.

Podcasting may be one of the clearest examples of that.

And maybe that’s part of why people keep doing it anyway.

Podcasting used to be relatively simple. You recorded some audio, uploaded it somewhere, and hoped another human being voluntarily listened to it.

Now podcasting apparently includes Netflix shows, vertical video clips, content funnels, algorithm strategy, six-camera YouTube setups, and at least one person online insisting you need a specific microphone before you’re allowed to speak publicly.

This week on Monetize This!, David talks with audio fiction creator Jonathan Marsh about the strange modern universe surrounding podcasting — a place where nobody can fully agree on what a podcast even is anymore, but everyone still seems very confident about the rules.

The conversation wanders through expensive microphones, Netflix “podcasts,” RSS evangelism, Reddit legal advice, creator economy panic, and one surprisingly intense reaction to the phrase “fair use.”

Somewhere underneath all the chaos is a quieter question:

What if podcasting was never supposed to become this complicated?

Jonathan Marsh is the creator of Afterlight Fictions, an audio storytelling podcast featuring original fiction and public domain adaptations.

Follow Monetize This!

Monetize This! is a lighthearted, contrarian podcast about podcasting culture, creator advice, guru nonsense, and the increasingly bizarre economy surrounding “content creation.”

Subscribe at monetizethispodcast.com

What happens when a podcast isn’t a funnel for a business… and the podcast itself is the thing?

In this episode of Monetize This!, David Beckemeyer talks with Andrew Lewin, host of How to Protect the Ocean, a podcast with nearly 1,900 episodes built around ocean conservation, science communication, and helping people care about the ocean a little more than they did yesterday.

No mastermind.
No “high-ticket offer.”
No podcast growth empire.

And yet, somehow, the show changes lives.

Andrew talks about:

• why most podcast advice doesn’t apply to mission-driven shows

• the problem with podcast guru culture and fake metrics

• why podcasting is a long game

• trying (and failing) to force traditional monetization models onto a niche show

• building an audience around impact instead of scale

• the strange reality of being “successful” in ways the industry doesn’t really measure

Along the way, we hear stories about listeners changing careers, starting environmental organizations, pursuing PhDs, and even influencing institutional policy after hearing episodes of the show.

This conversation is ultimately about a kind of podcaster that rarely gets represented in podcasting discourse:
people making shows because the subject itself matters to them.

Guest

Andrew Lewin
Host of How to Protect the Ocean
Speak Up For Blue

Mentioned in This Episode

• How to Protect the Ocean

• Beyond Jaws

• Podcast SEO

• “Top 1%” podcast rankings

• Mission-driven podcasting

• The long game of podcasting

Follow Monetize This!

If you’ve ever felt like podcasting advice assumes you’re secretly trying to become a business coach, this show is for you.

Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.

More essays and episodes at:
Monetize This!

Check it out:

Welcome back to the only podcast newsletter where growth is optional, monetization is suspicious, and “content ecosystem” is considered a cry for help.

This Month’s Big Lie

The Lie:
”In this economy, you can’t afford to miss this webinar!”

Why It’s Dumb:
“This economy” has become the adult version of “because I said so.” It sounds serious, but it’s doing zero actual work. Which economy? What changed? Why does this specific webinar suddenly become financially essential?

It’s not insight—it’s a pressure tactic dressed up as macroeconomics.

What they’re really saying:
“I need this to feel urgent so you stop thinking critically.”

What to do instead:
If someone invokes “this economy” without specifics, assume it’s marketing seasoning, not substance. The more urgent the tone, the less likely it is to matter tomorrow.

Guru Watch

Recent nonsense from the podcast-industrial complex.

• “you don't need more content. you need this.”
  Do I though?

• “Did you know that many people will spend 7 HOURS reading or listening to your content before they buy from you?”
  What if I’m not selling anything?

• “Podcast Growth OS”
  Appears to be a Notion template and emotional dependence

When Amazon product pages have “co-hosts,” the format itself stops meaning anything.
Take: Podcasting didn’t get disrupted—it got diluted into background noise.

Things That Actually Help

This article about “internet ugly” coming for podcasting from Chris Stone hit something I’ve been feeling for a while but couldn’t quite articulate.

A lot of podcast advice still assumes listeners want everything smoother, tighter, more polished, more optimized. But there’s growing evidence that people are getting tired of content that feels professionally engineered to death.

The piece connects that shift to podcasting in a way that’s funny, slightly uncomfortable, and honestly kind of encouraging if you’ve ever felt like your show was “too real” compared to the hyper-produced guru podcasts.

Read: Podcast Intro Music, OK Boomer

Small Win Of The Month

Loving the Spotify comments!

Plus Podcast Hall of Fame podcaster, Dave Jackson, subscribed to the Substack, roasted me about a domain for the podcast, and has agreed to be a guest for a future episode!

Hit reply with your small win.

Ask Monetize This!

Reader Q&A with light mockery.

Q: A guru told me every episode should be under 12 minutes because “attention spans are shrinking.” Thoughts?
A: People sat through three-hour podcasts about medieval grain taxes last week.

Attention spans are fine. Boring spans are shrinking.

Q: I released 12 episodes and literally no one is listening. Should I be worried?
A: No. “Literally no one” is doing a lot of emotional heavy lifting here.

Podcasting is weirdly front-loaded with silence.

The real question isn’t “why is no one listening?”

It’s “am I going to keep going long enough for people to discover I’m worth ignoring more intentionally?”

Got a podcasting question, dilemma, or petty grievance? Send it in and I may answer it with varying levels of wisdom.

This Month’s Recommendation

A Surprisingly Reasonable Take on Video

A lot of podcast advice right now sounds like: “Do video or disappear.” This article from The Podcast Tech Stack offers a much more useful framing.

The core argument: podcasting hasn’t simply “grown” — it’s split into two different businesses. There’s the RSS/audio world most podcasters know, and there’s the platform-video world driven by YouTube, TikTok clips, and algorithmic discovery. Both are valid. But they reward completely different strategies.

It’s a smart reminder that huge video numbers don’t automatically translate into podcast subscribers, and that “podcasting” now means very different things depending on where the audience is consuming it.

Worth reading if you’re tired of hearing that every show needs to become a YouTube channel immediately.

We’re Watching the Unbundling of ‘Podcasting’ in Real Time

Know a podcast, creator, tool, or weird little gem worth sharing? Send it my way.

Quote To Ignore This Month

“Create a torrential downpour of buyers that DEMAND you sell to them.”

There’s something admirable about treating customers like a natural disaster.
Less admirable: the implication that if this isn’t happening, you’re doing life incorrectly.

Seen an absurd guru quote, hustle cliché, or advice-post masterpiece? Forward it for possible public ridicule.

What I’m Working On

I take a look at some content repurposing advice that sounds harmless until you see what it actually means in practice. One podcast episode becomes five different posts, each requiring editing, writing, design, formatting, and tracking performance. On paper it’s “repurposing.” In reality, it’s a full content assembly line built for teams, not solo creators.

For indie podcasters, this quietly turns into a second job layered on top of the first one we’re barely keeping up with. And the assumption underneath—that you must be posting everywhere to be legitimate—doesn’t really hold up. There’s no requirement to turn your podcast into a content factory. Sometimes the most sustainable strategy is simply making the podcast.

Ask yourself, are you trying to grow your podcast or build a social media following?

Here’s Alex Sanfilippo:

As always, plans are subject to scheduling chaos, changing moods, and me deciding to record something completely different at the last minute.

Send your ideas or requests. Also, if you have a podcast and have been approached by podcast gurus, you would be the perfect guest. Likewise if your’e a brave guru or just somebody with a good sense of humor about podcasting or other creative endeavors.

Until Next Month

Join In

Reply anytime with questions, wins, complaints, bad advice, or things podcasting people should be embarrassed to say out loud.

I’ve been seeing more and more of a certain kind of podcast doing this. One recent pitch I saw was very direct about it. The host describes the show as a media platform. They say the guest will receive visibility, reach, promotion, clips, and distribution. The interview functions as part of a content engine.

The audience barely appears in the conversation.

The guest is the customer. The show serves the person paying for exposure. They promote to “professionals” and this particular pitch contrasted a paid-for guest spot with “hobby podcasts” which they claim:

• Do not publish every episode

• Backlog interviews for months

• Heavily edit your message

Whereas their “pay-to-play” show offers no editing “manipulation” and immediate publishing to a large “collective audience ecosystem” (more on that below).

They’re positioning long production schedules as unprofessional and editorial discretion as a threat to the client experience.

But where is the audience in this conversation? Who is the audience for a show with random guests making pitches?

A good host shapes conversations around pacing, clarity, entertainment, and relevance. Editing removes repetition and filler. Some interviews never air because some guests fail to connect. Production decisions exist because the audience is giving their time to the show. That kind of show might have a backlog because the host is in demand.

This particular show offering paid guest spots markets around professionalism. The say they focus on real media, real production, real visibility, and serious business operations.

I guess I like torture because I actually listened to parts of a few of these interviews. I can’t say it politely. The actual interviews sound rushed, unfocused, and poorly prepared. The audio quality is all over the place. The overall microphone presence and broadcasting chops are just not there.

It should not be a surprise since this production philosophy follows naturally from the business model. A guest who pays for access expects visibility and message control. The host becomes a facilitator instead of an editor or interviewer. The interview becomes a deliverable.

And that large “collective audience ecosystem?” I was the first/only viewer to some of these episodes.

Genuine podcast listeners form habits around tone, chemistry, specificity, and trust. They return for personality and perspective. They build loyalty around hosts who filter conversations and shape material into something worth hearing. A random stream of founders, coaches, speakers, and personal brands creates what? What is the promise to the listener?

The podcast label still carries cultural weight, which explains why so many of these projects use it aggressively. Some barely exist outside YouTube. Some have little presence in podcast apps or RSS distribution. The open podcast ecosystem matters less than the authority associated with the word podcast.

That authority supports a larger visibility economy built around clips, branding, appearances, and audience claims. The language grows bigger than the actual engagement. Ecosystems replace listeners. Reach replaces loyalty. Content replaces shows.

Independent podcasters receive a strange amount of contempt in this environment. The term hobby podcast appears constantly in sales copy. The word hobby functions as an insult directed at creators who edit carefully, publish selectively, and build slowly.

Many of those hobby podcasters still care deeply about the audience experience. They spend hours improving pacing, tightening interviews, fixing audio, and refining ideas. They build actual relationships with listeners over time. The show itself matters to them.

That relationship feels increasingly rare in business promotion podcast culture.

So, you can keep your “professional podcast,” thank you. It offers no reliable experience for listeners to come back to. The audience can’t build a relationship with it. It’s empty. It has no authority. It’s generic. It’s interchangeable. Why would I go on that show, even if I was the target market? Who would I be speaking to?

Don’t be that podcast.

And don’t waste your time and money being a guest on one either. If you have something of value to say, there are shows with audiences that will host you at no charge. If you don’t have anything of value to say, well…

Last week I argued you can’t out-consistency a machine. Let’s talk about what that looks like in practice…

I was recently reviewing advice from a company whose business model benefits from you feeling the need to post social media content frequently. Not surprisingly, they suggest posting consistently. And they want to help you. If you’ve found that even if you are posting consistently, you’re still not seeing results, you must be doing it wrong. But don’t worry, they’ve got a “simple workflow” to fix your problem. The advice sounds efficient in theory. But the real workload becomes much clearer when you take a closer look.

Here’s the workflow underneath the advice, stripped down to the operational steps:

1. Record a podcast episode.

2. Extract multiple content formats from the episode:

   • Reel or video clip

   • Quote graphic

   • Carousel or long-form text post

   • Behind-the-scenes image

   • Teaser or mashup clip

3. Publish all formats across platforms.

4. Monitor engagement metrics:

   • Likes

   • Shares

   • Comments

   • Saves

   • Watch time

   • Follows

5. Compare performance across formats.

6. Identify high-performing post types.

7. Remove or reduce low-performing formats.

8. Produce more variations of successful formats.

9. Shape future content around engagement patterns.

10. Design posts around shareability and audience response.

11. Maintain a consistent publishing schedule to generate enough data for analysis.

12. Repeat the cycle continuously.

It’s amazing how fast this “simple advice” turns into a recurring media operation.

A real implementation of this strategy requires video editing, graphic design, copywriting, content planning, and performance analysis. A solo podcaster handles every one of those roles personally.

The strategy itself makes sense for organizations with staff and production capacity. More formats create more opportunities for discovery and distribution. A solo creator experiences the strategy differently because every additional format increases the amount of operational work attached to a single episode.

“Consistency Is the Floor”

That phrase carries a specific assumption about growth. It frames audience growth as a direct result of output volume and execution quality.

Most indie podcasters operate with limited time, limited energy, and limited distribution reach. Many work without an audience team, production support, or promotional infrastructure. Consistency under those conditions functions as ongoing maintenance work. The schedule keeps moving whether growth arrives or not.

The Workload Behind Repurposing

Repurposing content requires editing, writing, formatting, scheduling, and publishing. Five posts attached to one episode can easily consume several additional hours.

The work continues after publishing through analytics reviews, experimentation, and format adjustments for future episodes.

One creative project expands into a recurring operational commitment.

The Tool Promise

Content tools reduce friction and accelerate production tasks. They help creators edit faster, publish faster, and manage more formats.

But we can assume by this suggestion from the tool creator themselves, that alone isn’t enough. There’s more to it.

The core decisions still require attention and judgment. Someone still chooses the clips, writes the copy, evaluates performance, and decides which formats deserve continued effort.

The software improves the workflow. The workflow still exists.

A Different Approach

A solo podcaster benefits from deciding which activities deserve sustained effort.

That can include lighter social media usage, irregular posting schedules, or long stretches without promotion. Podcasting does not require constant platform activity.

Time and energy can move toward stronger episodes, listener relationships, or simply maintaining a pace that remains enjoyable over time.

More content creates more visibility opportunities. Sustainable output creates longevity.

The Tradeoff

Every additional piece of content draws time and energy away from something else. The tradeoff often affects episode quality, personal bandwidth, or long-term motivation.

A podcast becomes harder to sustain once the surrounding workload grows larger than the creative process itself.

The Takeaway

This advice turns optional tactics into perceived obligations. And these tools that promise to do everything for you, obviously don’t, by the tool makers own admission.

A podcaster can publish episodes without building a full content pipeline. A creator can focus on the show itself without maintaining a presence on every platform.

The podcast can remain the primary project. Everything else stays optional.