Didn’t See It Coming by Marc Stoiber

Craig Thomas talks about the evolution of podcasting, what podcasters absolutely have to get right to succeed, and what the future holds with Marc Stoiber on the Didn’t See It Coming Podcast.

Marc Stoiber  00:08

Welcome to Didn’t See It Coming, the podcast about brands that learned from the past, look to the future, and profit today. I’m your host, Marc Stoiber. Hey, welcome back to Didn’t See It Coming. I have done a ton of podcasts, I think it’s 85 plus at last count, and I am what I guess I would call a hobby podcaster. I just love talking to people about brands, brands that are doing interesting new things and in general people who are doing interesting new things. Just things learned that brand stewards could pick up and say, I’ll implement that. So I have a certain number of listeners. Could I have more? Of course, I can. Do I care enough to do anything about it? Well, if you look at my monetization obviously not. So I guess I’m what you’d call a hobby podcaster however, the podcasting movement has grown by leaps and bounds to the point where I don’t even know what podcasts to listen to anymore. They’re just coming out of the woodwork and it seems everybody has a podcast now. I wanted to talk about podcast oversaturation because whenever I see a medium like this coming up, especially when brands are using it, I get really interested and I want to see how it’s working out for them. As luck would have it, today in the New York Times Jennifer Miller wrote a story about podcast oversaturation, and you’ll see it linked below this podcast. What she talks about is really interesting. She says exactly the same thing as I do. She says every freelancer, Guru, Entrepreneur has one now. There are over 700,000 podcasts out there. Two thousand new ones are being added every month. You know that an industry is in decline when the big rush is not to put out a quality podcast, but to put out books about how to make podcasts and how to make money on a podcast. You start hearing terms like podcast hacking. As far as I’m concerned, when I hear hacking, that’s when I start to think the industry is oversaturated and in decline, because the people getting involved are not there because they have the hobby of doing something of value and interest and they want to bring something cool to their audience, but they want to hack into it and figure out how to monetize it. And I think that’s where the ideas go sideways. I got really lucky a couple of weeks ago, a gentleman named Craig Thomas looked me up. He saw my podcast, and he saw that I was a hobby podcaster.  He said, you could do a whole lot better with this, and right away I just turned that around. I said, show me how I could do better at this, and now I’m taking Craig’s advice, just full transparency. I am going to make my podcast better and I’m hoping that I’m going to be able to attract a whole lot more listeners, because why not? But also I said, Craig if I do that I want to bring you on the show. Now Craig works for a company called Call For Content, and I want to talk to Craig today about podcasts and how they evolved. What podcasters are doing nowadays? And is the industry actually at a saturation point? Is it even in decline? So Craig, welcome to the show. 

Craig Thomas  03:30

Thanks so much for having me on.

Marc Stoiber  03:31

Now, you’ve got a funny accent. You’re not calling from Seattle, are you?

Craig Thomas  03:36

Definitely not. I’m a whole other continent away.

Marc Stoiber  03:39

You’re South African. 

Craig Thomas  03:41

That’s correct. 

Marc Stoiber  03:42

So that’s shorthand for saying if connection drops do not worry about it because South Africa only has dial-up internet, doesn’t it?

Craig Thomas  03:50

It’s one of those things. Yeah, that’s exactly the situation.

Marc Stoiber  03:54

You and I have had this problem already once. We were talking about this.

Craig Thomas  03:58