Yeah, youre right. Then on the other side, you have MrBeast, who literally gives away money to start a hamburger chain that will make him a billionaire. How do you do it? I feel like its still a thriving business. Will Ferrell has started a podcast as the character he played in the movie of the same name. Are they yours if theyre subscribed on YouTube? Yeah, we do too. Its really that simple. While some podcasts will make amazing video channels, YouTube channels, Facebook video series, and amazing Netflix series, I worry that it feels like the requirement to sit at the adult table. Even if ultimately it was frustrating to the creator network, usually when there was a huge shift in a business model, the newer platforms were fixing a problem. Overall, it was a fun first show that was a little light thematically but should improve with different guests and crazy circumstances allowing Will Ferrell to play around in the style that made him famous." Google wont give us the time of day. It sounds like you think you have some leverage over the platforms. 2023 Big Money Players and iHeartPodcasts. Were also co-producing a slate of whole new stuff. I think the first five or six years of the podcast industry can honestly take credit for several companies that are around today, like Mailchimp, Blue Apron, and probably the mattresses that we all sleep on. Yeah. One San Diego legend joins another for the definitive interview with the San Diego Chicken. I think weve said this publicly. You have a distribution model that is free. Reviews. You launched a lot of new stuff. Ron and Carolina are terrorized by Gilly The Clown, who teaches us about death. The Ron Burgundy Podcast 5M ago Will Ferrell reprises his role as Ron Burgundy in the world-famous Ron Burgundy Podcast! A third of all the media we consume is just audio. There has never been a moment in the company that we were sidelined or deprioritized. If you dont do this, you will never have the reach you need in digital audio. I think we moved off it too fast and I think its a robust business we should still focus on. No credit card needed. I think most podcasters are bad at marketing. When we sit with Malcolm Gladwell, Shonda Rhimes, Questlove, or Charlamagne tha God, our own radio DJ, the pitch is, I assure you every single episode of what we make will be available to any listener, wherever they want to pick it up.. Broadcast radio is a mass-reach medium still today. This year, were all talking about YouTube and video podcasts. Theyre not in charge, right? Were like, Hey, you should buy podcasting. There have been moments in the last five to ten years where Facebook has shown real interest in audio, and then theyve backed off the two or three times that has happened, so Im not sure. To answer your other question, if this industry were to wholly move to a platform like Facebook or YouTube, its a different platform. First of all, search engine optimization, period, is a version of what youre talking about. Episode One of "The Ron Burgundy Podcast" talks about one of the most popular genres of podcasts: True Crime. Hes like, How did you decide what youre going to do? I said, All I can tell you is, and this is where he rolls his eyes, is that the job I have, the industry I work in, didnt exist when I went to college. It thrives when it is a widely distributed medium. Do you worry that you dont have the same control? So he had a similar trajectory, and hes a wonderful guy. Actor Will Ferrell said Thursday at the Podcast Movement conference in Los Angeles that he has begun live-taping performances he is doing in L.A. which will serve at the anchor of The Ron Burgundy Podcast 's forthcoming outing. Whereas if I were to decide to stop distributing or making content on my YouTube channel, my brand just goes away. You have sat out a bunch of stuff, you have sat out subscription, but I just want to sit with distribution for one more second. Reviews. Subscribehere! Following the scary drop, Burgundy made sure everyone was alright and the proceeded to give his review of his recent Cheesecake Factory experience. Youre the CEO of iHeart Digital, which is a big company with a long history. It made it the medium that the internet promised creators it would give them but hadnt yet. Burgundy, who has a fountain of knowledge that spans literally every topic imaginable, has signed on for two 12-episode seasons, with the first episode of "The Ron Burgundy Podcast" making its . Will Ferrell reprises his role as Ron Burgundy in the Ron Burgundy Podcast. The core fundamental, pretty consistent business model of podcasting is a rev share model. You always do if youre running a startup. Its gone. I think our marketing team spends literally 95 percent of their time thinking about how to deploy what wed call house ads, and then maybe 5 percent of their time on paid marketing. iHeartMedia came along and offered us two or three things specifically. They take our panel listening on the iHeart radio app, look at it by geo-territory and day part, and they tie it back to the shows that youre listening to on air. You mentioned that you had experimented with subscriptions. The newest mass-reach media just happened, and it is called podcasting. Will Ferrell reprises his role as Ron Burgundy in the world-famous Ron Burgundy Podcast! And yeah, a lot of it is Bob Pittman, and his partner, Rich Bressler, and our head of finance, Mike McGuinness. That is some real Silicon Valley stuff. Its called Hot Pod, written by our very own Ariel Shapiro. As a creator or a publisher, I can plug my RSS feed into a distribution app if I so choose, and people subscribing to my RSS feed. Be as simple as you can in your answers, in your approaches, in your strategies. Its clearly not as regulated as radio. Some of this is obvious. But yes, weve seen that convert. What worries me a little bit is that we have this tendency on the internet, and since Ive been working in digital media overall, to have this belief sometimes that I think is false that everything really needs to be a video when it grows up. Join Americas favorite Anchorman, continuing to delight audiences with the comical musings of Ron Burgundy and leave them wanting more! There are huge, great ad agencies like Ad Results, Veritone, and Oxford Road who do great business for performance marketing companies. WARNING: This episode was haunted by a ghost. Will Ferrell was like, Please, please stop running so many ads, but it worked. We were actually working and trying to make change together genuinely. #moviepodcast #podcast #anchorman #ronburgundy #paulrudd #willferrel Who are we? Last year, Verge alumni and Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman reported that iHeart worked with a firm called Jun Group to essentially buy podcast downloads through video games. How did the NFT thing go? Ron and Carolina interview an actual, real live psychic after Ron gives listeners their horoscopes. It has been a player in the audio space across multiple kinds of distribution for a long time. Ron Burgundy! The other is the digital audio group. Its good content. This was extremely funny and enjoyable to listen as Ron stumbled through another day reliving memories. Is that something you think about as targeting? We do all kinds of advertising models with Malcolm and his team. Have you had conversations with Spotify about making stuff exclusive? There is always something new happening. The fifth season brings canned laughter and an audience . if these shows have a visual option available somewhere to watch, that'd be cool, i guess. We ran a third-party research study two years ago with WARC. Each episode has a different theme in which Ron engages in conversation with another notable person on the topic at hand. Last year when we were all in this room, we could not stop talking about Spotify. Our job was really simple. There is a product lead; Uta Knablein is our chief product officer. There is nothing broken in the podcast distribution and monetization model today. Thanks to all of you for coming to the HotPod Summit. / Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we've tested sent to your inbox daily. If anything, we have doubled down on this model of partnering with a creator, like a Shonda Rhimes, who wants a big playground thats long-term. We basically built an academy where once a year we grab eight or 10 people. In each episode, Georg.Show More Introducing: Season 3 of StraightioLab 02:55 | Sep 2nd More RECOMMEND 8) Peter McIndoe and Tim Heidecker He used his podcast as a way to capture that language and report on how a language dies off the face of the earth, never to come back. We tend to think and work sequentially. Associate Producers: Anna Hossnieh and Sophie Lichterman. By the way, put TheVerge.com on the home screen of your phone. It used to be tried and true, my go-to tool, and now it isnt., Audio all-up is a third of all the media we consume.. Sure we are. We tend to think we have to do things sequentially. Its all about the org chart. How do you account for that? I dont have it candidly on a P&L anywhere. We need certain things to calm down and other things to end. In fact, you almost certainly kill true creativity when you hit that moment. Why is that? This may be debatable, and may feel like an affront to a lot of folks in the room who live and breathe podcasting as an original medium. But I have learned firsthand and talked a lot about the extent to which broadcast radio talent has honed this craft of conversation over the last hundred years and certainly the last few decades, and the extent to which that has driven our medium, just sheer talent hitting the medium, but also with an awareness of the medium. Ive never seen a medium move from widely distributed, free, high quality, and low to no ad load, move into a paid medium with exactly the same assets. Thats important, because I think they want to do the right thing by the medium. Walk us through what that actually means. Yeah, we did a great Decoder episode with Chris Dixon, the lead partner for that stuff at Andreessen Horowitz. Is there any tension there at all? Thats our conference for the podcast industry. I dont have this concern in podcasting. One hundred and twenty million a month? Conal oversees podcasting at a giant radio company, and his group accounts for a quarter of iHearts revenue, which was $1 billion last quarter alone. Thats interesting. I think the value of that creative playground to a creator, that is really free and really permissive, cannot be underestimated.. I ask it of everybody. Sometimes they just shuffle it to create change. This show is also a podcast where we capture the file, distribute it as an on-demand thing, and then it drives upwards of 15 to 20 million downloads a month. Humans have a predilection for overcomplicating things. We were talking about these giant platform companies. We were especially interested in it recently because we were launching a thing called iHeartLand, which was basically iHeartMedia as a Roblox map and an island in Fortnite. The last piece I will say is Bob Pittman, the CEO of iHeartMedia. Launching in early 2019, the podcast will be co . In fact, well distribute it on broadcast radio, and so we did. Again, I hate to keep repeating it, but I dont see the problem Id be fixing. Ninety-five percent. The reason we started this company was because I think he genuinely had a blast making The Ron Burgundy Podcast. She said, On the podcast, its much looser. Most of them are like, Facebook wont give us the time of day. Discovery bought our company because they were about to go public, and they wanted to have a really strong digital strategy. We take this for granted as creators, as publishers, and as networks. Hes fantastic. Maybe one day you will, but not today. Yes, we do that all the time. Our marketing people are here, youre very good. Ron and Carolina get advice about how to navigate the dark web. Some of that newer distribution has proven out, like podcasting; some of it is Roblox. I think our stats were something like never more than 1 percent, 2 percent, 2.5 percent of our downloads in any given month. 2023 Vox Media, LLC. But I also think it fundamentally tripped up a little as a business model. You have a content type that is the highest quality in the world, I would argue, out of any content getting made today, except maybe TV, which is pretty good right now but we are right there next to it. I think they know the effect, long-term, that you have when you stop marketing. One of the themes we come back to on Decoder over and over again, especially when I talk to creatives or creative executives, is that your distribution fundamentally shapes what you make. No. Standing back and watching how her and the Shondaland audio team work, it seems they want to use this medium to do two things so far. Aside from "True Romance", Carolina also co-hosts "The Ron Burgundy Podcast," with the on-screen Ron Burgundy himself, Will Ferrell.