There's so much more to expand on this, and I am going to do a proper job of that at some point this month in the newsletter. I linked an article in the headline and it was so alarming to read as some who started the entire podcasting program for them. It is a perfect example of what I was talking about two weeks ago when I said that "You Are The Platform!"
If you are unfamiliar with SB Nation, it is a collection of websites for fans of mostly American sports like the NFL, NBA, MLB, and MMA as it main focal points.
Although the idea of having a Philadelphia Eagles fan podcast had been their before for their website Bleeding Green Nation, they couldn't execute it nor did they see the value in it in 2013. SB Nation at this point was very notorious for not paying their employees. It was totally disguised as people being "contributors to blog" so they wouldn't have to pay them and gave promises of exposure to "real media jobs" in the locker rooms, instead of making people W-2 employees or even 1099 contractors. They were making money hand over fist because Google Ads paid so well, and the labor was FREE. When has that ever been a good business model?
So when I co-founded the podcast "BGN Radio" with the staff in 2013, SB Nation had told us that they did not see the value in trying to make money in podcasting as it is "not profitable." They promised us in writing that we had every right to sell the podcast, use their platform to do it, and make money however we could. I was already ahead of the game with my early experiences in podcasting from 2005-2011 in Los Angeles, so the fact the I could sell my own advertising, and get our own deals done to making a living sounded like a dream come true to me. That is of course until we made it profitable during BGN Radio's peak, which was almost $100,000 as a group.
Once we made it that profitable in 2017, the Eagles won the Superbowl and sponsors were emailing us left and right to gear up for 2018 season. I wrote an entire Tweet thread about my experiences and urge you to check that out, but now SB Nation was claiming that they owned everything that we were doing and gave us an ultimatum. Take nothing, or get out. We had grown the podcast to 20K average listeners per episode and were peaking at 30k-40k listenership for the juicy breaking Eagles news (like Chip Kelly getting fired in 2015). We not only built an amazing podcast together, we laid out the entire blue print for the company of how to replicate it, so I honestly thought we were all getting jobs. Did that happen? Nope. Not even close.
They claimed they could provide us with $5,000/month in ad revenue share and we would be a part of a profit share moving forward. That was in the summer of 2018 and since that conversation, SB Nation has not sold ONE advertiser to BGN Radio. Not one.
I left because I couldn't take that anymore and went to Sportsradio 94WIP to work with them fulltime and took the podcast with me. There was another huge lesson to learn once I got there as well, but that's for another time. It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life and it ruined a ton of relationships in the process. We certainly had problems internally, but to me, most of those would have been solved with a living wage. For some reason, no one wanted to pay us but they sure as shit wanted to make money off of us.
If you are a content creator
Never ever, EVER, do anything for the sake of exposure. If no one wants to pay you, but they still want you to help them bring in business for them, please run away.
If you are a business owner
STOP chasing the big numbers that these companies keep pouring over you as a reason to spend big money with them. START scouting the people you actually like on social, YouTube, or whatever platform you use all of the time personally. Don't even look at their follower counts, these are the first things that you need to ask yourself when looking for content creation marketing partners:
1) Do I love the content this person is putting out?
2) Can I rely and work with the this content creator for six month to a year at a time?
3) Will the content and the content creator consistently talk to the community that I am seeking?
It's the same way content creators are seeking you right now.
