Episode 76: Helping Podcasters Get Paid with Michael Kadin, Founder and CEO at RedCircle

In this week’s episode of Subscriptions Scaled, we speak with Michael Kadin, Founder and CEO of RedCircle.

In the episode, we learn about podcasting and advertising, including marketing pixels, subscription pricing, and the growth and future of podcasting. 

Keep reading to learn more about the episode.

RedCircle

RedCircle is a platform for podcasters, brands, and agencies looking to transact in podcast advertising. The company helps all types of podcasters to distribute their shows to receive analytics on them to run marketing campaigns. 

RedCircle also helps podcasters monetize their show. It does this with subscription payments, where podcasters can collect a couple of dollars from their fans and through advertising. 

The mission of RedCircle is essentially to help podcasters get paid. But along the way, it also provides helpful tools and technology for creators, brands, and agencies.

RedCircle is around four years old. The company has been growing over the last several years. In the early days, the team focused exclusively on podcasters, trying to bring them on board as you can’t sell advertising on podcasts without a bunch of podcasts.

To get podcasters on board, RedCircle gave away its product for free. It decided to fill it with exciting and useful features in the market, including subscription tools. Podcasters could use the product to collect money from their fans.

RedCircle built the business up for a year or two, providing an excellent product for podcasters for distribution, analytics, growth, and payments. Once it grew to a decent size, it went to work on advertising automation tools, which are unique in the market.

The team has been building these tools over the last two years and has been growing and growing. RedCircle has had a lot of success gaining new brands and serving existing ones. It works with tiny brands looking to spend their first money on podcasting to some of the largest podcast advertisers out there.

Podcast advertising 

The episode covers pixels, pricing, and the growth of podcasting among other topics. 

There are already four million podcasts, with approximately 400,000 active in a given month, so the future of podcasting looks assured.

There are many benefits to podcasting that you can’t get from other media. For example, think about how much more you can explain about a product in a spoken word advertisement versus an Instagram post.

Podcasting allows you to explain a product in more detail than a simple image or a short video can show.

If your product is a little more complicated or you’re introducing something new to the market, podcasting can be an effective way to explain it.

Podcasting can be compared to influencer marketing, except it's done in audio and involves a host. However, in time, the podcast host and guests can influence their audience.

RedCircle tends to work with the sort of brands that are good at what they do and have established audiences but aren’t filled to the brim with advertising. RedCircle is excellent at helping grow the influence and reach of these types of podcasts.

Many larger podcasts are filled with ads, but mid-sized podcasts offer a much higher share of voice. These podcasters can offer a far more authentic experience. RedCircle believes that these mid-sized podcasters have a much greater opportunity for driving significant ROI and high performance.

Targeted advertising 

Targeted advertising can help marketers find their audience. For example, true crime, yoga, or reality TV podcasts are going to hit the right audience with targeted advertising.

RedCircle knows what kind of app people are listening from and the IP location, which can also help with targeted advertising. If you want to restrict campaigns to the United States or if there is a regulatory requirement that forces you into a particular market, that’s an option, too.

There’s some general targeting that RedCircle does that’s relatively coarse versus what some marketers may be used to. However, the contextual targeting available in podcasting can really let you focus on your niche and find the audience that you need.

Campaign analytics

There’s been impressive product innovation in campaign analytics over the last several years. Technologies for attribution and podcasting have emerged.

RedCircle pushes data to the vendor, saying a listener was impressed with a particular advertisement. Then the data is pushed through a pixel or another type of integration to the vendor to show who’s visited their landing pages and who’s converted and made a purchase. Then cross-device matching is made on the back end to give a clear picture of the fundamental performance of the campaign.

But what is a pixel? A pixel is a tiny web URL that allows you to push data to an attribution vendor that says a particular listener was impressed with an advert. It just involves a little copying and pasting that you can do from the attribution vendor into RedCircle software. 

When it comes up on the customer’s side, it comes up as a chunk of code you can put on your website. 

Then the pixel does the matching on the back end. The match isn’t perfect but it will give you a good idea of whether you’re getting reasonable ROI on a campaign, which podcasts are performing better than others, and more. Plus, the pixel is super easy to use.

The whole process is painless. You simply put the pixel in, hook it up to RedCircle’s campaign, and let it run. A lot of infrastructures similar to the pixel have emerged in the podcasting space to help brands make their way in the industry.

Historically in podcasting you’d need 900 spreadsheets and be querying databases, trying to match things together. But in this case, you just set up the infrastructure and the dashboard is there waiting for you. RedCircle fully integrates with all the different vendors that do this type of work.

With all the energy, creation, and effort going into podcasting, it comes as no surprise that RedCircle is so successful.

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