Keeping Tell Us Something Podcast Ad-Free

Recently a podcast monetization company reached out to me inviting me to use their service at no charge. We set up a phone interview.

Their promise to me was that, to start, the Tell Us Something Podcast would be earning net about $400/mo based upon current estimated listening trends of about 10,000 monthly listeners. They would also give me tools to help grow the listening audience. The other service they would provide is better analytics.

All of this sounds desirable, right? I mean, $400/month is not a lot of money, but it’s SOMETHING.

“What do I need to do?” I asked.

All I would have to do is run a pre-roll ad at the beginning of the podcast, a mid-roll ad & a post-roll ad. I would have complete control over all of the sponsorship mentions & the ads would be automatically & randomly generated from their pool of advertisers.

“Who’s in the pool?” I asked.

Chain restaurants, box stores, national insurance companies.

“Are there ways to opt out of certain advertisers?”

Yes, but that would negatively affect the quoted revenue stream.

“Ok, is there an option to opt out of the mid-roll ad?”

“No. But you have complete control as far as where the mid-roll ad is placed. You could have it come right as the story arc is peaking,” he said to me.

This is a deal breaker.

I explained to him that the whole mission of Tell Us Something is to value people’s stories & have those stories be heard uninterrupted. Everyone has a story. Everyone’s story is valuable & therefore everyone is valuable. Interrupting a story with an ad for car insurance (or anything else) goes against what Tell Us Something stands for.

He thanked me for my time & told me to call him if I reconsider sometime in the future.

I won’t be calling him.

Your story matters,

Marc