Podcasting’s audience (and its profits) are growing
TWiT was started in 2005 long before there was a Twitter. The network is named for its flagship podcast, a roundtable discussion with tech journalists called “This Week In Tech.” Leo Laporte had a long track record in TV and radio before he founded TWiT. He says it’s been successful since day one.
“Being a profitable podcast network is not an easy thing to do, and you can count the number of profitable podcast networks on the fingers of one hand. I’m one of them, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy thing to do by any means,” he says.
Laporte hosts nearly half of TWiT’s 30 shows. A live video stream of the tapings draws an audience of 3,000 to 4,000 viewers, but TWiT makes money because a loyal audience downloads five million podcast episodes a month, mostly as audio. That brings in $6 million in ad revenue a year.
Says Laporte, “I came to this from mainstream media. I had a built-in audience already. We have an ad sales infrastructure. We have a way of counting our downloads. And we have a very devoted community.”
That community includes a thousand geeks—some of them IT professionals—active in a chat room that weighs in on the tech topics while the podcasts are being recorded. It’s a boon to Laporte and his guests, which includes tech writer John C. Dvorak.
“I spend all my time monitoring the chatroom because they have good suggestions, and they will correct you if you say something stupid or wrong, and then you can correct yourself on the show in real time. And I find that very valuable,” says Dvorak.
TWiT’s audience ranges from tweens to seniors, and includes a sizable segment listening abroad. Fans have been known to turn out in droves when Laporte does personal appearances. In 2011, when TWiT’s new state of the art studio was being built in Petaluma, CA, listeners sent in a quarter million dollars to help build the facility.
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