Rewrite the rules. On your own terms.
introducing the podcast moneymaker
The reaLITY
The CPM Game is for Suckers
At 1,000 downloads, a $15 CPM pays you fifteen dollars. Per episode. A $50 CPM — which almost nobody actually gets — pays you a whole fifty.
Congratulations. You've earned a sandwich.
That's the ceiling the podcast industry told me my show was worth. I believed it for years, mostly because I was the one selling those CPMs to brands.
Then She Podcasts went and made a great deal more money than that math said was possible.
Not from downloads. From everything else.
The Podcast Moneymaker is the weekly newsletter where I show you exactly how that worked — and how to do it with the show you already have, at the size you already are.
LIMITED TIME BONUS: Become a founding member this week only and get a 5-day crash course about selling sponsorship for any size show, plus a year's subscription for only $197!
here i am!
Who's yelling at you about CPMs
I've been selling advertising for 25 years. Newspaper. Magazine. Digital. I started selling web ads in the late 90s, when most of the job was explaining to business owners what a website was for.
In 2015 I started a podcast advertising agency. Six figures within six months. Sold it in 2017.
Not because it stopped working. Because of one thing about it I couldn't seem to stomach.
For a while after that, I was going to build a podcast network. Gather up a bunch of shows, sell their advertising, and take a cut. On paper: perfect. It's the thing at which I'm genuinely amazing.
Networks run on downloads. That's the whole shaboomey. The entire thing. The shows that get taken care of are the ones already big enough to be worth taking care of. Everyone else gets to wait politely in line for a number that may never arrive.
Meh.
That aspect made me the person standing between you and your money — promising results while having roughly zero control over what you actually earned. Taking a percentage of revenue that depended entirely on some brand manager's quarterly budget. Not on you. Not on your audience. Not on one single thing you could influence.
Hard pass.
Instead, I'm going to teach it instead of brokering it. You keep your show, your audience, and your money. I hand over 25 years of knowing how this works, creative out-of-the-box thinking, and genuine joy when you break all the monetizing rules and bring in the bacon the best way that works for YOU and your show.
I'm the prime example of how it can all work
What we actually did.
With She Podcasts, we threw ALL of the pasta at the wall. Not just spaghetti.
Patreon. Live events. A membership. Sponsorships — and not just on the show, but on our social channels, our email list, our website.
Some of it worked beautifully. Some of it face-planted spectacularly. We kept what genuinely served this community and what we could energetically sustain, and we let the rest go.
Here's the part nobody tells you: almost none of it depended on download count.
We were sitting at about 1,000 downloads an episode. By industry logic, that's a show worth fifteen dollars a week. Instead:
$50,547 raised from 341 backers for a live event
$70,081 in ticket revenue from a single conference
$7,525 from an awards program we made up out of thin air
Plus Patreon, plus the membership, plus sponsorships across four separate channels
Not one dollar of that came from a CPM.
All of it came from having a specific audience that certain brands could not reach any other way.
All of it came from being able to value my assets and pitch them to sponsors who saw the value in my audience.
That is available to a show with 200 downloads. It's just not obvious — and nobody explains it, because the people who'd benefit from explaining it are the ones getting paid on volume.
the nitty gritty
Fine, but what is it?
The Podcast Moneymaker is a weekly newsletter teaching you all about how to make real money with your podcast. Real numbers, real rates, real teardowns. What shows are actually charging. What sponsors are actually paying. And the revenue models that have precisely nothing to do with your download count.
Three ways in. All three close September 1.
the basics - podcast sponsorship email course
The Crash Course - $67
Five days, five emails, distilled from thirty modules I've taught for years:
Day 1 — Intel: what you actually know about your listeners, and how to find out the rest
Day 2 — Building a media kit that doesn't lead with your downloads
Day 3 — Pricing: what to charge when the CPM math is insulting
Day 4 — Packaging: why bundles outsell spots, every time
Day 5 — The pitch: finding leads, and writing the email that actually gets answered
Plus 30 days of The Podcast Moneymaker.
The founder - a year of education
The Vault — $197
Everything above, plus:
- The Vault — media kit template, rate calculator, pitch email scripts, sponsorship contract templates, demographics worksheet, testimonial guide
Monthly comes to $228 a year. This is $197, and it never creeps up on you.
One sponsorship deal pays for this ten times over. One.
founding member plus my eyes on your show
Sponsor-Ready — $397 · only 40 seats
Everything above, plus two live 90-minute Pitch Labs:
- Tuesday, September 15
- Tuesday, September 29
I review real media kits and real pitch emails on the call. Yours included. Bring what you've got, or bring absolutely nothing and build it with us in real time. Recordings included if you can't make it live.
Forty seats, and when they're gone they're gone. I'm not adding chairs.
"Yeah, but my show is too small."
Cool. That's the exact belief this entire thing has been created to dismantle.
Small shows lose the CPM game by definition. That's what CPM is — a price per thousand. Fewer thousands, less money. There is no clever strategy that beats that arithmetic. You will not out-hustle multiplication.
So quit playing that game.
A sponsor doesn't want a thousand downloads. A sponsor wants the right listeners. If your 200 people are precisely who a brand has been trying to reach, and you can prove it, you're holding something a 50,000-download general-interest show physically cannot sell them.
Proving it is a skill. That skill is most of what I teach.
Questions you're probably having:
Is this for buying ads or selling them?
Selling. This is for podcasters trying to get paid — not for brands trying to spend.
I don't have any sponsors yet.
Then you're exactly who this is for. Most of the Crash Course is what to do before anybody has said yes to anything.
Is it all sponsorship?
Nope, and that's rather the point. Sponsorship is one of five or six ways to do this. The newsletter covers memberships, Patreon, live events, merch, affiliates, private feeds, paid subscriptions — with actual numbers on each.
Can't make the Pitch Labs live?
Recordings go to everyone in Sponsor-Ready. Send your media kit ahead and I'll review it on the call anyway.
Refunds?
If the Crash Course doesn't hand you something you can actually use, tell me within 14 days and I'll give you your money back. No form, no hoops, just reply.
September 1 - That's when all three close.
The Pitch Labs happen September 15 and 29 whether the seats sell out or not, and there is no second round on the calendar at this time.
I spent 25 years learning how to sell advertising on other people's behalf. I'd rather spend the next 25 teaching you to sell it on your own.
— Jess