The best content I saw this week!

Policing in Baltimore

The Tragedy of Baltimore (2019)

Who Wants to Run the Deadliest Big City in America? (2020)

The Media Business

How the ‘Call Her Daddy’ Feud Boiled Over (2020)

I had been underestimating the value of a podcast and personal brand by multiple orders of magnitude. The podcasters, Sofia Franklyn, and Alexandra Cooper understand their value (99.9%), the value of their hosting company (very little) and decide to get paid what they are worth. Hosting a podcast is simply hosting an RSS feed of an mp3 file, and some metadata like description text and images. A podcast app on a phone is just an RSS reader at heart. This includes the extremely popular Apple podcast app. Podcasts are an open web triumph! Now we come to the issue of promoting the podcast. This is another topic that the article corrected my understanding of. Sofia and Alexandra don't need gatekeepers to promote them. They can do it themselves. They are brands.

Combine

1) the open web of podcast hosting

2) social media connecting Sofia and Alexandra directly with their fans and the gatekeepers are not needed.

Sofia and Alexandra made it to the Top 20 on the Apple Podcast app.

“These girls have nearly one million followers, they can make $10,000 or $20,000 for a single Instagram post,” she said. “You can take that audience and do anything. You could start a fashion label, you could start a spinoff podcast. If that audience likes and trusts you, there’s literally endless things you can do with it. Imagine getting to that level and then taking a $75,000 salary.”

Sounds great for a top influencer! Now add in the long tail of interests online, and there's a big blue ocean of opportunity out there for creators.