Almost daily, a user asks us one of the following questions:
Will you sponsor my podcast?
Can I get Podpage Pro for free if I promote you on my podcast?
These are always hard emails for us to get, because we want to be as supportive as possible to as many podcasts as possible. But unfortunately, we can't reply with "Absolutely!" to these requests.
Truth be told, we used to offer to sponsor the podcast of any Podpage member. We did it our first year and unfortunately, we had to stop this practice. Not because we didn't want to support, just because it didn't make financial sense for us to do it.
Our math is pretty simple: If we can make more than we spend when sponsoring, we are happy to do it. We are a small business, and we can't do sponsorships unless we can measure that they are effective.
The problem is, most podcast sponsorships result in very little traffic to Podpage unless the podcast is very, very, very targeted towards podcasters (for example, the School of Podcasting). That's the key factor. It doesn't matter the # of downloads you have if your show doesn't target podcasters.
So, unfortunately, unless you can show us that sponsoring your podcast will truly have an impact, we can't commit to it or trade a free Pro subscription for it.
However, if you can show us your audience is into Podpage, then we're all for it. So we recommend you sign up as an affiliate, somehow tell your audience about us, and we can measure the traffic (and you get paid for signups). If it seems like a really good fit, then we can totally talk about a more formal relationship.
I hope that's helpful, and apologies we can't sponsor everyone's podcast. Maybe one day!
Brenden