Jessica Cordova Kramer is CEO and co founder of Lemonada Media. — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
Sam Sethi: You have had an amazing year. Talk us through it.
Jessica Cordova Kramer: I cannot believe how many things have happened this year, not just for us but for the industry as a whole.
I always like to couch our success in saying that it is hard work. What we do, what our producers do, what our marketers do, what our talent does, and everything you get to read about and see about is all the good stuff, of course. So happy to talk about challenges too, and we’re all having them and I think it’s helpful for other CEOs and folks at media companies to know that for every nice post we’re doing, there’s ten things we’re doing in the background to problem solve and build this beautiful thing with our team.
But yeah, it’s been a wild year, Sam. We’ve been working with Meghan on bringing her show Archetypes to the masses, and it had a phenomenal launch. It feels like 16 years ago now. We brought that show out to Apple listeners and out beyond Spotify listeners, and the reception has been warm and wonderful and we had a great time working with Meghan on that and her team and Spotify. It was a dream come true as well. So it was really a lovely experience across the board and our creative team, our marketing team is deep in the weeds with the Duchess now and we’ll share more in the New year about how that’s going. But it’s been a really wonderful experience. She’s brilliant and hard working and the first person to be on every single call. She’s really just fabulous.
And yeah, we’ve been rocking and rolling all year long. We brought Podcrushed to the network and Penn and Nava and Sophie have been phenomenal to work with. The show has been rising and just getting such incredible talent on it. And it’s a darling of brands and agencies as well. And of course, David Duchovny’s series came out in May and we had planned only 20 episodes with David, and he just texted me yesterday and it was like we just did 31 because it’s just been going incredibly well. Alec Baldwin just came on and they had a fabulous that’s been reported everywhere. And David is an intellectual and a brilliant interviewer and has been really growing into his own. And the show is a fantastic place to talk with remarkable people about the times in their lives where things haven’t gone as planned and how that’s shaped them.
Most recently, we announced that Happier would be coming - so Gretchen Rubin and her team, plus two other shows, Happier in Hollywood and Side Hustle School are all joining the network in the New Year. And we’ve just announced that Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso will be coming over as well. So that’s thrilling. I can’t wait for people to hear about that. But we’re working with Melissa McCarthy, Ellie Kemper, so many more - all of this happen this year and we just are grateful for folks who trust us with their brand and their message and their desire to use podcasting to make life success.
SS: Earlier this year, This American Life put out a note saying that they’re struggling with ad revenue. Where is it with you?
JCK: There are a couple of things for us that differentiate us from more traditional media.
One is we have to be nimble. We have to assume the worst every week. We have to plan for an environment that is ever changing. Stephanie and I launched this company in September 2019 - months before a pandemic, and we bootstrapped, we put our own money in, and that’s how we got the company off the ground. We got a small advance from our sales support network at the time, we hired a tiny team and then COVID hit.
And then it was a wild election in the middle of a pandemic and global wars, strife, protests, you name it. We have been running this company in the wildest of times and there has not been a precedented day since we started it and let alone the industry. Stuff from iOS 17 to media consolidation to the impact of the world news on the advertising industry, which we know are hand in hand. So we actually have staff meeting leaders talking about this with our team. We constantly have to be in a conservative environment as business leaders and as the people who are responsible for our staff and our talent.
And so I think we go into 2025 with the same level of careful planning as we went into 24, 23, 22, 21 and probably 19 as well. We brought sales in-house in 2021, so we’ve had our own sales team which enables us to monetize our slate of originals without sharing revenue with the sales partner and it enables us to bring sales and distribution partnerships onto the network. And we have wildly different results than the industry as a whole.
Even as we’ve grown upwards of 200% of audience year over year, our CPMs are in the high thirties and low forties, our fill-rate is around 80% consistently year over year and we are able to do that because we are working really closely with talent and producers to make those ads great, and we work really hand in hand and in a white glove way with agencies and with brands. Even when things are going wrong, which they inevitably do, we are approaching the work with a high level of customer service, which we’re able to scale over time. All to say it’s just dramatically different than, I think what traditional media and particularly public media is able to do on the sales and partnerships side.
And we’re hopeful about 2025, but we’re planning for a more conservative year just in case some of the feelings are true. Our subscription business is growing. We’ve had a wonderful partnership with Apple Premium subscriptions; we’re just launching with Supporting Cast now, so we’re excited about that and our revenue has grown around 40% to 70% year over year since we’ve started, and we’re assuming a similar level of growth next year.
But we’re still not a big company. We don’t have a ton of cash like a big, huge media company that’s publicly traded might have, and this year we will be turning a profit. And that’s exciting and helping us get to be even more independent.
We did a raise that was three years ago now, and we’ve been operating on our own steam for these past few years.
SS: One of the things that Sounds Profitable’s Tom Webster put out was the number of ads as an average within a podcast was about three minutes. And we know that radio has got significantly more. Do you think that listeners will push back on that?
JCK: You know, it really depends on the show. So if you have a creator lens on the sponsorship, which we do at Lemonada, we see the ads as content. Our team does a lot of the work with the brands to rewrite the scripts and have them sound fun. And who doesn’t want to hear David Duchovny, Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Scott Aukerman talking about whatever? I’ll listen to a phone book if it’s interesting enough. So we think about the ads as content for us. We don’t stuff our shows, but we also have to make the shows make sense. If people want to have art, it needs to be funded and this is our way of funding it. We’re not shy about it. I don’t think we should hide behind the fact that our hosts are reading ads, and those ads are what fuel the team’s salary, my salary, the ability for talent to spend their time making podcasts and if they’re great, people won’t skip them. Brands will be happy. They’ll come back.
Our retention is super high for brands and agencies, and if something isn’t working like swap it out, But we don’t do a ton of programmatic, which is where I think you see a lot of the stuffing. It’s easy to stuff, hard to put ten ads in a podcast if it’s all host-read and thoughtful and has a really clear call to action. So that is not to say the programmatic ads are bad, but I think that’s where you get a little bit of the strain. You’re listening to a show and then all of a sudden it’s something else and it’s back to the show. It doesn’t sound like that when we’re making ads, it sounds a little more like it’s part of the content.
SS: Would you ever move into like Wondery have with Wondery plus creating your own community network?
JCK: We think about community all the time, creating content and community is a big part of the next phase of our work. We got through our five year plan. We’ve built an extremely large audience. I think we’re fourth biggest network on Triton’s table and about the 18th or 19th, depending on the month on Podtrac. And that was a big part of our drive for the first five years. Now we have that big audience. They’re everywhere - and we want to convene them in different ways. So for sure, everything from live events to technological solutions for gathering our folks in a variety of ways so they could interact with each other around the issues and the shows that they care about, interact with talent, interact with staff. That is definitely part of the dream.
SS: Jessica, it’s been an amazing conversation and thank you so much.
JCK: Thanks, Sam.