Neil Mody is CEO and Co-Founder of Headliner — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
Neil Mody: Headliner is a suite of tools that help you try to grow your podcast. Everything from the smallest podcaster all the way up to some of the biggest operations and large organizations are using Headliner to attract new audiences, either through making short social videos up to posting on YouTube or through our new product Disco, that helps them take readers of their website and convert them into podcast listeners.
Sam Sethi: What’s next for you guys?
NM: Synthetic synthetic speech is an interesting space for us. It’s always back to our mission of how do we get more podcast listeners. On the Disco side of the business, I think that’s where you’ll see the most growth. We put out a press release with what we did for Newsweek, and it’s been amazing for them. We increased our audience from 100,000 an episode all the way over a million an episode. And it turns out just putting the podcast in front of people when it’s relevant will have them listen to it.
I often talk about podcasting still being an island on the internet. You got to travel to go get there. Making it easier for people to consume podcast I think is still our number one job. We do a pretty good job of it. In the coming year we still feel like we can do more. We’re really focused on can we get more listens out of the user, or try to start figuring out their journey over time. Disco is doing millions of podcast listeners a month now, and there’s not many platforms in podcasting doing that - obviously Apple, Spotify and YouTube, but besides that, it’s few and far between. And so we think next year, if we can get to 10 million listeners on our own platform, that puts us in pretty big territory. And that’s what we’re been focused on and hopefully deliver on where at a few million now and we’ll see where we go in 2025. But things are looking bright.
SS: The big debate right now is Spotify video and YouTube video versus audio - and what constitutes a podcast. Spotify talking about “shows”, changing it from Spotify for Podcasts to Creators. Given that you are one of the biggest now, producing clippings and videos and everything else, what do you think?
NM: I would like to see the creators and the consumers decide, and I think they’ve largely decided that for some genre of podcast, namely interview podcasts, you can attract an audience better on video than you can on audio - then the hope is over time, you can retain them better, I believe, on audio rather than video. It’s early days, but that’s the data I’m seeing.
And so for a company like YouTube and Spotify, that’s what they need to do. YouTube was already there. Spotify needed to grow into that. I like to point out that Joe Rogan, even when he was exclusive on Spotify, had more subscribers on YouTube than followers on Spotify. So you have an exclusive show on Spotify that actually has more subscribers, followers, whatever you want to call them, on a different platform that doesn’t even have the show anymore. And at some point you have to ask yourself, what is the strategy? And they figured out we’re not going to keep these shows closed.
Now the question is, if video is where people want to consume this stuff, we have to support it. So the question is what happens to narrative fiction, podcasts, comedy, podcasts, etc.? I think interview podcasts, generally speaking, again, to attract audience, you almost need to do video to attract audience - again, to keep them is a different story. But I think we’re all in the business of trying to find more audience as creators and video is piece of that.
SS: From all of your end points that you spread clips to, which is the most active coming back?
NM: YouTube. When you get someone listening on YouTube, they generally want to dig deeper. I think three or four years ago, most of the podcast industry was anti-YouTube. You’ve got to go where audience is if you want to grow audience. I’m sure you’re tired of hearing me say this and maybe some of the audience is, but podcasting is still really small. There’s 5 billion people online. There’s only 500 million listening to podcasts. So nine out of ten people online haven’t listened to a podcast. I think those debates are valid, but to not be on YouTube at all, I think that’s just a mistake from a customer acquisition point of view. If it’s a strategy decision, or a monetization decision, hey, that’s all good: but to say you’re not going to get audience on the biggest platforms… would you not want to be on Google search in any way, shape or form? That’s basically what you’re kind of saying, right? And I think that has handicapped podcasting to some extent, and I think we’re just growing out of that.
I know it sucks to get camera ready, and and all those kind of things, and you’ll be judged in a different way. But this is what the audience wants. This is where creators are going. And so you either embrace it or you buck the trend and keep the audience where you want. And that’s totally fine too. There’s always going to be a market for only audio consumption, but clearly to grow video as a component of it. And we’ve been saying that for a long time. As you know, the Internet is a visual medium first, and you need to hook people visually before you can hook them with your audio and Headliner has been at the forefront of that for seven years now.
We’ve got a ton of stuff coming and we keep on grinding. As I like to say, podcasting is still in its early stages. I know for some of us in the industry it’s been a long haul. But the average person on the Internet hasn’t listened to a podcast in the past month. And until that changes, podcasting is not mainstream and it’s our job to get it there.
SS: Thanks so much.
NM: Yeah, thank you.