Podcast Bookings Chosen by Audience, Not Downloads

Downloads are the wrong number to book against. A hospitality operations show with 3,200 downloads an episode, where most listeners run multi-site procurement, is worth more to you than a general business show with ninety thousand who will never buy what you sell. We book six to nine appearances a year on that basis, and we turn down most of the list, including shows your founder has heard of. How the list is built: We pull audience estimates from Rephonic and Listen Notes, then set them aside until we have read the last twenty episodes' guest list. That list tells you what the show actually is. A podcast that booked eighteen vendors and two operators is a vendor show whatever its category ranking says, and your founder will sound like the nineteenth pitch in a row. We also check whether the host asks follow-up questions or reads sponsor copy across a monologue, because one of those produces a segment worth having and the other produces forty minutes nobody finishes. You get the list with the reasoning attached and you cut from it. The pitch: To the producer, not the host, and built around a segment rather than a biography. Producers book topics. They decline people. Where we already know a show we say so, and where we are pitching cold we say that too rather than implying a relationship. The shows we work with regularly are the trade audio in each of our sectors: Skift's podcast and Travel Weekly's Folo, The Spoon and the Food Institute on the food side, Deconstructor of Fun and Naavik in games, and BNR's business programming for the Dutch market. Acceptance is never a given on any of them and we will not pretend it is. Before the recording: Half a day per appearance. We write a prep note carrying three stories your founder can tell in under ninety seconds each, one number they are cleared to say out loud, and two questions they should decline. Then we run a dry run and listen back to it together. That is the part clients want to skip and the part that decides whether the episode is usable. Technical minimum: a wired microphone rather than laptop audio, a room with soft furnishings, and recording on the host's platform rather than a call app. If the host records over Zoom we ask for a local track, every time. What we do not do: Broker paid guest slots. A meaningful share of business podcasts sell appearances, currently between five hundred and four thousand euros an episode, and the shows that do it are usually the ones whose booking inbox is easiest to reach. We will tell you which shows on your wishlist take money, and we will not place you on them. A listener who works out that a guest slot was purchased discounts everything said inside it, including the parts that were true. We also do not book by volume, and we do not put a founder on air who has not done the dry run, whatever the diary says. Not for you if: The founder is not the person you want on air. This work does not transfer to a spokesperson chosen by seniority, because listeners can hear the difference between someone who built the thing and someone briefed about it. It also does not suit a business that needs attributable pipeline per appearance. Podcast audiences convert quietly, across months, usually through searching your name afterwards, and the honest measurement is branded search volume and inbound mentions rather than a tracked link. If the reporting line is cost per lead, this is the wrong instrument and we will say so before you buy it rather than at the first review.