Launching podcasts on Youtube has led to “explosive results” for The Rest Is Politics producer Goalhanger in terms of both audience and revenue.
The UK’s largest independent podcast production company has only been filming and broadcasting its podcast episodes on Youtube for a year.
Speaking at The Podcast Show London last week, Goalhanger co-founder Tony Pastor revealed that in the previous 30 days its podcasts had achieved 63 million downloads or full-length video views.
Some 25% of Goalhanger’s audience comes via Youtube, with the same proportion via Apple and Spotify and the remaining 25% coming via a variety of other platforms.
Youtube is the fastest growing of the three main podcast platforms for Goalhanger, both in terms of audience and revenue.
Pastor said: “When we sell our brand partnerships, originally they would have been an audio deal. We would talk to Guinness about about The Rest is Football, or Sky about The Rest is Entertainment and they’d be buying audio.
“Now they’re buying audio, video and social, and it’s massively amplified all of our deals.”
IAB UK estimates the value of podcast advertising in the UK was £90m last year. But Pastor said that likely underestimates the real commercial value of the podcast industry.
He said: “There’s a much bigger bucket once you’re talking to the person who sells social, who sells video, who sells partnerships.Video has been super important. Youtube has been the thing that’s really accelerated.”
Presenter-read adverts are at the core of the Goalhanger commercial proposition and Press Gazette understands that presenters are incentivised with lucrative revenue share deals to read out these promotions.
Goalhanger is also offering marketers bespoke sponsor-led events, “custom-themed” episodes and series designed to “tie into your brand’s messaging or values”.
Goalhanger Ltd, which was founded in 2022, is not required to publish full accounts because it is designated as a smaller company.
Goalhanger’s biggest shareholder, with a third of the business, is former Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker. Pastor and fellow founder Jack Davenport also own significant stakes in the business.
Youtube broadcasting brings entirely new audience to podcasts
Davenport, who was also speaking at The Podcast Show, said: “One of the things that was holding us back from launching into video was that we thought we don’t want to cannibalise our audio audience because that’s how we get paid.”
Goalhanger trialled launching podcast and video versions of episodes at the same time with The Rest Is Football last summer and found there was no cannibalisation between audio and video audiences.
Davenport said: “The realisation that we came to is that it was effectively just a completely different audience in a different state who we weren’t talking to before, that were a whole new group of people that we could introduce our shows to.
“So it really switched us on to the potential of just a purely incremental audience on top of our key audio audience.”
Goalhanger then invested in a production team, robot cameras and studio space to ensure the video quality was as high as possible. Some 45% of Youtube video viewing of Goalhanger shows is on smart TVs.
The Rest Is History’s best-performing show so far on Youtube, with 450,000 views, has been The Bloody Battle of Agincourt which included extensive use of bespoke animation.
Live video has also been “brilliant for us”, according to Davenport, who cited the success of live shows on The Rest Is Politics reacting to breaking news like Joe Biden announcing he was not going to run for the US presidency.
Because The Rest Is History is recorded remotely at the presenters’ homes, Goalhanger was keen to ensure the video version did not come across like a split-screen Zoom call. The answer, which took months of experimentation, was a dual camera set-up with a webcam allowing the presenters to see each other but a second high-quality camera filming across to give the impression that they are facing.
Goalhanger’s first hit podcast, We Have Ways of Making You Talk, was launched in March 2019 fronted by comedian Al Murray and historian James Holland and focuses entirely on World War Two.
Pastor said the inspiration came from standing in Waterstones in Clapham Junction and realising seven out of the top-ten best-selling history books were about the Second World War but he couldn’t find a podcast about the subject.
The Rest Is History came next in November 2020 and now Goalhanger has more than a dozen ongoing podcast series including: The Rest is… Politics, Football, Entertainment, Classified, Politics US and Money as well as Empire, Football Cliches and Sherlock and Co.
Goalhanger has already launched two new podcasts this year, Journey Through Time (another history show) and Daly Brightness (about women’s football) with plans for two more to come.
Goalhanger also has 150,000 paying members who pay around £6 per month (prices vary from show to show) for early access to content, bonus episodes and ad-free listening.
It also put on 30 live shows last year. The Rest Is Politics live show sold out the O2 Arena (capacity 20,000) and The Rest Is Entertainment and Rest Is History sold out the Royal Albert Hall (5,000 capacity).
Newsletters are next for Goalhanger
Asked what the future plans are for Goalhanger, Davenport said: “We want to continue to develop into different formats and different media.
“We started in audio. We still really believe in audio. We want people to listen to the shows on audio. But we’re evolving what we are.
“Video is a big, big part of it. We’ve expanded into more written editorial content, so newsletters, and I think there’s a lot more that we can do there.
“Our ambition is to build a really exciting modern media business that builds on these relationships with the audience.
“You have the key partnership between the hosts at the top of the show, the tent pole. And there’s an ecosystem underneath it of content which deepens the engagement with the brand, which gives people more of the kind of content that they want, retaining the same ethos, but reaching into whatever way they want to consume content.”
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