Podcast Growth Journey

Rich Roll shares how his podcast grew from the early days of difficult MP3 downloads to becoming a major media platform.

"When I started listening to podcasts, it was pre-iPhone, so you had to go to your desktop or laptop and download a series of MP3s, then bounce those MP3s to your iPad and create playlists. I was doing this before anyone else I knew was listening to podcasts.

I started my podcast almost 10 years ago. I wasn't a first mover in the podcast space, but I was definitely an early adopter. When I started mine, there wasn't any competition - people were not clamoring to start podcasts in 2012. Aside from Adam Carolla, Kevin Smith, and maybe Joe Rogan, nobody was even monetizing these things.

I immediately was able to rise to the top of the iTunes rankings because there was no competition at the time. In the health and fitness and wellness space, there really wasn't very much good content. From that, I was able to build an audience slowly and gradually over time. I did the podcast for a number of years before monetization was even anything to consider. Now it's doing incredibly well, with about 500,000 listeners per episode, with 90-95% of our audience being audio-only listeners."