The Ledger
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Rosenthal: Million-view TikToks fail to convert podcast subscribers for Acquired
“We haven't acquired TikTok, we're on YouTube Shorts, we post on Twitter, and like, None of that drives the needle for us. Like, we've had videos on TikTok get a couple million views, and we don't know if it translated to a single new subscriber.”
High-Value Business Podcasts Forfeit Massive Revenue by Paywalling Feeds
“For the type of podcast that we are, where you have lots of founders and CEOs and hedge fund managers and these sorts of people listening, You could never ask someone to pay you in membership what they are worth to the most valuable advertiser for that slot. A…”
Acquired invests in almost all of its private company podcast sponsors
“Not our public company sponsors, but almost all of our private company sponsors, we invested them.”
Gilbert and Rosenthal deeply regret interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried on Acquired
“We totally regret doing it.”
Live podcast episodes require 10 to 20 times more production effort
“Some of the live shows we've done are the most special experiences of the year. They have hidden value for Acquired in a bunch of ways, like getting to actually talk with real people, like getting to hang out with the thousand people that came to the arena sho…”
Acquired hosts have invested in five of their podcast sponsors
“Most of them now, a very large percentage of our sponsors, we've invested in. What, five of them? I think five, yeah. Vanta, we should talk about Vanta in a big way. Modern Treasury, Vouch, Mystery, Standard Metrics, we've invested in.”
Gilbert: Scale economies prevent new competitors from matching Acquired's production depth
“The fact that there's a large number of listeners to amortize all the inputs across makes it So that we can do an unreasonable amount of things for each episode. I mean, if you were gonna try to compete with Acquired today, you couldn't do all the stuff that w…”
Michael Lewis: Acquired will eventually evolve into doing standalone biographies
“At some point you're gonna wake up and say, you know, we should be doing more biography. We should be doing more people, and if that person is not, you know, is not naturally a huge corporation, you may still, I have a feeling there's more, there's an evolutio…”
Gilbert: Low-SKU strategies demand exceptional curation due to high leverage
“If you're only going to sell very few things, you're only going to make very few episodes, it puts a lot of onus on making
Exceptional choices on the things that you do choose to carry.
So it's like a very high leveraged strategy.”
Rosenthal: CPM ad models force podcasts to maximize episode volume
“Most podcasts sell their ads on a CPM basis, and they are incentivized to make as many episodes as possible. With as many ad slots as possible. Our business is entirely structurally different.”
Gilbert: Leaning into heavy production constraints can build a valuable business
“Maybe if we just admit that we are heavily constrained, and then try to just lean into that constraint in the way that Hermes leans into every single Birkin bag must be handmade by one artisan, and we're going to build a business model around that. And it turn…”
Acquired is 3x to 4x oversubscribed on potential sponsors
“We're probably three or four X oversubscribed on, like, people who really could convert on becoming sponsors if we said, sure, we'll take you.”
Gilbert: Acquired's business model works due to privilege, not universal correctness
“I don't think we've figured out a better way to do it. Like, I don't think we figured out the way to do it and everybody else should just snap to our way. It's like, we have an enormous amount of Privileged that we can run a business in this way, and most peop…”
Gilbert: Acquired operates a strict policy of never working with ad agencies
“Here's, here's a rule. We don't work with agencies. If an agency reaches out and says, we want to place ads on your podcast, we write them a very nice note. If we're able to get to the email and say, oh, we don't work with agencies, but thank you so much for y…”
Celebrity guest interviews underperform Acquired's core narrative storytelling episodes
“We thought the interviews would be better than our core storytelling episodes because we hadn't discovered that the Ben and David storytelling is our N of one product. It is the thing that we uniquely can do that no one else can do, and we thought getting thes…”
Rosenthal: Passionate niche episodes pay off through asymmetric listener resonance
“If one of us feels passionate about something, even if the episode is a relative dud, it's still worth doing, because invariably, somebody latches onto that passion.”
Acquired reached #1 globally on Apple and Spotify following WSJ profile
“And what happened is when that article came out, Acquired became the number one podcast on both Spotify and Apple charts in the world.”
Gilbert: Covering the breaking news cycle creates commodity content
“We very much have moved away from current events, and I think that is in part because of what we talked about earlier, that we want to create n of one content, and the way to create the most possible commodity content is to try to cover the current news cycle …”
Gilbert: Acquired will release the same or fewer episodes after going full-time
“People ask, what's gonna be different for Acquired when you go full-time? Are you doing way more episodes? No, absolutely not. We're gonna make the same number or fewer of even better episodes.”
Gilbert: Acquired will sell interview sponsorships without guaranteed release dates
“The way we're thinking about it for next year and some early conversations, seems like this is gonna work, is you get the next three interviews We promise you they're going to be world-class, and we have no idea when they will come out. And they're probably go…”
Gilbert: Munger and Huang were Acquired's biggest episodes ever
“Charlie and Margaret was by far our biggest episode ever. Jensen was bigger than any previous season episode. Dara and Daniel were right around the ballpark of what our season episodes were doing at that point in time when we had interviewed them.”
Podcasts Should Split Revenue 50/50 Between Direct Monetization and Ads
“Most podcasts should generate about 50% of their revenue from direct monetization, some kind of membership program, or paywalling their feed and about half from advertising.”
Strategy requires rejecting lucrative low-hanging fruit that violates core trade-offs
“Sure, you could make more money doing that, but it goes in the too hard pile. I think you and I have a really big too hard pile. In some ways, that's strategy. It's like, if you actually believe in the set of trade-offs that you have, Then you have to be willi…”
Rosenthal: Acquired regrets lending its podcast platform to Sam Bankman-Fried
“We lent our platform to Sam and to FTX, and yeah, I do feel bad about that. I don't think there's any way we could have known at the time, and I don't want to stop having interesting people and companies on the show, you know, up and coming companies, so.”
Acquired hosts invested nearly $10 million in Vanta via an SPV
“One of our couple biggest sponsors and partners on the show this year, we, and kind of through kindergarten and you too, invested almost ten million dollars in the company this year.”
Gilbert: Acquired filled Radio City without announcing guest lineup
“We did not announce the guests.”
Acquired's podcast revenue plummeted 40% during the late 2022 advertising downturn
“So end of 22 FTX happens interest rates go up, you know, all the podcast advertising market, you know, falls off a cliff. Our revenue dropped 40%.”
Rosenthal: Acquired will reduce output to eight episodes next year
“We release, for the last three years, we've released 12 episodes. The next year, we're gonna do eight. Eight episodes for the whole year.”
Rosenthal and Gilbert: Acquired operates with no assistants or sales agents
“No, no, no assistance. No, we do everything.
Michael Lewis: You don't sell,
Michael Lewis: You don't have an ad sales.
David Rosenthal: There's no agent.
Michael Lewis: We do all the selling.
Ben Gilbert: We love doing the ad sales ourselves.”
Gilbert: Three specific criteria define a great Acquired podcast episode
“There's three things that make a great acquired episode. One, there's a compelling hero protagonist that takes a hero's journey, where we're going from obscurity to ubiquity. How it starts is this thing that nobody cares about, and then it becomes the most imp…”
Rosenthal: I write 10,000 to 20,000-word scripts for Acquired episodes
“So I write a script. I write 10 to 20,000 words. In sentence form, word for word.”
Rosenthal: Acquired episodes must retain 80% relevance after five years
“It must be that, like, if you listen to this, an episode that we make five years after we made it, it's, 80% is relevant. It's still, it will still be an important institution in the world.”
Michael Lewis: Acquired achieves the same narrative grip as long-form books
“You created the environment with the podcast that I tried to create with the book. You grab the listener. Like I try to grab a reader and get them to the state of mind where they'll let you take them anywhere, ah, and teach them about stuff that they don't eve…”
Ben Gilbert Calls Google's YouTube Purchase the Best Acquisition Ever
“So, this is officially one of the best acquisitions of all time, and I am raising my grade from a C to an A+.”
Daniel Ek: Acquired reached over five million Spotify listening hours, tripling yearly
“On Spotify alone, you guys have now done over five million hours, and it tripled in the last year.”
Acquired's audience doubled organically every year for its first nine years
“The audience has grown slowly, and it doubled organically every year for the first nine years.”
Acquired added 317,000 subscribers after Wall Street Journal profile
“317,000 new subscribers or followers, depending on whether you're using Apple or Spotify's parlance, have followed the show since the Wall Street Journal piece went live.”
Mark Zuckerberg to appear at Acquired's Chase Center live show
“Mark Zuckerberg and other special guests will be there.”
Gilbert: Acquired special interview episodes consistently underperformed core season episodes
“Every single time we did a special, it had less downloads than the most recent season episode we did, which is crazy. Never once was a special our biggest episode ever.”
Gilbert: Spinoff ACQ2 has one-tenth the distribution of Acquired
“ACQ-DOO is awesome, but it has one 10th the distribution of Acquired.”
Rosenthal: Acquired reached 500,000 listeners in 2023
“Yes, so the big news, we hit half a million listeners this year, which is pretty wild.”
Gilbert: 76% of Acquired's Spotify Audience Discovered the Show in 2023
“One stat that's interesting is from Spotify wrapped for podcasters, they make a wrapped to give to you in addition to the ones to distribute to your audience, is that 76% of the people who listen to Spotify acquired on Spotify found us this year.”
Gilbert transitions to venture partner at PSL to focus full-time on Acquired
“And the way it's going to work, I'm transitioning to a venture partner at PSL, at Pioneer Square Labs here in Seattle, so still get to keep my board seats, which I think keeps me sharp for the show, and stay a friend of the family there, so I'm excited to sort…”
Rosenthal: Acquired Keeps YouTube Monetization Turned Off
“So we have monetization turned off for our YouTube channel for us because it's not our primary business model.”
Gilbert: Acquired's Porsche Episode Reached 400K YouTube Views
“We put up this episode with Doug, and it's gotten 400,000 views, and is adding another 6000 a day, which in big YouTuber land doesn't sound like much, but for us, It's multiple orders of magnitude over anything else we've ever done on the platform.”
Gilbert: Acquired had fewer than 1,000 Spotify listeners on Jan 1, 2019
“If you look at January first, 2019, we had less than a thousand listeners on Spotify.”