🔴 Multitude: A podcast collective by and for "weirdos and outsiders"

Today’s guest is Amanda McLoughlin, the CEO of Multitude, a podcast collective and production studio. She is also the co-host of three podcasts: Attach Your Résumé, Join the Party, and Spirits — her longest-running show, which ranks in the top 0.1% of all podcasts by listenership, according to Listen Notes (the Nielsen of podcasting).

In this issue:

• 🎙️ How one successful podcast grew into a thriving collective

• 🪴 Running a sustainable, diversified creator business

• 🙅 Knowing when to say “no” is key to success with editorial and advertisers

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Watch my interview with Amanda, or listen to it wherever you get podcasts.

P.P.S We’re changing our format as of next week! The podcast will come to you on Tuesdays in a streamlined version of the tried-and-true Spotlight newsletter. Fridays will bring reporting and opinion writing, no longer in the profile format we’ve practiced for over a year.

Vlogs to finance to podcasts

Amanda McLoughlin was a teenage YouTuber. She started high school the same year that YouTube launched, 2006, and found both a creative outlet and community.

Back then, Facebook was still college-only, Instagram didn’t exist, and Twitter was in its infancy. YouTube offered something new: a window into other people’s lives.

By her twenties, Amanda was an analyst at JPMorganChase, but she hadn’t stopped vlogging. While navigating corporate life, the former high school theatre kid stumbled into the podcast world and found new community among the "art weirdos" who defined the space in 2014, years before the emergence of “podcast bros.”

Though Amanda was talented in business, it wasn't her passion, and she left finance after three years. At the start of 2016, she launched the podcast Spirits: Mythology, Legends & Folklore with her kindergarten best friend, Julia Schifini. With 451 episodes published to date, the weekly podcast now ranks in the top 0.1% of shows globally, according to Listen Notes (the Nielsen-like ratings provider for podcasts)

Spirits became the foundation for Multitude, a podcast collective, production company, and recording studio, of which Amanda is owner and CEO. Her spouse, Eric Silver — a former Creator Spotlight guest — is the company’s Head of Development. 

Of the twelve shows in the collective, Spirits is the longest-running. Functionally, the podcast started as a way for two childhood friends to stay connected in the growing crush of adult responsibility. The name is a double entendre; they have a drink while talking about a different story from mythology or folklore each week. It’s a take on one of the most consistently effective podcast formats: Julia is an expert on the topic, and Amanda, a curious layperson, is a proxy for the audience.

Collective necessity

Multitude is the product of Amanda’s creative instinct and business acumen, alongside the momentum of her peers. After a couple of years, Spirits was thriving, Amanda's friends from her YouTube and college days had also built popular shows, and she'd made new friends with others in the industry who ran successful shows. Many were bringing in a "couple grand a month on Patreon," and netting "several tens of thousands of downloads" on each episode.

Amanda saw an opportunity and started pitching networks and trying to sell sponsorships, but got no bites.

Thus was Multitude born: by necessity. If nobody else would help them grow businesses around these shows, they’d have to do it themselves. The formal collective sprang from a need to band together and “help each other look more legitimate, help each other grow our audiences.”

This was not faking it ‘til you make it; they were doing it. Amanda and Julia had spent three and a half years growing their podcast, generating enough income to consistently cover personal bills.

Soon, a radio station reached out to ask for Multitude’s help in producing a podcast; they knew how to produce quality audio, but they needed help publicizing it and growing the audience. This contract, in summer 2018, allowed Amanda and Eric to quit their day jobs and go all-in. They’ve never looked back.

A Multitude of revenue streams

Multitude will make eight years in business in December. This is a remarkably long time for a digital media startup. There’s no one reason it’s been successful for this long, but one of the most significant is Amanda’s combined background as a lifetime creator and one-time finance professional; that she is business-fluent but a creator first and foremost.

The rates Amanda is able to command for podcast ads, she says, are 3–8x more than standard prices for video ads on YouTube or display ads across the web. “Podcast listeners listen, they pay attention,” and tend to have a high level of trust in the hosts of their favorite shows, supporting these rates.

Multitude’s revenue comes in three forms:

1. A 30% commission on ads they sell for other podcasters (both within their collective and for-hire).

2. Podcast production and editing services for a variety of clients.

3. Studio rentals; they have a thoroughly equipped podcast studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Amanda’s personal living also comes in three forms:

1. Patreon revenue from the three podcasts she co-hosts.

2. Podcast ad revenue from the three podcasts she co-hosts.

3. Payout from Multitude after employee salaries and all other business expenses are covered.

Any revenue from the three podcasts Amanda co-hosts, she says, is split equally among the hosts. This represents “about half” of her income.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

Amanda self-identifies as a creator advocate; chief among her causes is revenue and platform diversification. When COVID hit in April 2020, “advertisers canceled all of their podcast ads for the year,” but that only impacted a third of her business. It hurt all the shows she works with, but it wasn’t fatal; it didn’t wipe out 100% of revenue for any of them; they all had thriving Patreon support.

Regarding the importance of platform diversification for creators, Amanda spoke about the beauty of the RSS feed as the podcast medium’s core distribution channel because it “does not require the intervention of any centrally owned or operated platform.” In other words, you can only watch YouTube videos through YouTube, but you can listen to podcasts “wherever you get your podcasts,” as the line goes. This protects podcasters from monopolistic practices.

Creators are greater together

Work is a social endeavor. Most people do not function at their best as solopreneurs. Value does not exist in a vacuum. The most successful artists in any medium have people around them selling, managing, booking venues, what-have-you. Creators with businesses at any sustainable, living-generating level have people making a full-time living from their work.

Multitude is a model for the future of the creator economy. I urge those who’ve built a business within the creator economy but struggled to push it to the next level to seek out like-minded peers; I urge those just starting out in this industry to do the same.

Connect with Amanda on Bluesky or LinkedIn.
Listen to Spirits, Attach Your Résumé, or Join the Party.

🎙️ This was an excellent conversation. It was impossible to fit every topic we touched on in this newsletter — here’s some of what we touch on in the podcast:

• 00:00 Introducing Amanda McLoughlin

• 01:29 Building a network through the early YouTube community

• 05:04 How the podcasting world has changed over the past decade

• 11:02 Forming Multitude

• 15:56 Building a top 0.1% pod without the algorithm

• 25:53 Podcast listeners are the most valuable audience

• 31:20 The most valuable thing you can do is say no

• 33:58 Diversifying your revenue streams

• 35:52 Sustainable creator-led businesses to model

• 38:53 Your podcast doesn't need to be profitable to be valuable

• 40:08 Never host your podcast with Spotify

• 45:58 All creators are a business

• 52:33 Platforms need creators, creators don't need platforms

• 56:13 Attache Your Résumé — Amanda and Eric’s media podcast

• 01:01:46 What NOT to focus on as a creator

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

Just say “no”

In preparation for recording this podcast with Amanda, I listened to another recent podcast appearance where she said, “From a business perspective, the most powerful word in my vocabulary is ’no.’”

When I asked her about this, she tempered the advice with an acknowledgment that saying no is a privilege; if you’re broke and a life-changing ad deal lands in your inbox, it’s difficult not to say yes.

Say “no” to create a strong point of view to create an engaged audience

Your editorial point of view is defined more by what you don’t include than by what you do include in your publication, show, YouTube channel, etc.

A good media product has a strong point of view. It’s exceedingly difficult to succeed, especially in today’s saturated media environment, with a product made to serve a mass audience. It’s impossible to make a product meant to serve everyone.

It’s a matter of taste; it’s a matter of saying “no.”

This, too, is a reason it’s so important to have diverse revenue streams.

Beyond turning down misaligned sponsors, selectivity is a strong negotiating position; it "makes you seem more desirable to tell a client or a potential partner what you do and don't want to do."

Say “no” to manage expectations with partners and audiences

You will not be everything to everyone, and you have to communicate what you’re not to help people understand what you are and what value you can offer them.

This applies to audiences; if you mislead people about the content of your work, they won’t stick around and engage.

This applies to business partners; be clear to advertisers about who your audience is, how engaged they are, and what they respond well to; just the same, be clear about what they do not respond well to. It’s a matter of managing expectations.

“No” is a long-game tactic; let the doors you close guide the way.