The Episode That Won't Die

00:00 Welcome back to How to Get Discovered. I'm Maya And I'm Tom! HTGD is the show where we argue about how podcasts get found, and last week, Tom made the strongest case yet for ignoring most of what I'm saying and just making a better show. I lost some ground She lost A LOT of ground I lost some ground. Today, I'm trying to get some of it back. Today's episode is called The Episode That Won't Die. It's about what happens when an old episode suddenly starts getting traffic — why some episodes are evergreen, why some episodes decay and what that means for the rest of your back catalogue And I am here to be skeptical of any case study that involves the word suddenly You always are Let's get into it

00:45 Okay, I want to tell you a story and then spend the rest of the episode arguing about what it means. This is the case study one? This is the case study one! So…I have an episode from three years ago—it's an interview with a tax accountant—about the specific question whether you should put your freelance business through a limited company or stay as sole trader. That sounds...not-to-be rude...incredibly boring. It IS incredibly boring. It's also the most consistently listened to episode I have. This year, and last year, and the year before it has been for about 18 months The single biggest source of new listeners to my show from a back catalog of at this point over 140 episodes One episode about tax structuring from three years ago

01:40 One episode about tax structuring from three years ago. And the question for the rest of the episode is, what? The question for the rest of the episode is was that an accident or can you do that on purpose and if you can't do it on purpose what does that mean for everything else you've ever recorded Okay, before you tell me about how to do it on purpose I want to interrogate the example. Because I think the obvious response is that's a fluke! You happened to record an episode about a thing people Google Most podcasters don't have episodes about things people google They have episodes about their guests' life story Their take on this week's news Their conversation about whatever they were thinking about that week

02:28 None of that is searchable in the same way. That's a fair pushback. Let me steelman it—you're saying the reason that episode works is because the question, should I be a soul trader or limited company? Is the exact thing a person types into Google so of course an episode that contains the answer to that question is going to be found but most episodes aren't shaped like that Most episodes aren't answers to questions they are conversations Right! That's my argument... I think you're partly right and partly wrong The partly right bit is yes, episodes that map cleanly onto a question somebody is actively searching for have a much higher chance of finding new listeners than episodes that don't. Obvious. Conceited. Good! The partly wrong bit is the assumption that you know in advance which episodes are which because here's the thing about that Tax episode when I recorded it...I would not have predicted it would be the one. I had episodes I thought were going to be hits

03:29 I had ones I poured weeks of work into. The tax episode was a guest canceling at the last minute and me ringing my accountant in a panic asking if he'd come on the show! That is not the heroic story I expected. It never is! It was a stopgap episode, I thought it would do okay...it did okay at the time and then it did okay for years quietly without me doing anything because and this is the bit that matters once it was findable the question kept being asked people keep starting freelance businesses people keep wondering whether to incorporate that episode

04:09 Okay, but that's still an accident. You got lucky that one of your filler episodes happened to be the one that aged well... That's where I want to push back. Because, and I'll be honest—this was the lesson for me. When I looked across my back catalog after I got the data…the pattern wasn't one accidental hit... The pattern was almost everything that addressed a specific persistent question kept earning listeners over time And almost everything that was tied to a moment or news cycle or specific person who was famous that week didn't. So the evergreen episodes were the ones answering durable questions? Yes! And the dying episodes were the ones tied to a moment? Yes, which sounds obvious when I say it out loud but its not how I was choosing what to record. I was chasing news. I was chasing guests who were hot that week

03:29 I had ones I poured weeks of work into. The tax episode was a guest canceling at the last minute and me ringing my accountant in a panic asking if he'd come on the show! That is not the heroic story I expected. It never is! It was a stopgap episode, I thought it would do okay...it did okay at the time and then it did okay for years quietly without me doing anything because and this is the bit that matters once it was findable the question kept being asked people keep starting freelance businesses people keep wondering whether to incorporate that episode

04:09 Okay, but that's still an accident. You got lucky that one of your filler episodes happened to be the one that aged well... That's where I want to push back. Because, and I'll be honest—this was the lesson for me. When I looked across my back catalog after I got the data…the pattern wasn't one accidental hit... The pattern was almost everything that addressed a specific persistent question kept earning listeners over time And almost everything that was tied to a moment or news cycle or specific person who was famous that week didn't. So the evergreen episodes were the ones answering durable questions? Yes! And the dying episodes were the ones tied to a moment? Yes, which sounds obvious when I say it out loud but its not how I was choosing what to record. I was chasing news. I was chasing guests who were hot that week

05:07 The episodes that ended up mattering were the ones I made when I had nothing better to do. That's a slightly painful realization It was a slightly painful realization Now, I want to get to the bit I think is the real point of the episode because the tax story isn't the interesting bit The interesting bit is what happened to the other episodes Go! So I'd been making this show for years Most of those episodes Even the good ones, even the ones that would have answered somebody's question were effectively dead. They existed in my feed in chronological order but nobody was finding them

05:47 The tax episode was the exception. And the only reason it was the exception, was that somebody had early on by accident linked to it from a thread on a freelancing forum and that link had kept it alive for years! Right... So I had this one episode that proved the principle and 120 other episodes that were just sitting there doing nothing Despite the fact that some of them, I knew, I could feel were answers to questions people were actively asking. This is the bit where PodHerd comes in...I'm going to try and tell this without it sounding like an advert. You can mention it we agreed! I am gonna mention it… So I put the whole back catalogue through every episode transcribed structured indexed

06:37 Each episode got its own page, with its transcript broken into proper sections. Key moments time stamped the lot and then I waited... How long? Three months before anything noticeable. Tales started to fatten! Not dramatically not there was no viral moment nothing went off episodes that had been getting basically zero traffic from search started getting some. Episodes started getting found What were the wins? A lot of them were small. An episode would get 5 listens a week from search, where it had been getting zero. Five a week sounds like nothing but across 120 episodes that's 600 listens a week from search alone! From episodes that were already in the can That's not nothing That's not nothing

07:29 And then there were the bigger surprises—episodes I had genuinely forgotten about that turned out to be answering a question I hadn't realized they were answering. There's one. I did an interview with a guy about what it's like to switch from working for an agency, to working in-house – just a conversation. I'd assumed it was niche topic. It turned out to be one that people are searching for constantly! That episode now pulls more new listeners per month than anything I recorded last year. An episode you forgot about? An episode I forgot about…

08:05 That episode existed. It had always existed, it had always been good The only thing that changed was that it became findable Okay I want to push back on the framing here because I think there's a thing you're not saying Go? The framing is...the episode was good It just needed to be findable But I think the actual lesson is more uncomfortable than that The actual lesson is, you wasted years of your back catalog's earning potential. Because the work was done! The audio existed! The value was there and you let it just sit there? Yes

08:44 That's the bit I find most striking. It's not that any specific episode came back from the dead, it's that the whole back catalog was doing nothing when it could have been doing something the entire time! That's exactly right and that's the bit that honestly...I get angry about when I think about it because every podcaster I know is in this same position they have years of work sitting there The audio is on a server somewhere. The conversations are good! The information is current, the questions are still being asked and the episodes...are invisible. This is the most Maya you've sounded this episode I know…I'm fired up Ok now I want to do one more thing in this episode because I want to close on the bit that I think changes how anyone with a sponsor deal thinks about their back catalog

09:40 Go. The ad you recorded for a sponsor in 2023 is being heard today by somebody who googled a question about tax structuring at 3 in the morning. That's actually interesting! Right? And here's where the conversation about advertising and podcasting gets, I think more interesting than people are talking about because the standard model is that an ad in an episode has a half-life — the episode comes out

10:29 The ad gets the bulk of its listens in the first two weeks? The rate card is priced based on that. Network deals are priced based on that. Yep But what if the half-life is wrong?! What if, for shows with a discoverable back catalog, the ad keeps earning listens for years—not at the same rate as launch week but meaningfully over time—possibly more in aggregate than the launch? This is the bit where I want to be careful because I have actually had this conversation with a sponsor. Tell me! I had a sponsor a couple of years ago who was... they were happy with the show, renewing every quarter and then they ended the deal not because they were unhappy but because their finance department decided that podcast ads have a discrete decay curve

11:18 And that any episode older than 90 days was contributing essentially nothing. So they didn't want to keep paying a retainer when the value was front-loaded. Right... And at the time, I didn't push back on it because that's roughly what I thought too The episode comes out, the ad gets heard That's the deal! ...and now? Now, I think if i'd had the data I might have had a different conversation Because if I could have shown that an episode from a year ago was still getting search traffic, still getting downloads, still putting that ad in front of new listeners... That's a different argument. That's not a decaying asset — that's an appreciating one!

12:01 That is exactly it. I'm not going to call that a concession! It's an observation about how I might have negotiated a specific deal differently. But it does open up the bigger question, which is if back-catalog listening is a real and growing share of podcast listening then the whole way the industry prices advertising is I think quietly broken. The rate card is built on the assumption that listens are frontloaded

12:38 And for shows that have invested in discoverability, that's increasingly not true. Although you have to be careful because the listens at the back end are not the same listens as at launch. They're not the engaged-from-the start listeners — they're somebody who searched for a question landed on specific moment and listened to part of an episode Right! The listener is different, the intent is different... The ad might land differently or the same…or better We don't actually know yet, because the data hasn't caught up. But it's clearly not zero! It's clearly NOT zero and the gap between 0 and whatever the real number is? That's a gap that industry is going to have to start pricing into deals I think this bit is what I find most genuinely persuasive of anything we've talked about so far Why this one

13:32 Because everything else has been about being found. Which I keep finding good in principle, but in practice it's a long game with uncertain payoff The advertising one is there is actual money on the table And if back catalog listens are real then a podcaster who can demonstrate them Is in a different negotiating position than one who can't That's it. That is the argument that would make me actually go and do the thing! You should actually go and do the thing I'm thinking about it Tom, you're thinking about it? I am thinking about it. I have not done the thing...I am THINKING about doing the thing This is most progress I have made in five episodes Do not celebrate too early Next week

14:19 Next week is the episode where we both agree on a lot, which I'm slightly worried about dramatically. It's the show notes episode! Stop writing bad show notes – the easy wins one! Right… The things you can do this afternoon that will make your show more findable without rebuilding anything. I have opinions about this...I will be unleashed You will be unleashed Thanks for listening to How to Get Discovered. We'll see you next week! See ya next week!