Offer Paid Podcast Subscriptions With Stripe

When we talk to podcasters (both newcomers and veterans of this medium) the conversation always comes back to 2 things:

How can I grow my audience?

and

How can I make a living as a podcaster?

Growing your audience is a really broad topic that has a bunch of different factors and variables. The short version is you have to make excellent content and promote it effectively and regularly.

Making money from a podcast is a bit of a tougher one. Previously there was only one real way to make money as a podcaster: Ads.

But let’s face it, ads stink. They are a lousy experience for everyone involved.

The Problem With Podcast Advertising

You as the content creator don’t want to damage your hard-earned brand loyalty by promoting the latest mattress company to offer you a “decent” deal or waste your listeners’ valuable attention that you’ve worked so hard to gain with some random product’s messaging in each episode.

And as a listener, let’s be honest…when is the last time you listened to an advertisement and said “oh that sounds great and makes a lot of sense, I’ll check it out.

How about never?!

The Analytics Gap

Think about it from the advertiser’s perspective too. We as podcasters are always frustrated by the lack of granularity around podcast analytics. Sure we know how many people listened to each episode, on what type of device/browser/OS/app, and where in the world they downloaded the episode from, but that’s it.

In podcast analytics, there’s no information about age, gender, interests or hobbies, and other information that advertising platforms like Google or Facebook provide.

It’s just the nature of podcasting. It’s an open and distributed distribution system by its very nature, and I’d venture to say that advertisers will NEVER get the kind of detail and granularity they get with other ad platforms like search and social media.

If we’re really honest podcast advertising is a holdover to a previous generation of terrestrial radio where that was just the only option.

Abysmal Ad Rates

And let’s not even talk about how much money the average podcaster can make through ads. A “good” CPM (cost per thousand) ad rate of $25 means that most podcasters can barely buy a nice dinner each month off of littering all of these ads in their content.

But no more.

Technology platforms have evolved enormously since the advent of podcasting. Today many of the most successful podcasters are learning that they don’t have to water down their content with off-brand messaging from their advertisers, worry about reducing brand equity, and just wasting their listeners’ valuable time through ads.

The Castos team is thrilled to announce that now you can accept payments directly from your listeners through our integration with Stripe, the leading payment processing platform online.

Paid Podcast Subscriptions with Stripe

Castos has partnered with Stripe to allow all of our customers to accept payments directly from your listeners and have that payment activity be the trigger in Castos’ Automations Engine to add those new paying customers as Private Podcast Subscribers.

Private Podcasting is hands down the best way to make money podcasting. It offers an exclusive experience for your most supportive fans, allows you to deliver highly customized content just to that elite subset of listeners, and enables you as the content creator to determine when, how and by who your content is accessed.

Here’s a breakdown of how it works:

• You create a Stripe account for free from https://stripe.com
• Create a Product in Stripe and set the price that you’d like customers to pay for access to your private podcast content
• Drop in that Product checkout link on your website (or Castos’ beautiful podcast websites) and in the Funding tag of your RSS feed show it shows up in podcasting apps.
• Set up Castos’ Automations Engine to automagically add new customers from Stripe to your Private Podcast

Viola! In about 5 minutes you’ve set up a way for you to make money as a podcaster without sacrificing anything about your content or scaring away your audience, and your listeners have a way to directly support your show and receive exclusive content in the process.

It’s a Win-Win-Win situation.

Here’s a video walking you through the entire process in real-time. Literally, 5 minutes to set everything up, and it’s all entirely free with your Castos account.

Best part: there’s no middle man taking a chunk of your revenue from this.

While platforms like Patreon and others have been the only choice previously they all took between 5 and 30% of your revenue from paid podcast subscriptions.

Castos charges zero!

Paid podcast subscriptions with Castos’ integration with Stripe are included for free in each of our hosting plans, starting at just $19/mo.

That’s right, there are zero transaction fees or per-user costs to private podcasting with Castos’ Stripe integration. Just connect Castos to your Stripe account, invite your listeners to purchase any of your paid products, and automate their addition as Private Subscribers.

So, what are you waiting for? Get started on the best way to monetize your podcast today!