✊ Sampling cost
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Hi friends, I have a friend with vivid childhood memories of his parents regularly dragging them and their siblings out to those 3-hour time share pitch events. His family had no interest in buying a time share, mind you. No, they were just there for the free dinner that was used as an incentive to get people in the door. Even at a young age, my friend was clear that “free” doesn’t always mean free. Not just for the people who got suckered into buying the notoriously bad (if not outright predatory) “investment” of a timeshare… But also for everyone who got the meal for free… but had to spend 3 hours of their Saturday enduring the pitch. This assumption that free of monetary exchange means free of cost is one of the biggest mistakes that keeps podcast hosts from growing their shows. Because from a potential listener’s perspective, podcasts are one of the most expensive forms of content available. Not in terms of price, but in terms of Sampling Cost. Sampling Cost is essentially the amount of time and attention a listener has to spend to determine whether or not a given piece of content is worth more of their attention. The typical social media post, for example, has almost zero sampling cost. Within seconds, a consumer can scan and assess a post (and the creator behind it) and understand if they want more like this. And while they might waste hours of time mindlessly scrolling their “for you” Instagram feed, they’ve wasted almost zero time on any one post. The result is that, even without IG’s algorithm, it’s easy for a typical Instagram user to find, sample and subscribe to hundreds (or thousands) of accounts they love. Compare that to a typical podcast, where a potential listener might need to listen to 5, 10, or 45 minutes of an episode to understand whether the show is worth their time. In other words, podcasting has a clear headwind that will always make sampling (and thus growth) more challenging than other channels. The questions you need to ask, then, are twofold:
When it comes to reducing sampling cost, some options include:
An obvious third option is to reduce your typical episode length. But while this does reduce the sampling cost, the core value of most podcasts for an expert business is to accrue Time on Platform. In fact, this is podcasting’s unique superpower within your marketing system, and it should be preserved, protected, and optimized for. Which means that ideally, your show is a long form show… that we’ve made it as easy as possible for the right people to sample and get sucked into, allowing us to then go much deeper, much faster with them. In addition to reducing the sampling cost, however, we can (and must) also take measures to overcome the remaining sampling cost. At its core, sampling cost is not simply about absolute amount of time it takes to sample a show but the perceivedrisk of doing so. And that perception can be influenced. You can think of the job of overcoming sampling costs as balancing a set of scales. On the one side is the amount of time and effort your content requires to sample. On the other is the amount of confidence a consumer has that the ask will be worth their time. The bigger the ask (ie. podcast vs IG Reel), the more confidence you need to instil to get someone to sample it. Fortunately, there are no shortage of ways to build that confidence, a few of which include:
Of course, not all of these confidence building characteristics are within your direct control. But the most important ones are. And they tend to lead to the others. In the end, most of these confidence inducing measures come down to increasing external Legibility. Making legible who your show is for and what it’s about. Making legible the promise of the show is. Making legible the role each episode has in fulfilling that promise and how the episodes have been designed to do so Making legible that time, thought, expertise, and care have gone into the design, crafting, and execution of the show. Make these things legible and you make it easy for a potential subscriber to read the value of your show with clarity and certainty. Most shows don’t come anywhere close to instilling this level of confidence in their listeners. But yours can. And if you’re serious about growth, you must.
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