YouSaid · the spoken record

Conal Byrne

lines on the record: 83
first: 2023-02-28
most recent: 2023-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, I will test anything. I don't see a reason. Put it simply we have a platform. We have an app of our own. I can test exclusive or windowed content there. We've dabbled in subscription channels on Apple podcasts just because I had creators who came to us and said, I'd like to try this. And we're very proud of this. We're a very good partner with creators. We tried it. It's not a huge focus for us because, again, I hate to keep repeating. I don't see the problem I'd be fixing.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perhaps because today podcasting there is nothing broken in the distribution and monetization model. Nothing's perfect, but it's pretty close to perfect. You have a distribution model that is free. You have an ad load that is light. You have a content type that is the highest quality in the world, I'd argue. Maybe out of any content getting made today except TV is really pretty good right now. But we're right there next to it. I struggle to see something broken with this. And usually, even if ultimately it was frustrating to the creator network, usually when there was a huge shift in a business model, the newer platforms were fixing a problem. We may have liked it, but there usually was a problem getting fixed streaming again is a really obvious example of this, of TV streaming companies. I don't see it in podcasting, and maybe that's why I'm not.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't have this concern in the same way that I had when I was writing text based articles 20 years ago for housetuffworks.com when I was focused on social and digital video at discovery communications you were always worried like oh man but I'm always at this sort of beck and call of the platforms that I distribute on like to a crazy extent to an existential extent I don't have this concern in podcasting”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Its interest has grown and waned and grown a bit on podcast. And we've all seen this. I'm not saying anything like privileged or anything. Over the last 10 years, and I think that's been a question of them sort of figuring out what they are as a platform, what the next chapter of them should be, whether it's the metaverse or just doubling down on newsfeed better. There's been moments in the last five, ten years where Facebook has shown real interest in audio. And then they've sort of backed off it the two or three times that's happened. So I'm not sure.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. They're all like, oh, thank God he said that. Are awesome insofar as, and I don't pretend to like know what's in their heads, they seem to be genuinely. It's cheesy. They seem to be genuinely in love with the medium like we all are, like I fell in love with this medium ten years ago. And that's important because I think they want to do the right thing by the medium. Facebook has come.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, to answer your other question, if this industry were to wholly move to a platform like Facebook or YouTube, different platform, different platform. You have a platform tax that's introduced that has not been introduced yet into podcasting and may never be introduced. It makes sense to me why a platform like YouTube, a wonderful platform in many, many ways. It makes sense to me that they would smartly say, this is some of the best content in the world. We'd like to distribute that. But it's a different business model, and you just have to be aware of it. That's the only difference so far. Everywhere we distribute today, and candidly, the lion's share of our listening is on platforms that are all created equal in terms of the economics that flow back to the publisher, in this case iHeart.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of the distribution points that we distribute to today through RSS feeds are equal to us in terms of the money we make on them. That's because that's just how RSS feeds work. And you're doing ads.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problems. In this one, I couldn't identify the problem that that was solving, and therefore I think the industry tripped up on it.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing. It has made conversations with creators really simple because You can rest assured that at some point in the conversation, the point will come up, well, how are we going to distribute? I'm Will Farrell. Let's hang with him for a second. I want to get as much audience as possible. I make content. I think it's going to be good. I want to put it in front of as many people. There's no asterisk on the answer back to him. It's, yeah, we do too. It's really that simple. In fact, we'll distribute it on broadcast radio. We did. The Ron Burgundy podcast was distributed as a show on late Sunday night on broadcast radio too. There's no ulterior motive or different goal. That's where I think podcasting, and yes, it's about my competitors and I get it. But I also just think fundamentally as a business model, it tripped up a little where it said, let's do mega deals. That could be worth it if a creator is that good, you may want to pay that. Were it tripped up is these exclusive distribution models that made sense for streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and maybe Prime because they were solving.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I choose to pull my RSS feed out of a distribution app, I choke my audience because people who go there and expect it there won't see it anymore, but I still own and control the pipe. Whereas if I decide to stop distributing or making content on my YouTube channel, my brand just goes away. It's gone to the extent that I can try to convert people to a different platform to keep that audience relationship going post my YouTube channel, it's possible, it's hard to convert to a new platform, but it'd be like being able to walk away with your YouTube channel or with your channel is a better way to put it. This has made podcasting different. It's why we widely distribute. Otherwise, I'd be sitting up here saying we really are working hard to get everybody the iHeart Radio app. But the business, the economics of podcasting today still today, sit with the creator, sit with the publisher because you own the pipe that you distribute your shows to. So it is, it sort of behooves all of us, I think, at least I haven't found a business model that proves it differently. It behooves all of us to plug that pipe into as many distribution points as possible. I'll say one more.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're a creator on YouTube, terrific platform, incredibly creative, but you don't own your fanbase. This is obvious at this point. We all get it by now, painfully. In podcasting, it is fundamentally different. I can plug my RSS feed as a creator or a publisher into a distribution app if I so choose. People are subscribing to my RSS feed. They're mine. This has made all the”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, because podcasting is a decentralized medium insofar as its distribution is concerned. It's a widely, it thrives when it is a widely distributed medium, it is a centralized medium when it comes to RSS feeds. And we take this for granted as creators, as publishers, as networks, but to tell it in a sort of reductive way twenty years ago, when some folks were sitting around a table deciding how am I going to distribute all these great podcasts that we're going to start making. They could have used several different technologies to do that. They could have published them on YouTube. They chose what is a real simple version of it called Real Simple Syndication RSS feeds. This changed everything for podcasting. It made it the medium that the internet promised creators. It would give them, but hadn't yet.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we'll tag all of our spots on air with listen wherever you get podcasts and we'll say our own app, but then other apps too. We are an obsessively widely distributed content company.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't care If it's a jump ball, I'd love them to use the iHeart Radio app. I understand where we sit. I understand where we sit in the pecking order. It's good to know. I admire your optimism download the iRate. It's like a thousand dollar CPM post red ad right here.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the broadcast radio promotion that we were giving them. We give a ton of in-show podcast promotion as well, but we've seen that convert, yes.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of them way more stuff you should know is up in the usually up in the 40s, but we have seventy-ish shows that drive a million monthly downloads or more. That's a ton. Like anybody in the room and most of us do work and podcast, and you know that number is hard to get. Harder and harder to get every day. The only reason we have that number is because a broadcast radio marketing. Funny anecdote. When we launched the Ron Burgundy podcast four years ago with Will Farrell, we gave him a really big GRP push across broadcast radio. We ran an ad on broadcast radio every single hour for thirty seconds for the Ron Burgundy podcast in one hundred sixty markets. The only time I've ever gotten a call from somebody who was like, please, Willfarrell was like, please, please stop running so many ads. But it worked. I didn't know if it would work, but these shows started to pop one after the other.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we've said this publicly. We spend 120 million dollars a year. It's like it's something specific, like $113 million a year the last time we said this out loud of our own on broadcast radio valued impressions or commercials to promote our podcasts. So one of the numbers I'm most proud of at the iHeart Network is we have about seventy-ish shows in the iHeart podcast network that drive over a million monthly downloads or more.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can talk about sexuality or what trends I like or don't like. I can go on as long as I want. I think there's a creative freedom to it that allures a lot of them, that radio doesn't have. It doesn't have the mass reach of broadcast radio yet. So the allure backwards the radio is you have true mass reach audiences, which I think brings them back.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is supposed to be 28 minutes long and have two ad breaks. It's actually a lot of different kinds of things. It can be a true crime limited series of eight to ten episodes that are 30 minutes long. It can also be a stuff to blow your mind episode that's sometimes three hours long of just two guys talking about stuff. And both are completely okay and really perform well, actually. So it hasn't yet hit this moment of reverse engineering from the platforms that it's on. But no, you're spot on. Broadcast radio is a highly formatted media type. And I think if you were to sit down any of these creators who are on broadcast radio, they'd openly say to you, we're talking about Angeli the other day who started a new radio show on iHeart called Way Up. She was a former co-host of the breakfast club as well. And she said, you know, on the podcast, it's much looser. It's clearly not as regulated as radio. I can talk about the things that I can't talk about on radio.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great, great point and question. And it's been a pitfall of, I think, digital media from day one. First of all, search engine optimization period is a version of what you're talking about. When you start to reverse engineer all the content you make because that works best on such and such a platform, there was a moment on YouTube where we all sort of realized the same thing around like 2010 or something. It's like, oh, the optimal video is this length and you have to open with this kind of thing and then close with that. And to some extent you kill creativity and true innovation when you start to reverse engineer what an asset should be for the content platform that it's going to be distributed on. In fact, you almost certainly kill, I think, true creativity when you hit that moment. Just as a side question, it's not your question, but as a side answer to it real quick, podcasting has bucked that a lot to date. It has resisted this notion of a podcast episode.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All I see is this sort of constructiveness across these two segments. There is very little competition and there's very little, well, they do that and we do this. In fact, I think the only way we succeed and the reason we've succeeded is that it's been quite the opposite of that. I don't think we would be where we are, my opinion, as an industry. I certainly wouldn't be where I am as a podcast network without the support of not just the sales team but the creative juice of the broadcast radio guys.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, just with sheer talent hitting the medium, but also with awareness of the medium. So the easiest example for me is Charlemagne the God hosts a show called The Breakfast Club out of Tribec every morning. This show is also a podcast where we capture the file, distribute as an on-demand thing, and it drives upwards of $15,000, $20 million downloads a month. He also co-owns a company with us called the Black Effect, that he actually 51% owns, it has twenty nine thirty podcasts under it. It alone drives 15, 20 million downloads a month.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oddly no. I've learned about this a lot, and I've talked about this a lot as I've learned it is how much and this may be debatable and may feel like an affront to a lot of folks in the room who live and breathe podcasting as an original medium in quotes. But I have learned firsthand and then talked about a lot the extent to which broadcast radio talent have honed this craft of conversation over the last hundred years with certainly decades, and to the extent to which that has driven our medium,”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly sell all the assets we have. We have this mantra at the company of any seller can sell anything any day of the week, wherever they live and work. And that's wrung pretty true. That's driven most of our growth in podcasting over the last two, three, four years at the companies because of that.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One is called the multi platform group. It comprises broadcast radio live events, a few other things, and the other is the digital audio group. That comprises all of our social media assets, all of our websites. A lot of the innovative tech work we do, like we launched iHeartland in Roblox and Fortnite, and podcasting, and also, by the way, a huge streaming business, but podcasting. I was made CEO of that after two or three years of just running the podcast division, I was made the CEO of the digital audio group. What it allowed us to do, a lot with a lot of other stuff, it allowed us to talk a lot more freely to the market about how well this segment was growing and specifically podcasting. To be clear, though, there's a whole lot of fluidity between these segments. A thousand or so of the sellers that I mentioned sit in the multi-platform group.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This one was definitely very, very real. Our podcast division, the iHeart podcast network was seeing explosive growth. I thought we were doing a good job. Also the medium was exploding. We felt at IHER that a lot of the value that we had as a company We wanted to unlock and make more transparent to the investor community, to audiences, to researchers to analysts. One way to do that is to create different operating segments in your company so that you can talk more about how well you're doing inside certain divisions and businesses, as opposed to it all getting lumped together into one big overall set of numbers. The way to do that was to create two segments in our company”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A great question because I've been on both sides of that. It's not that being inside Discovery was bad. It was just different. Ultimately, Discovery, I think, did the right thing by leaning into more of a streaming strategy as their digital media strategy. What that meant for us was We predicted it to some sense. We felt in 2018 and 2019 that it was coming, but that certainly helped. And yeah, a lot of it is Bob Pittman. And his partner, Rich Bressler and our head of finance, Mike McGuinness, it's just a deep, deep belief in the C-suite across iHeart that podcasting merits a place at the table. It's never been any different from day one, and it's made all the difference.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Day he founded MTV. He's had a long career of being the CEO of several companies. He has a certain energy and vision about him where he's able to run large companies as if they were startups. This is very immediately notable when you sit in a room with him and talk to him for thirty seconds, and it definitely helps. So we jumped in.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marketing machine. Broadcast radio is a mass mass reach medium still today. iHeartRadio through its broadcast radio stations reaches nine out of ten Americans a month. That's an insanely large but insanely accurate number. We wanted access to that. We wanted to shout really loudly about the stuff we were doing. And the third thing they let us do was a sales team. We had three or four people who are our formal official sales team at Stuff Media. IHERT has thirteen hundred salespeople in all fifty states across one hundred and sixty or so markets as we've divided up the country. Those three things let us go from like two thousand eighteen to like 2028 in our own trajectory almost overnight. The last piece I'll say is Bob Pittman. He's the CEO of iHeart Media way back in the”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was this new ish thing called podcasting. We soundproofed some rooms and we threw some people in those rooms who are now Josh and Chuck who co-host stuff you should know and several other shows. Cut to ten years later that had become in some ways more successful than the source of it, the website, and so we spun it out as its own company stuff media. And very shortly thereafter we realized we needed two or three things to grow a lot faster and get a lot bigger. We felt this podcast wave coming, we felt like we were really on to something, but we wanted to accelerate it ten years ahead fast. You always do if you're running a startup. IHATS two or three things specifically. One was just investment make more shows, make more great content, sort of level up the stuff that you're doing. Number two was this massive”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In around 2008, I was the general manager of a company called HouseTuffworks.com, and we were acquired by Discovery Communications. Discovery bought our company because they were about to go public. And they wanted to have a really strong digital strategy. It was a smart move on their part. And to buy a company like ours, housetuffworks.com was a good move. Our job was real simple. We were a medium-sized website trying to explain everything under the sun through medium-sized articles. Once we were inside discovery, we suddenly had the air cover of this huge already global media company, and we could start to experimental a lot with other content types, other stuff. We realized that maybe our greatest asset was the people who worked there. They were really good storytellers. They could take anything from air conditioning to artificial intelligence and tell a story about a topic.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The god, who you'll hear Connell talk about quite a lot. Connell and iHeart Digital earned that success by doing some unconventional things, whereas other big podcasting players like Spotify and Apple have tried to boost revenue through subscriptions or platform exclusivity. Connell shunned those approaches. Instead, he's going for big audience reach, made possible in part by his ability to run ads and even shows on iHeart's huge network of traditional radio stations. But that Maverick approach has included some controversial steps as well. Last year, Bloomberg Reporter and Virtual Alumni, Ashley Carman reported that IHAHAHAHAHAHT worked with a firm called the June Group to essentially buy podcast downloads through video games. People would be playing games like subway surfers, and if they tapped on an ad to get loot in the game, an iHeart podcast would download in the background, that seemed pretty disingenuous. So, of course, I asked Connell about that and lots more when I sat down with him at Hot Pod Summit.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Li Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week I'm talking to Connel Byrne, CEO of iHeart Media Digital. And it's a pretty special episode. We taped it live at Hotpod Summit. That's our conference for the podcast industry. If you don't know, we have a whole newsletter for podcasters. It's called Hotpod, written by our very own Ariel Shapiro. And Hotpod Summit is where we bring that community together. This year we gathered creators, trendsetters, and decision makers to explore the latest developments in podcasting, audiobooks, and more. It was a Pax House. It was a great time. We ended the day by doing a live decoder interview with Connell, who oversees podcasting at iHeart Media, which is a gigantic radio company that did almost a billion dollars of revenue in Q3 of 2022 alone. Connell's group accounts for a quarter of that revenue, and his team makes some of the biggest podcasts with the biggest talent around, like Will Farrell, Shonda Rhimes, and Charlemagne.”
2023-02-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Podcasting? Radio? It’s all one big opportunity for iHeartMedia digital CEO Conal Byrne · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT