My experience with Podcorn

As you might know, I have a podcast on Anchor.fm called The Frug Life.  My initial sponsorship with Anchor was great, but I wasn’t getting any additional sponsors. So I went on a quest to find some new sponsors for the show.

I first tried using Gumball.fm (post here), but was not successful. After waiting over a year to get on the platform, I finally emailed support and was told I need 10k downloads within 30 days of releasing an episode.  For a weekly show, this translates into over half a million downloads a year (at least, as some of your listens might be after that 30 day mark), which frankly, is a little insane.

This post isn’t about either of those platforms; it's about Podcorn, my first platform other than Anchor where I had any success. I applied for a sponsorship with Podcorn itself and was approved pretty quickly and was able to make my own ad. Here is the episode.

Overall, using Podcorn was a pretty smooth experience. Podcorn itself was very friendly and was ok with my goofy ad. I have yet to find a second sponsor on the platform. A few contacted me back and said to return when I am bigger or that it wasn’t a good fit right now. The majority of sponsors did not reply at all. 

So that is my one small complaint with the platform. Applying to tons of sponsorships for a few bucks a piece isn’t super productive. 

I felt like a lot of the other sponsors on the platform were other podcasts. I imagine that putting yourself as a sponsor and having people listen to your show, asking them to provide customized applications with details about your show, is a way to drive traffic without actually even paying anyone. Maybe I am too much of a pessimist. 

Overall, I enjoyed the experience on Podcorn and will apply to some more sponsors when my listenership increases. 

On one final note, Podcorn has a feature that reports your listenership numbers to sponsors. However, Anchor does not support this feature, which might explain my lack of success finding new sponsors on Podcorn, as  sponsors weren't able to validate my listenership numbers.  Instead I had to take screenshots of my analytics in Anchor, which can easily be manipulated. 

Photo by Erkan Utu from Pexels