Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

This year, the goal is to earn more than $20 million in revenue. To do that, the primarily business-to-business publisher is branching out with more consumer-facing revenue streams, including using NFTs to sell event tickets and expanding its advertising client base to include decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which are blockchain-based, member-owned communities that operate without centralized leadership.

“We’ve really grown the business for the last three-and-a-half years by being B-to-B, but now we’re starting to expand out,” said Yanowitz. He pointed to Blockworks’ crypto-focused podcast network, which receives 30,000 downloads per day, on average, and has a listener base that is likely not exclusively made up of executives in the blockchain space. 

Blockworks’ site receives 2 million monthly page views on average as of January, and its daily newsletter, which was launched a year ago, counts a subscriber base of 100,000, according to Yanowitz. He added that the goal is to increase that subscriber base to 400,000 by the end of 2022.

Prior to the pandemic, the company earned about 80% of its revenue from conferences. Last year, after about an 18-month hiatus, it held three in-person conferences between August and November. Its upcoming Permissionless conference, which is the first of the annual event franchise, will be the largest event Blockworks has hosted.  

From May 17-19, the independent publisher is planning to host 5,000 to 6,000 people at Permissionless in Palm Beach, Fla., but the conference is taking a different approach on both the ticket sales model and sponsorship sales strategy than is typical of publisher conferences.

Selling tickets is like selling NFTs

Blockworks is selling general admission tickets to Permissionless in a way that more closely resembles NFT drops than traditional ticket sales. 

Every two weeks, starting last November, 250 tickets are released to the public to purchase, either using U.S. dollars or cryptocurrency (the crypto prices adjust to match the dollar price, meaning that people buying tickets through cryptocurrency don’t risk paying more or less, since cryptocurrency valuations tend to fluctuate). The starting price for the tickets was $418, but that price increases with each drop. Currently, the tickets released on Feb. 1 run $967 per person. 

Secondly, the VIP tickets, which give holders access to exclusive events and parties as well as options to skip lines, will only be accessible to people who purchase one of 500 Permissionless NFTs that will be released in March for 1 ETH/per NFT (which at the time of writing this hovered at about $2,800, roughly $1,000 lower than its valuation on Jan. 1). After purchasing the NFT, those looking to claim one of the VIP tickets will be able to connect their crypto wallets to the event website, thus proving they own one of the NFTs, and will be able to gain access to the ticket. 

This also means that the cost of the NFT VIP ticket could increase in value as the event gets closer and the NFTs sell out, creating a secondary sales market for that ticket tier. In order to capitalize on any secondary sales (similar to event ticket scalping), a royalty structure will be built into the NFTs, where Blockworks will earn 10% of any transactions that happen beyond the point of sale, capitalizing on an otherwise missed opportunity. 

Blockworks is partnering with a to-be-announced digital artist to create the NFT tickets, but all of the technology being used to program the NFT sales and access to VIP tickets was created in-house by the product engineering team, which is led by the company’s newly hired CTO, Dennis Stücken, who started last month.    

“The [businesses that] are going to be experimenting the most with practical applications of NFTs are actually going to be media sites that cover the space,” because they’re reporting on and learning about the newest advancements of blockchain technology on a daily basis in some cases, said David Cohn, head of research and development at The Alpha Group, an in-house tech and media incubator for Advance Publications’ local media arm Advance Local, where he leads blockchain innovation. 

Additionally, because Blockworks’ audience reads its coverage of NFTs and understands the use cases for NFTs likely better than non-crypto native audiences, there will be fewer barriers to entry of getting those readers and attendees to buy into this experimentation, Cohn added. 

Yanowitz estimated that 75% of Blockworks’ audience owns some form of crypto, indicating that a significant portion of Permissionless attendees are familiar with how and why someone would buy an NFT. 

Other media companies that don’t have a large portion of crypto enthusiasts in their audience would likely have to put a lot of extra effort in teaching attendees how to buy NFTs, or even what NFTs are, and might experience more friction in the process, Cohn added, which could result in limiting sales from prospective attendees. 

Selling advertisements to DAOs 

In 2021, Blockworks sold 100 ad clients on brand sponsorships on both the conference and media products. Those clients often fell in the crypto company bucket or financial institution bucket. 

This year, however, the focus is selling ad campaigns and conference sponsorships to DAOs, which are organizations that are self-governed by members who have bought into the organization by purchasing the group’s unique token and joining their Discord channel. 

DAOs often are mission-driven, such as banding together to purchase an expensive asset (like an original copy of the U.S. Constitution), but others are more in line with start-ups. They act as companies that, instead of having a singular leader, take actions by having users vote on how to invest their money. 

As new additions to the internet, it is too early to determine how good or bad DAOs might be to the overall digital economy. They could very well come with a double-edged sword, Cohn said. That’s because DAOs are essentially a cash storm that could do great things, in the vein of a decentralized version of a GoFundMe or Kickstarter campaign, but they could eventually create a financial influence that is unexpected. “As [they] continue to expand and we see DAOs purchasing more and more things eventually, it’ll be interesting to see when they start to step over lines that society deems taboo,” Cohn said.

What’s particularly appealing about DAOs is the potential size of their ad budgets. While a lot of Blockworks’ biggest clients are raising $400 million or $500 million in investments or are earning that annually, the DAOs that Yanowitz’s sales team is targeting have 10 times that amount in their treasuries. However, instead of pitching to one CMO, a salesperson is trying to earn the trust of sometimes thousands of people who will vote on whether or not they want to accept a proposal.

“It’s much harder to make the sale, but once the community trusts you, the total dollar size that you get from them will end up being a lot higher,” Yanowitz said, compared to the sponsorship dollars from a centralized company.

To date, Blockworks’ sales team of six has sold two DAOs – Mantra DAO and Tracer Finance – on event sponsorships to Permissionless, although Yanowitz would not disclose the price tag of those sponsorships. The sponsorships include having a DAO member speak at Permissionless as well as having branded parties take place around the event that are used to convene the DAO members in-person. 

“It’s one of the main goals this year to sell into DAOs,” said Yanowitz. “It will be one of the biggest revenue opportunities for us in like 24 to 36 months, so we need every single salesperson to know how to do it.”

In order to capitalize on the potential to capture a larger international audience, publishers and audio platforms have to adapt their podcasts into languages beyond English — and they are taking a variety of different approaches, from translation to duo-language production. They’re also investing in podcasts produced specifically for non-English-language listeners.

“There’s definitely a big trend in international growth over the last few years, so it’s not surprising that publishers are looking to expand their offerings,” said Dave Zohrob, co-founder and CEO of podcast analytics service Chartable.

The Washington Post hopped on this emerging growth area a couple years ago and continues to see it pay off. The news publisher launched a Spanish-language news podcast called “El Washington Post” in 2019, and in September 2020, it increased production from two episodes per week to four. Downloads increased 67% from 2020 to 2021, according to a Post spokesperson. Unique listeners were up by 48% from December 2020 to December 2021. The top countries for the show’s downloads outside of the U.S. are Mexico, Colombia, Spain and Peru, the spokesperson added.

The Post is far from alone in tapping the international market. Of the 600,000-plus podcasts that launched in 2021 and tagged a language, a majority – 53% – tagged a non-English language, according to Zohrob. By contrast, in 2020 less than half of the 900,000 new podcasts debuted in 2020 were in non-English languages. After English, the top five most popular podcast languages were Spanish (18%), Portuguese (11%), Indonesian (7%) and German (3%). Those top languages did not change from 2020 to 2021, Zohrob said.

“We have seen the growth in international listening and the growth in native language podcasts, as have a number of our clients,” said Stephen Smyk, svp of podcast and influencer marketing at audio agency Veritone One. 

Translating podcasts for kids

Tinkercast, a children’s podcast producer, is translating its flagship science and tech show “Wow in the World” into three different languages this year, including German, Japanese and Spanish, said Tinkercast CEO Meredith Halpern-Ranzer. Later, it will also translate the show into French, Hindi and Arabic. 

On average, 17% of monthly downloads for “Wow in the World” come from people who reside outside of the U.S. Those people predominantly reside in English-speaking countries, including Australia, the U.K., New Zealand and Canada (which also counts French as an official language). But Tinkercast also sees listeners in China, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Korea and Mexico, a spokesperson said.

The translation process will start by casting international talent to dub “Wow in the World” in non-English languages, as well as finding distribution and production partners in the corresponding countries, Halpern-Ranzer said. Eventually, the company plans to create original content for an international audience. But starting out with translations of popular podcast shows “is a nice easy step into the international market,” said Tinkercast’s Chief Operating Officer Jodi Nussbaum.

“Operationally, it’s not a very big lift when we are just talking about dubbing audio,” Nussbaum said. “It’s a science-based show, and science is everywhere — and kids want to learn about science everywhere. We feel confident the content is going to work globally.” 

Veritone recently launched a solution called Synthetic Voice Cloning, which uses artificial intelligence technology to clone a podcast host’s voice and translate for them in their voice. The technology helps to ensure the show’s experience and tone aren’t lost, Smyk said. It has the potential to streamline the translation process for podcast producers. “We’ve been talking to a number of podcasters about foreign language support of their content,” Smyk said.

Creating original podcasts for non-English-language listeners

Vice Media Group has a three-pronged approach to producing more international podcasts, said Kathleen Osborn, vp of audio at Vice Media Group.

The first approach is developing original podcasts in languages other than English. Vice has created podcasts in Japanese, Dutch, Hindi and Spanish, among other languages. The team is working on launching a show in Arabic about video games this year and more shows in Japanese. Vice Media Group is also producing “a bunch of shows that are going to be reaching the market in India” in both English and Hindi in the next year or two, Osborn said. About 70% to 80% of Vice’s podcast listeners are living in the U.S., but its international audience is increasing, Osborn said, though she did not provide further details. Some of these new shows will come from partnerships with audio platforms like Spotify, but Osborn said deciding on a distribution partner depends on where people are listening to podcasts in the countries they live in.

The second approach by Vice’s audio team is creating spin-off series from popular podcast shows for different regions and languages. While Vice hasn’t done this yet, Osborn said they are developing ideas in this area. For example, a Vice series coming out of Australia called “Extremes” looks at stories about “widely extreme behavior,” such as a man who mailed himself from London to Sydney in a box, Osborn said. There’s potential for creating a season in other languages that would contain stories not available in English, she said — such as something that happened to a French person who only speaks French.

“We are increasingly looking into taking successful formats and then making them in other languages — not translating it, but rather refitting it to fit the particularities of the culture,” Osborn said. 

The third approach is Vice’s bilingual efforts, or what Osborn called “duo-language” podcasts. Rather than direct translation — which she believes doesn’t work as well with the documentary-style podcasts Vice is known for — a project is developed in two languages simultaneously by two teams working together. A lead team works on a story in one language and a smaller team works with them to produce the story in a second language. This began in 2018, when partway through the production of the podcast “Chapo: Kingpin on Trial,” the Vice team decided to also make a Spanish-language version. It became Vice’s first audio documentary made in two different languages, but it meant “we did have to play catch up,” Osborn said.’

Vice took the opposite tact with “The Crisis” — or “Contra Natura” in Spanish — which came out last March. From the get-go, the Vice team knew they wanted to produce the show in both English and Spanish. “What’s good about going in knowing you want to do that, is inherently in the field… you can record and ask questions in Spanish, and record in English. You can also capture live translation,” she said. Shows can then cross-promote the other language editions. In “Chapo: Kingpin on Trial” episodes, there were call-outs to the Spanish version to let bilingual listeners know they could listen in Spanish if they’d prefer.

Vice is also experimenting with publishing two episodes in the same feed at the same time, one in Spanish and one in English. The publisher has podcasts currently in development that will be in both English and Spanish, as well as a potential show made in both English and French, Osborn said.

Audio platforms are also seeing potential in global listeners

Platforms are also noticing an increase in international efforts. Susan Jurevics, head of international for Audible, said she is especially seeing an uptick in short-form podcasts on the Amazon-owned platform with topics relevant to a global audience, such as in sleep, wellness and sports. In 2021, worldwide Audible listening increased by 25% year over year, according to a spokesperson (Audible operates in 10 countries, five of which are primarily non-English: Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Japan). The company’s newest audiobook and podcast-listening subscription service launched in September 2020 for Spanish-speaking listeners. In its first year, listeners consumed 225,000 hours of Audible Original podcast content, a spokesperson said.

It’s been an area of expansion at iHeartMedia, too. The company launched My Cultura, a Latinx-focused podcast network, last summer. Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s Digital Audio Group, said iHeartMedia will select limited series podcasts and translate them into Spanish. It will then publish the English and Spanish episodes simultaneously on the same feed so that listeners can choose to hear the story in English or Spanish. The company has already tested the strategy with the audio drama “Princess of South Beach,” which premiered last October.

Within the past six months, iHeartMedia has signed deals with media companies NRJ Group in France and GEDI Group in Italy to co-create and co-produce new podcast shows for French and Italian-speaking listeners this year, respectively. Relevant audio content from iHeartMedia will also be translated from English into French or Italian, as will NRJ and GEDI content be translated into English. There will be more language-focused partnerships like this in the future, Byrne said.

“This is not going to be an anomaly. We are doing this with a bunch of limited series this year,” he said.