Has Canadaland Cracked the Da Vinci Code Of Podcasting: How To Make Narrative Series Profitable?
Canadaland, the indie crowd-funded podcast platform, is 10 years old this year and it has a bold assertion...wait for it...read on to the Q+A with founder Jesse Brown to find out
Ten years ago, podcasts were still in pre-school.
“It’s still a lot to ask them to listen to a podcast,” Jessie Thorn said in an article back in 2013 in the now defunct Daily Dot, the first exclusively online newspaper whose beat was “the Internet.” Thorn was the founder of Maximum Fun Network and Comedy Bang! Bang! alum, two early adopters of the podcast platform.
“You have this multi-step process where you plug your phone into your computer, find a show, download it onto your computer, move it onto your phone…” Thorn went on to explain.
The other big news in podcasting in 2013 was the public outrage that the iOs 7 upgrade had launched the Podcasts app, which meant that podcasts weren’t buried in the Music app, or the iTunes U app, any longer. They had their own piece of Apple screen real-estate on the home screen.
In case you hadn’t found podcasts yet in 2013, the top performing shows were 99% Invisible, WTF with Marc Maron, The Moth and Welcome to Nightvale, along with the NPR staples of This American Life and Radiolab.
As for what was going on with podcasts in Canada back in 2013, the answer is simple and short: There was CBC, and not much else.
Until that point, CBC had been busy repurposing its flagship radio programs, like Ideas, Tapestry and Under the Influence. In Montreal, Jonathan Goldstein was making his early podcast Wiretap, which he left in 2015 to move to Gimlet to launch Heavyweight.
It wasn’t until 2016 that CBC began to embrace podcasts at the National level. Two of their first breakout hits were Somebody Knows Something, and Connie Walker’s first series Missing and Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams.
This meant that for Jesse Brown to imagine a new job for himself, after 15 years of freelancing at places like CBC and Maclean’s Magazine, as the founder of a podcast news and media platform that openly criticized both traditional media and all forms of government, was not a sure bet.
It’s more accurate to call it risky and potentially foolish to embrace a medium that was not yet taken seriously by mainstream media.
Nevertheless, Brown launched the Canadaland podcast in 2013, with the title sponsor Freshbooks, an online accounting software program also founded out of Toronto. But when that sponsorship expired a year later, Brown began to think about alternatives. He chose to pivot towards crowdfunding and placed a bet on Patreon.
Over the years Brown’s journalism has both gained him credibility and ire. He worked with Kevin Donovan at the Toronto Star to break the Jian Ghomeshi story in 2015. In 2019 he began to report on the WE Charity scandal, both on the Canadaland flagship podcast and then through their series The White Saviors in 2021. This reporting went right to the top, naming Federal politicians and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau along with his family members. It also landed him a hefty lawsuit.
By now, one decade on, Jesse Brown is both loved, and hated, perhaps in equal measure, across the media spectrum, and the public. Based on the tenor of the online tributes that have flooded in for the tenth anniversary of Canadaland, it’s a role he’s leaned into.
And while early on this could all be dismissed as an ambitious, youthful journalist who was willing to put everything on the line to report a story, one decade later, it begs the question: How did this actually happen?
In a recent Zoom meeting with the Canadaland Executive team, I asked Brown what event horizon he was looking at when he began Canadaland: “Much less than where we are at,” he said decisively.
Ten years later, Canadaland is more than 50 percent funded by its listeners, 30 percent through advertising, and the remaining 20 percent is made up of content licensing deals and grants.
When I tried to think of analogs of this model, the list was short. In some ways, it’s like traditional media, with a reliance on subscriptions mixed with advertising. But the difference here is that it’s podcast-first model. Crooked, 99PI and in some ways Radiotopia have similar models.
But the fact that Canadaland began with a potential/likely-to-be-interested audience of just 35 million people (ie the entire population of Canada) is notable. And to see that it has managed to make it past the decade mark, grow its audience to a reported 8.5 million downloads (one in every 3 Canadians) and more than 500,000 listening hours in 2022, makes me want to pop open the hood and take a closer look at this little engine that could.
In the last year, Brown has hired three new executives to run Canadaland: Alan Black came on as COO, Julie Shapiro as Executive Producer and Karyn Pugliese as Editor-in-Chief.
I pressed Brown on how it is that he has expanded, in a year that’s otherwise been a bloodbath for the podcast industry, they have tripled the size of their executive office. [read on to the Q+A with Jesse Brown below for the full details].
But the short stroke is this: Jesse Brown feels that he has cracked the code of how to make longform, narrative and investigative journalism profitable.
Yes, he did actually say that. It’s not a unicorn in the mist, dancing on a rainbow. He went on to back up this claim with some audience details.
With that in mind, it begs the question: What’s the future for Canadaland?
For starters, they brought in veteran producer Julie Shapiro to be Executive Producer. Shapiro co-founded the Third Coast Audio Festival in 2001, where she stayed for more than a decade. Later she became an Executive Producer at Radiotopia/PRX where, in a giant pile of 1537 pitches, she picked Ear Hustle, which has gone on to win almost every award available, including a Pulitzer Prize, and is now well into its eighth season.
Earlier this year, Shaprio led the efforts of Canadaland to launch an Open Call for new shows. How did that process go?
[JULIE SHAPIRO]: We got a ton of submissions and narrowed them down to about a dozen at first, which was very exciting unto itself.
Not all of them were perfect for their own standalone series; but one great advantages that we have is to consider some of those pitches for other shows on Canadaland.
So I think it's maybe not been the intention, but the result, there are [now] other ways people can get involved and become part of the Candaland community as makers.
The new COO Alan Black hopes to collaborate with other staffers to expand the reach of Canadaland to become a hub for audio journalists, across the country. With their new space, and their bigger studio facilities, this goal seems more attainable than before.
Also, Jesse has fired himself. He’s hoping that they will hire him to continue to be a journalist, to continue to make the shows and report the journalism that he wants to.
In his place, Canadaland hired a new Editor-in-Chief, Karyn Pugliese, an Indigenous producer and journalist who cut her teeth at APTN (The Aboriginal People’s Television Network). While she admits she’s just getting up to speed, I can already see some of where she is going to help take this position, with the release of a new mini-series The Newfoundlander, which is the sort of series that makes me excited about the new types of shows that Canadaland might produce in the coming years.
The Newfoundlander is a 3-part series produced and hosted by Justin Brake. The story begins on Broadway, with the hit musical, Come From Away.
Brake’s family is from Gander, Newfoundland, which became famous on that day in 2001 when planes from all over the world were grounded there during 9/11. As the story goes, this remote town did not have enough hotel facilities for this deluge of people, so the community members opened their doors and their fridges to welcome the passengers, which led to a series of unexpected encounters.
This series investigates one such alleged encounter. Brake’s grandfather, his Pop, opened up to a travelling Rabbi that he was a Holocaust survivor and had hidden his Jewish identity from his family for decades.
But was this true, or a story from a man who had slipped into dementia? The series explores this, but then veers into a whole other identity question: Is Justin Blake’s family actually Indigenous? In a week when Canada’s folk music hero Buffy Saint-Marie has been accused of being a Pretendian, the series is timely and provocative.
The following is an excerpt from a Zoom interview. It has been edited for length and clarity.
[Samantha Hodder]: Longform journalism is a tough business. And in the year that’s basically been a bloodbath, you've added three new executives who are all sitting on this call. What's the secret?
[Jesse Brown]: We've been doing long form for years now, sporadically, and I think that we have cracked it. We have figured out a way for it to actually build the business and not be a loss leader.
When you ask our audience why they support Canadaland, they're very likely to say things like Thunder Bay, or the White Saviors [two narrative Canadaland series].
We've gotten more skilled at how we release things and offering support or benefits, the same things that everybody's doing…but we [also] have this backbone of a profitable regular RSS feed on the main Canadaland channel.
If people are really interested in the show like Ratfucker, (our most recent series), then those listeners stick around [to listen to other shows], which means they're increasing our bottom line on our weekly ad sales, increasing our success at driving supporters during our company drive.
When we release the show we say: Become a Supporter and you can hear all the shows at once plus bonus content—we see a big spike there.
So when you add up all those things, plus the Entertainment One deal for TV and film projects, we have a working philosophy.
This is backed by our last couple of releases. We can actually have shows pay for themselves.
[SH]: So am I hearing you say that the bingeworthy aspects of your shows, that the longform shows like Cool Mules, White Saviors and Ratfucker...the audience get into them, and then and then says: I need more. I'm gonna come here for my weekly dose. And I'm going to do that in English and French and then I'm going to veer into Canadalandback...is that what you're saying actually happens?
[JB]: The French is new for us, but that's pretty much it. The chief instrument of audience growth has been these shows [the longform narrative shows].
These are the inflection points over the history of Canadaland. Thunder Bay comes out, our overall audience goes up.
So this is how our kind of network effect makes this possible.
[ALAN BLACK]: We've done some research and people spend a lot of time not only with one of our shows, they really, once they get into it, they go in hard.
There are people that spend nine hours a week with us, the network; so the network effect is particularly strong here.
[JB]: Then out of every 10 of you, one of you, we can hopefully convert into a paying supporter.
So that's as descriptive as we can get….that's sort of how it all works together.
[SH]: Well, it's interesting, because it's debunking the myth that I've been looking to figure out, which is, this idea that the longform shows are what’s sinking all of these networks in the US. They're systematically cutting all kinds of narrative shows, because, they say, they are expensive, risky and they just can't deal with them.
But you're actually telling me the opposite, that the longform shows are the gateway drug to get into the rest of the ecosystem. And once they're there, they stay. And then they keep coming back.
[JB:] But I think that you have to look at some important differences between us; Canadaland, across the network, has a shared ethos.
A lot of the big American publishers, they're wonderful, but they don't. If you're getting somebody in the door for an incredible bingeable crime show, you don't necessarily care about the mission of the network.
A lot of people in the past, and in the early years of support of Patreon, people would say: Okay, I gave these guys some money for a year, that’s enough.
But if we're able to say, well, in year two, because our supporter base grew, we were able to do [add this show]…and who knows what we'll do next…we found that those kinds of messages mattered to people.
[SH]: I'm curious to look at the tone of the 10th Anniversary campaign, the call out on Twitter/X to tell us “If Canada is better or worse now with Canadaland” there's an equal number of supporters and people who were dressing it down. What does this say about the Canadaland listener, and why you struck that tone?
[JB]: Oh, it's probably my fault.
I feel like as we're coping with the news crisis, in Canada, and everywhere, there's been a choice on the part of most of the legacy news brands, but others as well, to assume a tone and a position of like, utmost seriousness, and threatening the public that democracy will die without us, which is a heck of a way to market, a company that tries to put out engaging and interesting podcasts.
I do think that society needs good journalism, I think that we make a noticeable an important contribution.
But I don't really want to scare or shame people into supporting us. I think it should be a joyous thing. And it is an optional thing. And if people opt not to support journalism, there won't be any.
People are very unforgiving. When you make mistakes, after you've taken on that tone. And all journalists make mistakes.
Our approach to journalism has always been that we are going to own our biases to account for them. Try to recognize them as we record fairly, and not pretend that we're not humans.