Pay to Play
Before I dive in here, let me first caveat with this: the pay-to-play method is a rare and potentially controversial way to make money podcasting. It is when a guest has to pay an “appearance fee” to be a guest on your show. This could range anywhere from under $100 all the way into the thousands of dollars.
While it is not a common practice at the time of this writing, it is becoming more common as the podcast industry grows. There are several big-name podcasters with big shows that charge thousands of dollars for a guest to have a 20 or 30 minute spot on their show. The thought process behind this is because if the guest has a particular book, product, service, program, etc that they want to get more publicity for and promote to a very niche podcast audience, it may be worth the “price of admission” so to speak. While the guest provides value to the audience during the interview, it also serves as almost a long-form commercial for them.
As a podcaster myself that loves to find new ways to market and monetize podcasts, I tested this out myself. A $50 appearance fee was what I started with. It quite surprised me at how many interested guests took me up on this offer. I felt I was on to something. But, almost just as many that were interested and willing, there were quite a few naysayers as well, because this isn’t a common practice yet (if ever). I then raised the rate to $75 to test that price point, and while I got maybe a handful of guests interested, it seems $50 was the limit most guests felt they could justify for a show of my size.
My personal takeaway or lesson learned from this is that “pay-to-play” just isn’t common enough to risk alienating and turning off potential good guests for a mere $50 (or whatever rate you determine). Perhaps someday this will become more common practice, and then one could re-evaluate the pros and cons, but it is not something I am doing again.
However, if this is something you are interested in, there is one resource I recommend which is Guestio (affiliate link). This platform is set up as “pay-to-play” so people coming on that platform to find podcasts to be on or guests to have on are acquainted with this concept. I will be including an overview video of this platform in Podcast Profit Pro.
For a deeper dive into this subject, here is a good Bloomberg article on this topic: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-03/podcast-guests-can-pay-big-money-to-be-on-top-shows
If you don’t want to do that, but still want to make money from podcast guests, consider the next option instead: Skip-The-Line.