How to Make Money From Your Podcast Through Listener Support

Can you actually make money with a podcast?
How do I start a podcast and get paid?

Questions like this about how to develop a financial return on a podcast are among the most popular topics that we get asked about. Knowing why you’re creating your podcast and where you will get value from it is a key question we suggest people focus on at the start of a project. It’s not always about dollars in your pocket, but there are surely costs and returns that everyone needs to consider.

There are numerous approaches to the big question, but unfortunately there are no quick routes to generating an income. But if you can stick at it and grow your listenership, there are definite options available to us.

Income Generation

Sponsorship and Advertising Revenue are options to consider but firstly we are going to focus on Listener Support as an immediate and actionable route to gaining some income for your work to produce a podcast.

Listener Support

This is the approach where you’re in control and don’t have to wait. It’s a good choice if you cover a niche interest topic and have a personal enthusiasm to share what you do. Let’s start with a list of technical solutions, just to outline a few of the options available to us right now for the transaction element.

• Lenny.fm – delightfully simple platform for small but regular listener donation
• Buy Me A Coffee – popular small, regular donation platform.
• Memberful – create a Subscriber-only version of your podcast
• Supporting Cast – create a Subscriber-only version of your podcast
• Patreon – incentivised membership tiers, with podcast importing to create a private patrons-only version of the podcast
• Apple Podcast Subscriptions monthly payment for premium episodes integrated into your regular feed in the Apple Podcasts app.
• There are also other routes, like YouTube channel memberships, or Bandcamp subscriptions if your podcast has a presence on those platforms.

These options create an important distinction between listeners as donors and listeners as members. But also, some approaches seed an expectation that the podcast will create bonuses for their members. This is where you need to use your own judgement about what will motivate your listeners and what you’re willing to do to reward their donation. The ideal is not to have to do lots of additional work in order to create rewards for the original podcast that you already put your effort into.

Listeners As Donors

You’ll have seen these links, subtly on small software apps or solo-developer web services… or in the show notes of podcasts. The guys behind Buy Me A Coffee nailed it with the name of their service. Although they’re now moving to extend the scale of what people may like to buy you i.e. more than the $5 for a coffee, the name encapsulates the offer – a single or ongoing donation.

Lenny.fm has a similar thinking but their Top 4 list feature distinguishes their idea. The ask is for listeners to give $4 per month, and they can create their own bundle of podcasts that they wish to donate to. Add one to the list and the show gets the full donation, add 4 and it’s split between them.

Asking for Support

As the amount of money is small, scale is obviously more important. With the Listener As Donor approach, you’re encouraging listeners to understand how complex and time consuming it is to produce your podcast and to value that time with a small donation. So, cultivating this understanding and voicing a reciprocal valuing of the listener support in your show would be good messaging. You can use dynamic injection of an audio segment to add a carefully worded prompt for listeners to visit the giving website. Dynamic, in case you decide to switch platforms or methods in the future, but baking in the mention to your episode introductions would work equally well in the short term if you need to.

The Blindboy Podcast is a great example of how to voice the request for support on a podcast. It’s a great podcast – and the way the invitation to sponsor it is presented is hard to deny.

“If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you distraction or entertainment, please consider paying me for the work that I’m doing, because this is my full-time job, it’s how I rent out my office, it’s how I pay all my bills, this is what I do for a living….

And if you can’t afford it, don’t worry about it. Listen for free. Listen for free, because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free.
So everybody gets the exact same podcast, and I get to earn a living. It’s a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness…”

From The Blindboy Podcast
This material may be protected by copyright.

Listeners As Members

With the Listeners as Members model, we’re planning on a very different relationship with our audience. This is not just that they appreciate you and buy you a coffee, but they want to feel part of the podcast and its extended community.

There are two different levels to this feeling of belonging to the community. With platforms like Supporting Cast or Memberful, the membership fee unlocks access to a separate RSS feed (created by the platforms) which becomes how paying members listen to your podcast, and where you can publish your member-only bonus episodes.

Our own Cassette Culture podcast has a member offer via Bandcamp. Importantly for a music-focused podcast, Bandcamp is a natural fit because the audience are already familiar the platform. This allows members to donate a variable regular amount, for which they get full quality audio episodes and a variety of insider information about the show development, plus archive music tracks and member-only merch.

Bonus Episodes

The approach to creating your member-only content is an individual decision, but it can be to provide extended episodes, or additional bonus episodes that are not available at all in the main public feed.

Some podcasts message it like:

“That’s the end of the show for now, but if you’re a member we’ll see you on the other side of the break“.

Followed by a short invitation for listeners to join your member platform.

So essentially, with the member community, you are valuing people’s support by giving them more of what they like.

This example above comes from niche heavy Noise Music show Noisextra. Not that you have to have the same musical taste to learn from their model! They demonstrate their obvious knowledge of their audience by offering a comprehensive set of quality benefits that supporters can opt in to. We love the “You’re one of us!” statement for the top priced member tier.

Support Within Your Control

The good news is that listener support is available to you right now, regardless of how many downloads you’re getting. You don’t need thousands of listeners, and you don’t need to wait for a brand to come knocking.

The real question isn’t which platform to use – it’s what kind of relationship you want to build with your audience. Do you want their appreciation, or their belonging? That decision shapes everything: your ask, your content approach, and what you’re willing to create as a reward.

If you’re just starting out, a simple donation link costs you nothing and asks little of your listeners.

If you’ve built an engaged audience around a topic you’re genuinely passionate about, a membership model may be the natural next step.

Either way, the first move is the same: be honest about the work you put in, tell your listeners what their support means, and make it easy for them to help.

Sponsorship and advertising revenue complete the picture – and we’ll cover both in separate articles. For most podcasters, listener support is where you can start today, and for many, it turns out to be the most sustainable return of all.

---

If you’d like professional support to get your podcast sounding its best from day one, take a look at our podcast production packages.

---