What the end of Marc Maron's WTF means for YOU

So Marc Maron is wrapping up his podcast, WTF this fall.

He's announced it, it's happening, it's official.

And this is after more than a decade and 1600 episodes.

That's mad, right?

But why should you give a flying fig?

How does this impact on your podcast?

Well, because his claims of burnout should act as a red flag to any podcaster listening to this right now.

I'm sure most of us have at some point thought, yeah, I'll just keep cranking this out forever.

Not realistic.

And if a world famous podcaster who once interviewed the President of the United States is feeling burned out, what do you think that's going to mean for the rest of us?

So stick around and I'll explain to you why this situation is like watching a train wreck unfold in front of your very eyes.

And I'll also share how you can avoid the same fate.

Podcasting inside.

Podcasting Inside.

Hello, my delightful podcasting padawan.

I'm Neil Velio, the podmaster.

Yes, that's a thing.

I invented it.

Normally I hit you with 10 minute little nuggets on stuff happening in podcasting, tips, tricks, that sort of thing.

Today, I've got something a little bit different.

We're unpacking exactly why Marc Maron's existential crisis in podcasting can act as a valuable lesson for all podcasters, including you and me.

So let's sum up this bombshell in a nutshell.

So, Marc MARON and Brendan McDonald, I want to say his name is the producer.

They've been working together on this podcast since before podcasting was really a thing.

I remember first becoming aware of Mark Marin's WTF podcast back in the day when the Stitcher app was brand new, it was the only way of then being able to listen to podcasts on an Android phone.

Or at least the easiest way and the best way.

So this show goes back a long way for me personally.

Over the years, I've enjoyed many conversations that Mark Marin's had, and the fact that I've been to see him doing stand up a couple of times in London as well would suggest that, yes, I'm a bit of a fan.

So I do have a bit of personal at stake here in that I enjoy Mark's work and I will sadly miss him when he's gone.

But there's a wider, less emotional aspect at play here and that is the lessons that we can learn from his podcast and the announced retirement.

So he's been doing this show for 16 years.

He's been releasing around about two to three episodes per week.

And they've all been self produced.

And from his garage.

I mean, when I say self produced, his producer, Brendan, does the editing, but largely the two of them just work together alone on it.

And there's not much editing that needs to be done, maybe entire passages of conversation.

But it's not like he's sat there diligently editing the filler words and the ums.

That's kind of the charm of his show, is that he was doing it before that became a thing.

And before you come at me and say, yeah, but Neil, you're always talking about getting rid of filler words and advising that we do that.

Well, here's the difference.

If you too have a million downloads per episode, you too wouldn't have to worry so much about the ums.

And you could be a bit more authentic.

I mentioned at the beginning that obviously the most famous moment of WTF's history was when Marc Maron interviewed President Barack Obama.

That was in 2015.

And I remember reading accounts and Instagram pictures of Mark outside his own house being stopped by security from re entering his own house while the security teams did a quick swoop of the property to make sure that Mark wasn't secretly planning to kidnap President Barack Obama.

Although that would be great PR for a podcast, wouldn't it?

So here's why this is a really important piece of news in the podcasting space right now.

If a show like wtf, a Titanic podcast, can sink under its own weight from burnout, what chance does your podcast that you're probably recording hand to mouth, episode to episode to episode, week in, week out?

What chance does that have of surviving the same fate?

Especially when you're juggling.

Yeah, I do everything myself.

Editing social clips, scheduling.

It's fine, totally fine.

Producing the thing, publishing the thing, marketing the thing, and then taking a bit of a break from the thing to send your grandma a Christmas card.

So let's talk about burnout City, population one.

You.

Mark was churning out two episodes a week with very little support.

Loaded on coffee, loaded on charisma.

And great guests.

Well, most of them were great.

Mentioning no names.

So you're editing, you're producing, you're marketing, and you're avoiding your cat stink eye because you've forgotten to feed them.

Again, this is a slow train to exhaustion.

Let's be real now.

He has never engaged my consultancy services.

But should Marc Maron come to me and say, do you know what, Neil?

I'd love to understand what went wrong Here is the Advice I would be giving him should he decide to ever bring the podcast back.

And I really hope he does.

He should have picked a pace that he could live with really easily.

Now, producing two episodes per week is a lot of work.

Take it from me, someone who sometimes does that, admittedly their bonus episodes, and I place a little bit less impetus on the production value of those.

That said, I stake my reputation on them, so I don't want them to sound crap.

Two episodes a week is a lot, especially when These are usually 90 minute conversations, certainly more than 40 minutes.

You can't pretend you're a one person Netflix studio.

It's not gonna work.

So the first mistake I feel that they've both made is they've refused outside help.

Brendan could quite easily have outsourced a lot of the editing work so that he could focus on the final spit and polish, which is kind of how it works.

In my organization, Podnos Podcasting, we have a team of basic editors who do the groundwork to then get the final voiced edit for me to then come along and put the spit and polish on.

That's adding the music, adding the effects, adding the sparkle, the things that create engagement, the things that leave the listener hanging on to the end of the episodes.

And this method works for us now occasionally, I'll admit, yes, I do feel tired and exhausted if I'm working on five or six podcasts at the same time in a week.

But that's where time management comes in.

I also outsource some of the marketing stuff that I do as well.

So the onus for everything is not always on me and me alone.

The problem with being jacks of all trades is that we then end up becoming masters of none.

My mastery, hence my title, the Podmaster.

My mastery is around production value.

That's kind of where I plied my trade for nearly 30 years.

Audio production in both broadcasting and podcasting, but also in getting shows listened to.

That's my mastery too.

So that means some of the creative assets that we need, some of the targeting work, some of the thinking outside of the box to get listeners engaged in talking topics.

That's my mastery in terms of sitting down on our various platforms and typing in the keywords and all the things that we need.

Anybody can do that with my guidance.

And that's kind of how it works.

The other thing that I feel Mark probably didn't do was plan for time off.

As in, what would he be doing on some of those weeks where maybe guests weren't coming through?

Perhaps there would be an occasion where he needed a rest and wanted to go away knowing that the episodes were going to be taken care of themselves and marketed properly.

Mark tends to take on a lot of the marketing himself, which is valid.

I mean, he's got a personality and a profile.

He has followers on Instagram that is seemingly his number one place to market his show.

But why couldn't he get someone else to do that?

Why couldn't he get some sort of influencer involved, some collaborator who could help him do some of the heavy lifting around the marketing?

You know, some other podcasters do this really well.

Joe Rogan, for example, isn't doing all the heavy lifting with his own marketing.

He relies on teams, he relies on other podcasters, he relies on collaborators.

And this is the whole point of setting up a social media presence for your show rather than just the host.

And I also wonder if he had an exit plan.

Did he at any point think, okay, so my goal is to run this podcast for a certain amount of years, and then once that happens, here's what I'm gonna do with it.

I'll either sell it.

Believe me, there are probably a lot of commissioners, comedians, who would pay good money to have that back catalog of content and the keywords within the feed that they could then take on and interview similar guests, knowing they've got a baked in audience that'd be worth thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.

Did he have that exit plan worked out?

I suspect not.

And now he's left in a situation where he has a very active RSS feature that's been going for many years, is very valuable, really high value real estate in terms of digitally.

And now we're facing the prospect that he'll stop paying his hosting fees for his RSS feed and his hosting company will just turn off the RSS feed, deactivate it, close it down.

That's what usually happens.

So unless he moves it to Spotify for creativity and has it hosted for free, despite all the risk that is known to come with having a show on Spotify for creators, in terms of your ip, in terms of the reliability, in terms of the someone hijacking it issues, and they're not particularly helpful when things like that happen.

Listen to a past episode about why I advise you not to use Spotify for creators for reference, he's going to be having a bigger problem to solve, isn't he?

Comparison is the thief of joy.

We all know that.

However, I feel it's important for us to take a moment to Almost compare the situation that Marc Maron is enjoying versus the situation that most of us have to endure.

Imagine you are setting up a show for the first time in your garage, and you're thinking, I want to be the next Marc Maron.

So you publish the content and you follow his model two times a week.

You're getting relatively decent guests in.

Some of them have even been heard of as household names, but no one's listening.

Well, would you be surprised to learn that's exactly what Marc Maron experienced 16 years ago when he started WTF.

He had probably fewer than a thousand people listening to episodes at that point.

I was one of them.

And I remember how small the show felt to listen to.

You really can take some value from this lesson that Mark is giving us here that you're approaching this podcast, putting all the work in and getting crickets at the end of it, more than likely, if you're not working with me on growing your show.

But Mark had the same situation, and now look at it 16 years later.

It's got to the point where he's so exhausted from maintaining this trajectory, he's decided he needs a break.

I'm sure that's a problem that you would love to have, right?

So what I want to leave you with here is an actionable checklist to make sure that you don't f this up for yourself.

Don't follow in the footsteps of Marc Maron.

I'm always telling people this.

Don't copy existing podcasters.

Create your own story.

And here's how I would do that.

Number one, Audit your workflow.

List every task associated with your podcast.

Everything from research to booking guests to recording episodes, to editing episodes to.

To producing episodes, to marketing episodes, to posting pointless social media posts.

Oh, my God, so many pointless social media posts.

Then circle the tasks you hate.

And pointless social media posts should probably be near the top somewhere.

Outsource those immediately.

And I don't mean in a couple of months, I mean now.

And if you don't have budget for outsourcing them, have a look in the mirror and figure out why.

Number two, define what your podcast is about.

This needs to be one sentence.

My show helps people with.

That's it.

My show helps people with.

If your show name and your description doesn't answer that question, you need to rework it.

Or have a chat with me about how I can help you rework it.

Number three, plan your exit strategy.

What is it going to take for you to decide one day?

Do you know what?

I'm done.

But I'M done on my terms.

Make sure you have a plan for what your metrics for that decision are going to be.

2.

What you will decide to do at the point you make that decision.

Number three how the show and its legacy will live on after you've decided to call it a day.

Will you sell the show?

Will you move the show to an archive?

What will you do?

Any decision is valid, but it's a decision you need to make so you can decide on your own terms.

Oh, and here's another tip for you.

Repurpose.

Take some of your best clips that are slightly more evergreen and make new content from them.

That way there's less pressure on you to come up with new stuff.

If you have a few episodes that have a common theme, batch those together into one bumper episode to save people time.

They will thank you.

If you're able to say to them if you missed episode three 19273750142 in which we talked about how to grow your revenue bottom line, you're not going to have to do that.

If you can say here's an episode where we talk about growing your revenue bottom line, with a number of guests that we've interviewed over the years.

Perfect.

That is an episode worth listening to, right?

Okay, so avoiding Marc Marining aside for a moment, here are some of the opportunities that the demise of WTF are going to open up for the rest of us.

There's gonna be a gap in the market for genuine, authentic long form conversations with the real people.

I'm not talking about the kooky stuff you get on Steven Bartlett's Diver CEO or Joe Rogan.

I'm talking about the kinds of characters that Marc Maron has had conversations with about real things that are relatable to you and I.

No pseudo science, no kooky crap, no health bros.

Just authentic conversations with entertainers, philosophers, authors, TV show actresses, you name it.

He's had them all.

And now you can grow a show to a similar theme.

All you need to do is bring a unique angle, something that makes it less about a carbon copy of the Marc Maron WTF show and more your own take on what that might be.

Here's the other thing.

Plan to monetize in a way other than 30 second ad reads.

That's what Mark relied on ads pre rolls subscriptions and then he got tired.

Wow.

Big surprise.

When you're serving an audience, it's going to be a struggle for you.

So set up multiple revenue streams from the show.

Live events, merchandise services, offers, memberships coaching.

There are all kinds of ways that you can monetize a show.

You don't need to rely on sponsorship and advertising.

Now, one thing that's important to know is that Mark's chat with President Obama has now been archived into a massive library.

It's huge.

It's gone down in history as an historical artifact.

The chances of you achieving that are probably quite slim, to be honest.

I don't want to be down and negative on your chances.

Let's be optimistic here.

It could happen, but the chances are it probably won't.

At least not now or anytime soon.

But you can still leverage your content in a way that lives on beyond you think.

Articles, medium posts, white papers, scholarly documents, books.

You can even license clips from your show that people pay to reuse.

The truth is that regardless of whether Marc Maron's WTF disappeared or remained, there's still equal opportunity for you and your podcast.

And one of the common themes I hear from podcasters is that they struggle to grow their show to a point that they feel they can be completely proud of it.

And that, to me, is really sad.

You're spending so much time putting out this content that you should be able to feel that there's some intrinsic value to that effort in it for you.

Mark is demonstrative of exactly what podcasters go through.

Oh my God, I am working so hard on this.

Why am I doing so much?

I'm burned out.

I've had enough.

I want to disappear.

I want to escape.

I've done this for 16 years.

I've put out 1600 episodes.

That's enough.

Well, the truth is, yeah, all of that's true.

But it's also not true.

Mark could very easily continue his podcast.

He's built a brand that pretty much everybody in podcasting is aware of.

Think of the value of that.

The problem isn't with Mark being burned out.

The problem is with Mark being burned out because he's lost perspective.

Don't let the same thing happen to you.

Sit down.

Properly.

Plan what you're doing with your podcast.

If you decided it's going to have a five year shelf life, a 10 year shelf life, a 20 year shelf life, or it will carry on forever with your kids taking over.

Fine, all of it's valid.

But plan for it.

Even legends get fried without a proper plan.

Learn from his meltdown, pace yourself, guard your sanity, and craft your exit plan.

Next week, I'm going to tell you about how you can use brutal listener feedback to grow your show.

Make your haters your besties.

It's not going to be easy, but it's so valuable.

Until then, follow the show if you haven't already, and pass this show on to anybody that you think would benefit from listening or watching.

Until my next episode pops up in your library, enjoy your podcasting and keep aspiring to pod mastery.