Small and Mid-Sized Podcasts Can Monetize Too! 《理想自己研究室》 Lands Eight Ad Deals in Two Months

"Hi, I'm Athena. Welcome to 理想自己研究室."

When Life Gets Too Rough, Escape into a Podcast

"Hi, I'm Athena. Welcome to 理想自己研究室." Listeners interested in personal growth should be familiar with this opening, set to upbeat music. True to its name, 理想自己研究室 is a show about exploring your purpose, designing your life, and optimizing your daily routine.

Initially, Athena approached podcasting simply as a way to build her personal media presence. Before she knew it, two years had passed. "For me, podcasting is something that balances out real life -- sometimes it even heals the creator," she says. From the perspective of a small to mid-sized show creator, she has observed that unless creators already have an existing following or are deeply passionate about running a show, it is very hard to stick with podcasting.

Fortunately, Athena pushed through her low points and saw her listener numbers grow. Looking back, the main driver of growth was establishing a clear core identity for the show.

"理想自己研究室 is now in its third season. During seasons one and two, while the content was always related to personal growth, it covered too broad a range. Combined with using stock images as the show artwork, it was hard to reach the most relevant listeners." It was not until Athena rebranded from the original name "那個自己" to "理想自己研究室" and defined the show's focus around "exploring your purpose," "designing your life," and "optimizing your daily routine" that collaboration offers started coming in. By then, she had been recording for exactly one year.

Advertising Is Not Just for Influencers -- Small and Mid-Sized Shows Can Monetize Too

As the number of podcasts grows and the industry enters its monetization era, revenue models including advertising and paid content have been validated in pockets of the podcast ecosystem. However, before creators have established their show's direction or built a base of loyal listeners, advertising and sponsorships are often not even on their radar.

Reflecting on her first advertising offer, Athena laughed and said, "More than the revenue, what made me happiest was that my show was noticed by an advertiser. That was when I truly understood how podcast advertising works." The advertising Athena refers to is actually another Firstory ad product -- Select Ads.

Unlike dynamic ads, Select Ads operate on the premise that an advertiser has a specific vision for the shows they want to partner with, making them particularly suited for shows with clearly defined audiences. Since micro-influencers have well-defined audience profiles, advertisers can more precisely target who their ads will reach. As a result, some advertisers actually prefer working with micro-influencers over large influencers whose audience profiles may be broader but less defined.

A similar dynamic plays out in the podcast ecosystem. Even though small and mid-sized shows may not have the listener numbers of top shows, their clearly defined audiences make them strong candidates for long-term advertiser partnerships. In the case of 理想自己研究室, it was precisely because of the show's well-defined audience that, despite ranking in the middle tiers, Athena was able to land eight ad deals within just two months of activating the advertising feature.

The success of 理想自己研究室 should give other creators confidence -- as long as you have advertising features enabled, you could be the next creator that advertisers take notice of.

Athena offers a simple description of dynamic ads: "They're basically the YouTube ads of the podcast world."

In the nearly one year since Firstory launched its advertising features, we have observed that the categories most favored by advertisers tend to be "Education," "Leisure," and "Society & Culture" -- relatively neutral show categories. This may reflect the fact that podcast advertising is still a new frontier for many advertisers, who remain in an exploratory phase and prefer to start with more neutral shows to test the effectiveness of podcast ads.

While there is still some distance to go before creators experience truly impactful traffic monetization, Athena's story shows that podcasting is no longer something sustained purely by passion alone!

Quick Q&A with 理想自己研究室

• How would you describe your show in one sentence?
• 理想自己研究室 is a personal growth show that accompanies you in exploring your purpose, designing your life, and optimizing your daily routine -- making your ideal life a work in progress.
• Any tips you can share with new creators?
• Follow your passion: Find a topic you genuinely love so you can talk about it longer, enjoy it more, and actually stick with it. Many people obsess over whether their content appeals to audiences -- and while that matters, you first need to figure out what you truly care about. When I repositioned the show in season three, I realized I love thinking about questions like "Why do we live?" and "How can we live better?"
• Keep learning: Many people don't know how to find material, but often it's not that life lacks stories -- it's that we lack the ability to extract them. For example, when everyone is covering the same topic, having a unique perspective is what makes content stand out.
• Learn from the best: Listen to other shows critically from the listener's perspective. You'll notice small details like pronoun flow and pause timing that serve as valuable references for improving your own work (this perhaps echoes the "research lab" in 理想自己研究室's name). My show includes music in the middle and a slogan at the end -- these are things I learned by studying other shows as a listener, right down to details like pronoun flow and pause timing.