It’s a long time since consumers became accustomed to the ready availability of print media brands, for example, on smartphones, tablets and laptops. Now, they equally expect to find their favourite content in video and audio almost everywhere on social media. Alongside ads-free subscriptions, ‘Total Media’ is what 21st century consumers demand.
A whole generation of consumers increasingly identify their favourite brands by, say, the podcasts, TikTok or Instagram posts – even though the original incarnations of the brand might have been in print, digital text, or video. What once were ancillary ‘new’ media can now become the primary brands. But, for traditional media, it means new competitors coming at them from different directions.
That’s why media everywhere should watch a London-based company that has not only become, arguably, the fastest growing podcast producer in the UK but is also diversifying its portfolio in ways that may be subtly creating competition for traditional news and magazine brands.
Goalhanger Podcasts is a two-year-old, c£20mn-revenue company co-founded by Gary Lineker, the UK’s best-known sports presenter who had been a star footballer in the UK, Spain and Japan. He’s a controversial if highly popular personality for Brits, most of whom can tell you he is the BBC’s best-paid employee and someone whose liberal political views have periodically irked his employer. But there seems surprisingly little scuttlebutt about the way that the former footballer – still fronting the BBC’s Match of the Day prime time TV show – has built a podcasting business that, at least partly, competes with one of the public broadcaster’s own podcasts. Although it is all of 20 years since the BBC produced its own pioneering podcasts, Lineker’s company now produces the Match of the Day podcast on their behalf – featuring the same ex footballer presenters (including Lineker himself) as Goalhanger’s own The Rest is Football podcast. As in his days as a world-class goalscorer, Lineker is running rings round the opposition.
But Goalhanger now has bigger targets than merely the football which made its co-founder famous.
It produces two of the UK’s most popular podcasts: The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is History with six other brands covering money, entertainment, the former British Empire (yes) – and football. The almost accidental company, which stumbled into podcasting from sports films, now claims to be the UK’s largest independent podcast producer with an estimated 50mn audio downloads and full YouTube episode views per month. In this week’s Apple Podcast chart in the UK, Goalhanger occupies the top three and five of the top 10.
Lineker told the FT: “I think we started early, recognised that podcasting was going to be interesting, got a bit lucky and made some good choices . . . The business is performing staggeringly well.”
That’s the slightly self-deprecating style that BBC viewers will recognise. But Goalhanger has brought a style of its own to podcasting and not just the “The Rest is…” branding of their four biggest productions. The Rest is Politics is a twice-weekly, good humoured, fast-paced and insightful production (in audio and video) presented by Alastair Campbell, (former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s spin doctor) and ex Conservative government minister Rory Stewart. Like some other Goalhanger productions, the star presenters don’t receive a salary but share two-thirds of the revenue, with the publisher taking the other one-third.
While not all its podcast hosts have the same rich deal, the company says “it’s fair to say that in general the presenters are heavily incentivised in the back end”. At this stage, most of the revenue is advertising (many of the messages are voiced by the presenters) but it is now building £35 per year subscriptions which entitle members to a newsletter, ads-free listening, access to growing numbers of live events and to book discounts. Campbell and Stewart are now political rock stars and have been on tour with a live show. Tickets to their 2023 appearance at London’s historic 5,000-seat Royal Albert Hall were said to have sold-out in 24 hours. The brand has now spawned a US edition featuring the BBC’s ex US correspondent Katty Kay and punchy former Trump communications director, Anthony Scaramucci.
The Rest is Politics is the largest podcast in the UK but The Rest is History – presented by Brit historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland – has a larger international footprint, claiming to to be the world’s most popular history podcast, with less than 40% of its audience in the UK. Launched in 2020, it covers everything from the killing of Julius Caesar to the rise of the Nazis and the Roman invasion of England. The podcast is downloaded 6mn times a month. Its £60-200 member subscription includes invitations to parties and discussion groups.
Goalhanger’s distinctive approach to costs, revenue and membership is clearly paying dividends. In six weeks this summer (across the UK general election campaign), The Rest Is Politics and its companion show, Leading, achieved 21.6mn audio and video downloads and 22mn all-platform views. The Rest Is Football also witnessed a substantial surge in popularity during the Euros competition, netting 19.6mn downloads and 22mn views.
Goalhanger managing director, co-founder and former BBC producer Jack Davenport marked what seemed to be the podcaster’s first PR announcement with an upbeat statement: “These numbers show that 2024 is the year Goalhanger evolved from an audio production company to a mass media publisher, speaking to tens of millions of people worldwide. We want to reach audiences wherever they consume content—whether they prefer podcasting, watching on YouTube, social media, linear TV, or even in print—you can find us there.”
Fellow co-founder and sports film producer Tony Pastor reinforced a message likely to attract the interest of investors and would-be collaborators and partners: “The success of our shows proves that the so-called TikTok generation only wanting short-form content is a myth. Half of our audience is under 33 years old and enjoying long-form conversations between intelligent people, discussing everything from history to politics to sports and entertainment.”
In 2013, Pastor had left his job as controller of sport at the UK’s leading commercial channel ITV to form a production company, Goalhanger Films with Lineker. One thing led to another and they dabbled in football podcasts before Davenport joined in 2022. The three co-founders jointly own the company.
This year, with the lucky combination of the Euros and the recent UK general election, the Goalhanger business has taken off, helped by the US launch of The Rest is Politics in presidential election year. In 2024, the company is expected to double its revenue to £15-20mn (some £2-3mn from its c85k subscriptions). About 60-70% of revenue comes from the UK. Goalhanger employs 39 people (up from a headcount of 10 this time last year and just one in 2022). Most of the team are in production, with Spotify accounting for the majority of the advertising and sponsorship revenue.
At a time when relatively few podcasts are making solid profits, we should not miss the point that Goalhanger’s revenue is turbocharged by combining the audio with YouTube video, which generates the audience, analytics – and advertiser budgets.
Davenport says: “Many of our recent hires have been in the 10-person video team…long-form video for YouTube and then cut-downs for social and all the production needs that go around that. Social producers, video editors… That’s essentially a new department that we didn’t have a year ago. This time last year, we probably had two big shows and three or four growing shows, and now we have probably double that on both counts. Each show tends to have a dedicated producer with executive producers and assistants working across two shows”.
The Goalhanger managing director gives some clue to the ambitions of the fledgling media company: “We’re in the process of evolving from a podcast production company to a multimedia publisher, and would like to become the leading English language provider of thoughtful, long-form content. The US is a major priority, and we think there’s a few content areas in which we can make a mark. In terms of diversification, we’re experimenting with other models. But, outside advertising and sponsorship, by far the most interesting is our subscription business – people paying for additional benefits around the content: ads free, early access, bonus content etc. It’s already a significant contributor to overall revenue and hopefully will continue to grow at the rate we’ve seen so far.”
The transatlantic ambitions have been fuelled by the success of the US edition of The Rest is Politics (which gets some 500-600k downloads per episode), the US 25% of the audience for The Rest is History and, you suspect, the soaring appeal of the UK’s premier league soccer-football. Surely football must be high on their export list? The fast-moving company is clearly searching for ideas (presumably along with Spotify) and, perhaps even potential partners and investors. But its distinctive approach to audio, video, subscriptions and events still has a long way to go in the UK. And the neat idea of using celebrity presenters might just awaken publishers to the magical memories of Oprah Winfrey’s once-bestselling US magazine.
Publishers everywhere should study the rapid ascent of Goalhanger. Its approach may help others to create powerful new audio-video-event “verticals” that could dwarf the audiences and even the revenue of, say, the lifestyle, health and money sections of newspapers and specialist magazines. The use of big name podcast presenters may be an opportunity even for B2B media groups.
Not for the first time in his life, Gary Lineker has become a role model.
