How Adam Carolla Became a Podcast Superstar

Radio-and-TV personality Adam Carolla stumbled into podcasting and immediately became its No. 1 star. Now he's launching his own broadcasting network. Inside the messy birth of a new medium.

In just over a year, Carolla, 45, has used this same improvisational approach to lift podcasting from the realm of amateur audio and video blogging to an increasingly professional medium with real revenue potential. His daily talk show was an immediate hit -- more than 50 million downloads in its first year -- and was named iTunes's best audio podcast of 2009.

By aggregating a devoted audience and then experimenting with new ways of interacting with it, Carolla is both taking advantage of an opportunity and creating one. Analysts at eMarketer predict that U.S. podcast listenership will approach 38 million by 2013, more than double 2008's audience. Meanwhile, traditional media has mostly used podcasting to repurpose preexisting TV and radio content -- the same mistake newspapers and magazines made with the Web, opening the door to outsiders.

With the first launch of his podcast, Carolla quickly found himself dangling from a very expensive hoist, with no plan in sight. "We thought it would be easy and cheap," he says. A couple of mics, a mixer, and bandwidth fees -- he figured the whole thing would cost $300 to $400 a month. "Within weeks, we were melting down the servers," Misraje recalls. As downloads kept rising to more than a million a week, Carolla was spending $3,000 and then $5,000 and then more than $13,000 a month on technology to host the show, which was staffed entirely by volunteer help and course-credit interns. "By September, we needed to look for advertisers," says Misraje, now Carolla's executive producer. A bit of fancy dancing was in order "to get around Adam's noncompete clause" with CBS. CarCast, a weekly show devoted to Carolla's love of cars -- sufficiently different from Carolla's signature chat fest -- was born.

As their audience grows -- Carolla now has 2.8 million listeners a month -- he and his team have been testing a variety of ad formats. (CarCast's audience is easier to define; Ford signed on as an advertiser last October, and he recently added a major auto magazine.) DiggersList, an online construction-classifieds site, is building out a larger facility for Carolla's headquarters, a $100,000 value, in exchange for a physical banner ad, signage on the studio wall. "So could we get you to read an ad for FAST COMPANY for $100,000?" I ask. "Oh, you can get a lot more than that for that price," laughs Carolla. He studies me. "But that's only because you're a friend now."

Later, I ask Misraje if he thinks podcasting is truly ready for its close-up. "The technology and infrastructure isn't there," he says. "The Internet is like TV in the '40s and '50s." The laid-back Misraje wants to be the future of podcasting but pegs their efforts as being perhaps two years too early. "We're going to live-stream shows, like a TV network, rent space to talent, and develop others," he says, sounding as if they're wandering toward a digital Texaco Star Theater. "We're growing revenue and listeners every month, but we're still a bit in the red."

The key, Carolla says, is having a focused audience. "What we're going to do is have a smaller, more educated, loyal group," he tells me. (Or, as he put it during his state-of-radio rant, "I'd rather have 10 smart people than a billion retards listening to me.") . But Carolla seems all-in. "I would have a hard time calling myself a pioneer, sitting around talking while Donny records it and puts it on the Internet," he tells me on the ride back to his house. But the outsidery angst that his fans adore is part of the equation. It's tough to be first. "Think of all those guys who played for the NFL in the '40s and '50s," he says, looming perilously close to a rant. "They made $7,000 a year and had to work at car dealerships in the off-season," he says, pulling into his driveway. "Maybe we'll spend a bunch of money and time, and 20 years later... ." He pauses, does the math. "Ashton Kutcher will get rich off what we thought of. I don't know." (via fastcompany).