Sponsorship Openings at Daring Fireball and The Talk Show, Early 2024 Edition

Saturday, 9 March 2024

After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including this upcoming week.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch. And again, this coming week remains open.

Also, sponsoring The Talk Show is a great opportunity for a lot of the same services and products that sponsor the website. And because there are up to three sponsors per episode, the price is significantly lower than the weekly sponsorship of the entire site. Advertising in the podcast industry is going through upheaval, and my show is really feeling it. Those of you who listen to ATP know they are too, and I’ll bet the same is true for just about all your favorite ad-based podcasts. What I’ve seen, in broad terms, is that the early years of podcasting were indie across the board — indie podcasters with indie sponsors. Then, when podcasting exploded in popularity, advertising agencies stepped in, and most spots on my show — and most spots on the shows I listen to — were sold to internet startup brands through ad agencies. The brands and products were great — companies like Warby Parker eyeglasses, Casper mattresses, Hullo pillows, you know the type — but dealing with ad agencies was (and remains) a much, much bigger hassle than dealing with smaller independent companies directly (which is how I sell almost all my weekly sponsorship spots).

So if you have an app, product, service or whatever that you think is a good fit for Daring Fireball, I encourage you to consider a sponsorship of The Talk Show. Small indie products have been vastly underrepresented amongst The Talk Show sponsors in recent years, but I hope to change that. Again, the number of repeat sponsors is the best proof I can offer that it’s a great value. (Those big brands going through ad agencies track their results.) I don’t sell the podcast sponsorships myself, so if you’re interested, get in touch with Elaine Pow at Neat.fm. There are a bunch of openings in the next few months, and we’re happy to offer a discount to first-time sponsors to fill them.

I kind of hate writing these sponsorship-pimping posts, but my job, from an accounting point of view, is an ad salesman, not a writer/podcaster. The obvious truth is that I should be publicly promoting these sponsorships — both on the site and the podcast — far more often than I do. (I’d have been fired from this sales job years ago if I had a boss.)