Normal Gossip is a big fat hit. Where does Defector go from here?

Defector published its annual report yesterday, providing an unusually open look into their business during the last fiscal year, with details ranging from its total revenue ($4.5 million, up 18 percent year over year) to how much the company spent on Taco Bell ($28, up from $0). One of the pillars of the business is the hit podcast Normal Gossip, which sits in a weird position: it’s a big driver of subscriptions, but pretty divergent from Defector’s typical sports-loving audience. Squaring that is one of the company’s next challenges.

Normal Gossip has helped drive Defector’s increase in subscriptions, with a podcast-only tier, and has brought in money from live events, which represent one of the publication’s biggest growth spots. Now the company is gearing up to expand its podcast operation. I got a chance to talk with Jasper Wang, VP of revenue & operations for Defector, about what he has in mind. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

First of all, I have to say I really appreciated seeing your brutally honest annual report. That is not something that’s typical in the media business. Truly a business journalist’s delight.

Oh, I’m glad. Yeah, I mean, I was at a dinner of subscription business people, and they were all sort of mystified as to why I would do that. I’m like, I guess our assumptions are different. It’s my first job of media, it’s probably my last. So, whatever, put it all out there.

I want to get into the numbers a little bit. So you reported $3.75 million in subscription revenue. How much of that is coming from Normal Gossip subscriptions versus Defector subscriptions?

We have about 40,000 plus subscribers, and about 10 percent of those are Normal Gossip subscribers. Normal Gossip is a cheaper subscription in general — its average revenue per user is lower. So it’s something like 10 percent of our total subscriptions, but more like 7 or 8 percent of our revenue dollars.

There was a bit in the report that I thought was really interesting, in which you discussed looking into new podcasts, but you said upfront that you don’t expect to hit the lottery again like you did with Normal Gossip. So when you’re developing these new podcasts, what in your mind does success look like?

The most important piece is to extend the audience of Defector, so where can we find adjacent audiences and have a podcast serve as their on ramp into… getting to know the brand from a different angle. You sort of see that in the two shows we chose to launch: Normal Gossip and Namedropping. Normal Gossip has turned out to be more woman-focused, it tends to be a younger generation than our average Defector subscriber. Namedropping is the concept of the unintended consequences of your name, and it does tend to be a little bit more focused toward an immigrant community, a non-white audience. Number two is like, it would be great if we got those to the point where they are driving secondary revenue, so we’re not losing money on the production. And ideally we would make a little bit of profit off of them. And then finally, honestly, it’s a matter of letting our talented people spread their wings in different arenas, you know, in different media and channels.

I mean, to your point, I don’t read any sports media, but I am a Normal Gossip subscriber.

We hope to bring you further into the mix of what Kelsey and Alex write on this site, and what else is there that you might be interested in. That’s definitely a thing we want to focus on this year. Some number of people are never going to read the site — they’re just like, “I’m here for Normal Gossip and the bonus episodes, and that’s it.” And that’s fine. But we suspect some number of a couple thousand Normal Gossip subscribers would be happy to engage with [Defector] otherwise.

And when you’re talking about breaking even on a production, is there a download number or a revenue figure in mind that can achieve that?

The ballpark point at which you start being able to sell host-read ads, as opposed to just taking programmatic ads, is around 10,000 listens per episode. Once you get to that point, that’s sort of the goal.

One topic that has come up in the discussion of the podcast bust is overexpansion. As you guys look to develop more shows, what lessons have you learned from this period of turmoil?

We’re just like a reasonably conservative company. We’re 100 percent worker owned, we’ve never taken outside money. And as such, we just don’t have that much in cash reserves. So you can’t make a mistake at the level of all these different companies that have over extended. The other dynamic for us is we are first and foremost the website; the blogs that get produced every day that is the bread and butter of the business. Subscriptions are still 85 percent of the revenue of the businesses. And so if we want to have writers hosting podcasts, we have to take them off the playing field that is most of their day job to some extent. So there’s just no version of this where, even if we had whatever minimum revenue guarantees against the ad sales, we could go to market with all of these amazing podcast concepts at once because it’s just too many. It’s an internal resource allocation question. Whatever approach we take, we will be pretty onesie-twosie on new podcast concepts that actually go into a full season.

I also noticed in the report that you said that the production deal for Normal Gossip ends in the first half of 2025.

We signed a two-year agreement earlier [with Radiotopia] this year. Again, we’re a pretty conservative company, and so we’re going to operate as though that’s the end. Maybe there will be more, but that’s sort of the way we’re financially modeling is thinking about that at the end.

We have a first look deal with Radiotopia for our new podcast ideas. I talk to [executive producer] Audrey Mardavich over there very frequently and have contact with [chief of business development and content] Jason Saldanha over there, as well. So as we continue to figure out our additional podcasts plans, we’ll be doing it hand in hand with them. I think the other piece here that we haven’t touched on yet, and it doesn’t really show up in the annual report, is since pretty early on in Defector days, we’ve had inbound interest from podcast producers and creators on whether Defector orders outside podcast ideas. And for a long time, the answer was no. It was just like, we didn’t know what we were doing. We were not sure that we were doing right by anybody by suggesting this should be a Defector podcast. But now, a couple years later, we have the experience and expertise of incubating Normal Gossip from the very beginning… We have a little bit more, you know, clout, heat, whatever you want to call it, in the podcast world. And so now it does feel like, yes, we actually have something to offer to outside podcast creators who might want to associate and be supported by Defector.

Are there any ideas that have jumped out at you?

As the business guy, I try not to comment on the actual editorial. There are a couple of pilot ideas that are being actively worked on right now. But I shouldn’t be the person to comment publicly on what those are.

My last question for you is what are you listening to right now?

Okay, Normal Gossip, On the Media. I listen a lot to Odd Lots, the Bloomberg podcast. I’ve dipped into Search Engine. That’s pretty great. Season 1 of Makes Sense, which is with Chanel Miller and Karen Chee buddy podcast — that’s been very nice. And then the other Defector podcasts: The Distraction and Namedropping. And I am a longtime Comedy Bang! Bang! listener.

Correction November 21, 2023: A previous version listed Buddy Podcast among Wang’s recs. He was in fact describing Makes Sense as a “buddy podcast.”