Paul Sylvester - Content Director, Absolute Radio

Absolute Radio's most popular podcast is The Frank Skinner Show Podcast. Now, that is effectively a cutdown version of the radio show with the songs taken out. When we started about nine years ago with The Frank Skinner Show, he would get on the first one about a 100 then it was a 1000, and then it was 5000. Then we celebrated when it was 10000.

So, Frank gets about 150000 downloads every single week now. But it's taken us all this time to build up that amount of listeners. New people come along every week. New people come along every month. And so, it should always grow, the more episodes you put out. And putting out lots of episodes does help, because actually what you wanna do is build a loyal audience, and build a loyal audience that keeps coming back to you for more.

So, for us it was about creating the podcast of the radio show. Then we found out that the radio show wasn't long enough for all of the material that Frank wanted to talk about each week. So, what we did then was actually create a bonus podcast on a Wednesday.

So, Frank would do his radio show on a Saturday morning, 8:00 till 11:00. Then he'd go downstairs and record an extra podcast that would go out on a Wednesday. So, that was just for the podcast fans. And that helped to build that loyalty that I've talked about amongst his audience, because they thought they were getting something that wasn't heard on the radio.