What’s the latest on advertorial and podcasting cash

Some more ways to make freelancing pay

UNLESS we're very successful and happy in a niche (or two - nobody said we have to be mononiched, you know) freelances know they have to cover the waterfront to earn a crust - even the bits we barely knew were there.

Advertorial

So, there's this thing called advertorial - which practitioners say is partly just like copywriting and partly not - here's what a few people get paid for it nowadays. And do please anonymously tell the Rate For The Job your how-much and who-from for the edificatory benefit of all...

What we have - subject to negotiation, no fixed rate involved - is:

  • The Evening Standard paying around £400 per thousand words - on matters ranging from hardnose commercial to talking up an NHS campaign on this or that health issue; and
  • The Times paying a lot better for a given piece, £750 per thousand.

And then a member reports a good client commissioning him to deploy diverse, skills, advertorial in part, like this: tech company running social-cum-professional events - dinners with panel discussions. They commission freelances, first to write a piece to attract the target audience to the soirée (200-250 words); and then to do a report of the discussion, published online either by the event company or the event's sponsors.

There is no standard length for the second part, though it may be "quite long". The fee for the "package" is £375 with travel expenses and transcription fees for preparatory interviews and possibly the panel discussion: "I think about these jobs in terms of the time they takes me, and I consider them to be pretty well paid."

Podcasts

A very different area of work is making podcasts. These tend to be far more about basic radio-alike feature journalism, including some heavy-lifting investigative stuff or personal opinion, with varying amounts of research behind it. They can also be duet "performances", you might say, whether journalistic or comedic or something else. That is, the genre is still under construction.

Podcasts can be created and "broadcast" by the freelance in hopes of ad revenue arriving in life-enhancing sums. Or they can be carried out on commission for a corporate or institutional client with a website to vibe up.

Meanwhile, on the fiscal rewards front...

But don't follow that thought that if you're not funny, we won't thank you for it. Somewhat more realistic wonderings might arise from a DIY podcaster starting on a once-a-fortnight schedule who got so good and so more-ish that listener numbers pulled ad income up to £5000 a time, provoking a lightbulb moment in which she said to herself, "Why don't I do this every week?" So she did.

  • A well-known-in-his-field non-TV-star music journo offers a corrective to showbiz dreams by detailing his duo-pod with an equally well-known colleague - it paid handsomely in laughs and miserably in the bank account.
  • It went like this: 24 episodes, professionally produced, out on all the big streaming services (100,000 streams arising over a year or so), Guardian Podcast Of The Week right at the start, and gross ad income added up to... £1000 split between the chatty pals and the producer. Result: parsnips unbuttered...

The ever-worth-a-gander Rate For The Job does have quite a few podcast earning examples already: £300 fee from a non-profit in 2021; £250 per day from an independent producer in 2020; £500 per podcast from a museum, and £600 for the same client interviewing and editing a substantial feature for online use (isn't that a podcast?) in 2022; £300 for a "startup podcast" for a commercial outlet, 2021; £6,200 from an NHS hospital Trust for delivering a 15-minute "video podcast" on health inequalities, 2021; and £200 for chairing a two-hour discussion to be podcast for a retail chain (no production work, but prep) in 2021.

This is in no way a scientific survey, but the 2020-onwards fees quoted here are a massive improvement on listed podcast rates from earlier years. Which is nice...

When you're looking for ad income, the fundamental question is: how do you dig out an audience that makes the difference between caviar and a mess of pottage. Do take a look at the UK Audio Network's 2023 survey of podcast income (mostly salaries, but some day rates too). Some of you may have heard UKAN founder Lily Ames introduce the venture at LFB back in 2019 (report here) She presented analysis showing that earnings differentials by gender and race have already come to bear on this newish area of journalistic work.

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