Though many people associate Carolla with The Man Show or Loveline, these days he is a giant in the world of podcasting. His show has been downloaded more than 60 million times, easily beating the previous record of 4.5 million by Ricky Gervais in 2006. What’s more, he’s making money — at least enough to turn down a deal to go back to terrestrial radio.
One particularly lucrative arrangement is a revenue-sharing deal with Amazon. Fans who click through Carolla’s site to Amazon know that he gets a cut of the transaction.
Carolla's podcast zoomed to number one on iTunes because of name recognition, but it stayed there for several reasons. One is that, unlike many other podcasters, Carolla's show is daily rather than weekly. A second reason: He gets big-name guests like Alec Baldwin, Albert Brooks and Seth MacFarlane. But a lot of credit has to go to Carolla himself, who has the unique ability to riff humorously on any topic.
Mashable recently spoke to Carolla about his podcasting success. Here are some excerpts of the conversation.
On your show, you recently talked about turning down a lucrative deal on terrestrial radio to stay with the podcast. Do you ever regret that decision? And what was your thinking?
No. And my thinking was I had a whole bunch of other irons in the fire so to speak and stuff cooking, and this podcast thing was just starting to really take off. And I just realized it's a business and I need to immerse myself in it and just go at it instead of treating it like a hobby, treat it like a job and I just dug in.
And it's been paying off ever since. I mean, I didn't do it because I had a ton of blind fai th. I did it because it was...
