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Rory Satran / Photography by Elianel Clinton for WSJ. Magazine
Dec. 14, 2022 12:01 pm ETLily Marotta and Steven Phillips-Horst host a hit weekly podcast called “Celebrity Book Club With Steven & Lily.” The freewheeling show, on which they review books by notables, has been critically lauded by outlets including the New Yorker and the New York Times. The New York duo has sold out live shows in Los Angeles and London and appeared in glossy fashion spreads.
“It is glamorous, but press doesn’t pay the bills,” said Mr. Marotta, who also works as a maid.
Often,...
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Lily Marotta and Steven Phillips-Horst host a hit weekly podcast called “Celebrity Book Club With Steven & Lily.” The freewheeling show, on which they review books by notables, has been critically lauded by outlets including the New Yorker and the New York Times. The New York duo has sold out live shows in Los Angeles and London and appeared in glossy fashion spreads.
“It is glamorous, but press doesn’t pay the bills,” said Mr. Marotta, who also works as a maid.
Often, Mr. Marotta, who uses they as a pronoun and Mr. as a title, will go straight from cleaning someone’s apartment to a podcast-related event or interview, changing from “dirty shorts” into a “fun outfit.” They recently worked an additional gig by participating in a Zoom focus group for a vodka brand in the kid’s bedroom of a client’s house. When they go out at night, “People are like, ‘What’s in your bag?’ And I’m like, ‘A Swiffer.’ They usually think I’m joking.”
In the booming, unpredictable podcast landscape, it’s entirely possible to have a hit on your hands and still have to keep your day job. Even if your show transcends the lonely-guy-in-a-basement stereotype to find a real audience, you may find yourself Swiffering or waiting tables as you put in the long hours of producing, hosting and editing a podcast. While many podcasters have 9-to-5s in media, some microcelebrities toil away in unrelated industries, creating some awkward situations as their fame grows.
“I think that people are probably getting into it for the money,” said Jenna Weiss-Berman, co-founder of Brooklyn podcast company Pineapple Street Studios, who is responsible for shows with Lena Dunham and Ronan Farrow. “And the truth is, so few podcasts make any money.”
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Podcasting, so often a passion project, can now occasionally be a path to recognition and cash. Research firm Statista predicts that there are 88.9 million podcast listeners in the U.S., up from 75.9 million in 2020. With over two million shows listed on Apple Podcasts, it seems a new podcast launches every minute to meet this demand. Plus, news of Spotify’s megadeals in the past few years has contributed to a podcasting gold rush—from the $60 million deal Alex Cooper signed for “Call Her Daddy” to the $200 million that Joe Rogan reportedly got for his show. (The Wall Street Journal has a partnership with Gimlet Media, which is owned by Spotify.)
Hosts make money from running ads, performing live shows and selling merchandise, among other means. Some podcasts are part of established networks like Pineapple or Wondery that produce, sell and market their shows, and others hire companies that just sell advertising. Advertising is sold according to an opaque, ever-changing system based on the number of listens or downloads.
Ms. Weiss-Berman estimated that a successful podcast with 50,000 listeners could make about $2,500 to $5,000 in ad sales per episode.
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Mr. Marotta’s podcast is produced by Prologue Projects and gets over 100,000 downloads a month. They declined to share advertising sales figures. “Celebrity Book Club” makes most of its money through Patreon, where fans buy subscriptions starting at $5 a month for exclusive content. That nets around $5,000 a month, which is split with the production team. Live shows, where they also sell merchandise, can generate about $2,000.
When comedian Matt Rogers started the “Las Culturistas” podcast with current “Saturday Night Live” cast member Bowen Yang in 2016, he held down a series of odd jobs while Mr. Yang worked as a graphic designer. Even a few years after their podcast took off, Mr. Rogers still waited tables at Brooklyn Crab in Red Hook, where listeners would sometimes recognize him, and was a tour guide on the giant bus “The Ride.”
For a while, “The Ride” planted him as a fake busker outside Carnegie Hall, where he would sing Meghan Trainor’s “Lips Are Movin” several times a day with a saxophonist. Eventually, he said, “We were able to transition out of our day jobs because the podcast elevated us out of them.” Mr. Rogers is currently headlining a nationwide tour and has a musical-comedy Christmas special streaming on Showtime.
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Sometimes, a podcaster’s transition to full-time audio personality can be more fraught. “I was living a double life in a way,” said Stefanie Maegan, the host of Apple society-and-culture top-10 podcast “Broke Girl Therapy,” of her days growing her show while also working as a salon receptionist, at a camera store, and in public relations (all jobs she was fired from). She said she tried to hide her oversharing podcast personality at those jobs, even going so far as to create an alternate Instagram account that made no mention of her successful, sometimes viral podcast.
When Ms. Maegan’s podcast was first picked up by the Lipstick & Vinyl network in 2020, it made about $300 to $500 a month. Now, it sells host-read ads at a rate of about $500, of which there can be up to three per episode. A recent live show netted $5,450, and merch sold during it made an additional $2,000.
Drew Ohringer, a teacher at Manhattan private school Avenues, is also the co-host of the podcast “Our Struggle,” which loosely explores the work of Karl Ove Knausgård and was called a “literary-world sensation” by Vanity Fair. His high-school students have taken to playing the podcast when he walks into the room. The show veers raunchy (a recent episode discussed airplane sex), but Mr. Ohringer said that he tempers his content more often these days. He said, “I have a certain role I play on the show, which is this debauched slacker who shows up but can still say something vaguely intelligent about writing, which is not exactly the role I play at school, obviously.”
“Our Struggle” does not run ads. It has made approximately $1,000 total from T-shirts, mugs and tickets to a live show. On one episode, Mr. Ohringer’s co-host Lauren Teixeira describes the mugs as an albatross: They keep breaking and are difficult to ship. And though Mr. Ohringer said he had “fantasies” of trying to monetize the podcast and make a living as a podcaster, he likes teaching too.
“Part of being a podcaster means I’m invited to a lot of readings, and there are a lot of late nights out, buzzing about with the literati, so to speak, and I still have to be in front of a class at 9 a.m.,” he said. “Thank God I have my job, because it patterns my life in a way that’s probably healthier than the podcast lifestyle.”
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Mr. Marotta compared themself to David Sedaris, a proto-podcaster who told stories about his quirky gigs like apple picker and Macy’s elf on NPR’s “This American Life.” He cleaned houses too, continuing until well after his first book, “Barrel Fever,” was a bestseller in 1994. Mr. Marotta said cleaning could sometimes be generative, as it was for Mr. Sedaris.
“I get material the first time I clean a house,” they said, “and then maybe when I’m in the trenches of cleaning the grout, I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t know if this is giving me material.’”
Write to Rory Satran at rory.satran@wsj.com