Goalhanger co-founder Tony Pastor has claimed young people are connecting with podcasts that “no commissioner at a TV station in the UK would dream of commissioning.”
In a keynote talk at MIP London last night, Pastor outlined the case for Goalhanger’s podcast-first model, and said there was a “massive cause for optimism” in the space.
“People keep telling us that the TikTok generation only want short form,” he added. “We are finding the exact opposite. The average age of a listener for our shows is 33. About half the audience is in their 20s and early 30s. They are listening to five episodes on the history of Carthage. That is a challenging entry point.
“They are listening to stuff that no commissioner at a TV station in the UK would dream of commissioning. We’re getting millions of people in their 20s and 30s to watch and listen to five or six hours of long-form content about these quite sophisticated stories, and we’re doing it by hopefully telling it in an entertaining way.”
Goalhanger, the podcast production company Pastor founded with England soccer legend Gary Lineker, sold a minority stake to The Chernin Group so it can expand its creator-led and fandom-driven media businesses across television, film, digital video, written formats and live experiences.
Pastor explained how the company’s suite of podcasts, most of which come under the The Rest is… brand, had evolved.
“We started making video podcasts as we now make somthing much more like TV,” he said. “We have an archive deal with British Pathé and with the English Premier League, we buy stills, we have a football rights deal with La Liga and we do a lot of animation. We realized that the closer we are to television on YouTube, the better we do.”
Goalhanger’s podcasts include The Rest is Football, The Rest is Entertainment, The Rest is Science, the recently launched Book Club and The Rest is History, which was recently named Apple’s podcast of the year and is being adapted for TV.
Pastor noted The Rest is History got 26 million downloads last month, five million of which were on YouTube.
“The last show we put out had an average view time of over 40 minutes, which is wildly contradictory to anything anyone will tell you what YouTube is for,” he said. “The other thing is a startling number are watching it on connected TV, not on a mobile device or a laptop, which means they are sat watching it, so we’re trying to make the TV version for them.”
The Rest is History, which is hosted by historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, has a library of over 600 episodes. Goalhanger is working with Brent Montgomery’s Wheelhouse on the TV adaptation.
MIP London finishes today (February 24).