Owning Your Audience Is the Business Model with Michelle Jackson

About this episode

Michelle Jackson discusses the importance of owning your audience for successful podcast monetization.

If you don’t own your audience, are you actually building a business? This week on PodBiz, Michelle Jackson, founder of Creators Getting Paid , breaks down why most creators struggle to monetize and what’s actually required to turn a podcast into something sustainable. Her work sits at the intersection of independent creators, community building, and revenue transparency, giving her a clear view into what’s working and where people get stuck. The throughline is simple: monetization isn’t about doing more content. It’s about building something around the content that converts. “There’s no one way to monetize a podcast… each podcast is completely different.” That flexibility is part of the opportunity, but also the problem. Without a defined structure, most creators default to focusing only on the show itself. “If you get nothing out of this whole conversation… you need to be collecting your audience.” Because the gap isn’t effort or even consistency. It’s ownership. This conversation looks at what actually needs to be in place beyond the podcast feed, and why building an audience you control is the difference between a project and a business. In this episode: Why there’s no single…

People in this episode

Hosts: Norma Jean Belenky, John Kiernan

Guest: Michelle Jackson

Topics covered

• audience ownership
• monetization strategies
• podcast business models
• creator economy
• community building
• revenue transparency

Keywords

• monetization
• podcasting
• audience ownership
• content strategy
• creator economy
• revenue
• community building

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Creators Getting Paid

More episodes of PodBiz | Where's The Money In Podcasting?

• The Future of Podcast Advertising in Latin America with Rodrigo Tigre · June 8, 2026 · 51 min
• Building a Sustainable and Successful Podcast Membership Model with Joe Fucigna · June 1, 2026 · 54 min
• Why Podcast Advertising Still Runs on Predictions, Not Certainty with Sean Howard · May 25, 2026 · 46 min
• What Podcast Metrics Actually Matter? Tom Webster on Discovery, Data & the Future of Audio · May 18, 2026 · 1h 2m
• Building Trust at Scale in Health Podcasting with Dan Kendall · May 11, 2026 · 52 min
• Podcast Infrastructure and Platform Economics with Brendan Monaghan · April 27, 2026 · 42 min