#159 The Podcast Community Era Is Here
Earlier this year I traveled to NYC with Affinity's Product Leader, Danielle Walker, to do in-person workshops with one of our clients. This client has over 100 employees, and an entire network of podcasts.
For months we've been researching top podcasts building community and scaling their businesses with membership revenue, so we could build a community engagement strategy for our client.
I asked Danielle to write up some of our findings to share with all of you, because it was too good not to share. If you run a podcast, you should be thinking about your community strategy... because ad-free listening isn't enough for a subscription anymore.
Let's get into it –
Guest Written by Affinity Collective's Product Leader, Danielle Walker. Danielle has worked behind-the-scenes with me since 2024, and we've been working together in tech since 2018. She's not just a product thinker – she's someone who understands community from the inside out, whether she's teaching companies like The Home Depot, Deloitte, and The New York Times how to build human-centered strategies, or showing up every week on a yoga mat with her students. We're lucky to work with her every day.
Podcasts have always been a one-sided experience. You listen while you’re commuting, doing the dishes, or maybe you watch an episode on your podcast player. You know the host’s favorite music, their dog’s name… they have no idea you exist. But a growing number of podcasts are breaking this mold. They’re moving listeners from the audience into the room — closer to each other and to the creator. This isn’t just a scrappy indie-podcast phenomenon, even podcasts with millions of listeners are building community tiers. What listeners actually want from the podcasts they love enough to pay for isn’t ad-free listening, it’s connection. Let's take a look at 5 mini-case-studies.
Diary of a CEO
Imagine watching an exclusive podcast episode screening in a theater with fellow fans. Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett's podcast with 40M+ monthly listeners, is offering exactly that to its community members, alongside dinner parties in cities like Frankfurt. Members can weigh in on what types of in-person events they want to see inside of the community, DOAC Circle, hosted on StanStore. While I think the community name could use some work, the experience itself has some great elements. For £6.99/month, members get access to behind the scenes content, episode research briefs, the ability to vote on future episodes, and an opportunity to connect with other fans. Even at a massive scale, they’re investing in building community, especially through in-person events.
The Crime Junkie Podcast
The Crime Junkie podcast, hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Pawat, is ranked among the top 5 podcasts globally, and has one of the most devoted fanbases in podcasting. They went further than most by building their own branded app. With memberships ranging from $8/month to $20/month, all community members get access to the app—a one-stop shop for bonus content, exclusive merch, ad-free listening, a chance to attend in-person events with the hosts, and the ability to connect with other fans through an in-app forum. And then there’s the nonprofit. A portion of their Fan Club revenue goes directly to funding Season of Justice, Crime Junkie’s nonprofit that provides financial grants to law enforcement agencies and families to solve cold cases. Fans aren’t just connecting with one another, they’re directly impacting cases.
The Rest Is History
The Rest is History is Apple Podcasts 2025 Show of the Year and has 20M+ monthly downloads. With two tiers, £7.99/month or £249/year, 45k+ listeners have joined their community on a private Discord server where members break down episodes, go into rabbit holes about historical events, and set up self-organized meetups. These threads garner multiple responses per hour. Beyond the Discord community, members get bonus episodes, ad-free listening and merch discounts. The top tier gets guaranteed access to their annual The Rest is History Festival, held at one of England’s great historic palaces. This festival has costume reenactments, baroque dancing, and live episode recordings. Like Diary of a CEO and Crime Junkie, the hosts aren't super active in the online community, but they're at the palace.
Governerds
Sharon McMahon built one of the most intimate podcast communities in the game before she was famous. She built her following on social media and now has the kind of portfolio I’d call a smorgasbord. A top 1% podcast, 335k+ subscribers on Substack, a 2X NYT Bestselling author, and 1.5M followers on Instagram. But her community wasn’t built on scale, it’s what actually built the scale. She started the Governerds Insider Book Club when her podcast was brand new and she had ~350k Instagram followers. Governerds Insider runs 3 “semesters” per year and over 20k people sign up each time doors open. For $17.99/month, members have access to a private Instagram where Sharon goes live and shows behind-the-scenes details, multiple live Zoom calls with Sharon per month, educational workshops, and author meets with the books they read each semester. While there is no dedicated community platform outside of Instagram, members have created their own unaffiliated Discord server, local meetup groups, and affinity groups where they can connect with one another outside of the live calls. I have personally been a member of this community since 2022 and the intention and connection that goes into the community is top notch. Being able to ask her opinion on why the Vietnam War was different than other wars and join a live call with authors like Kristin Hannah, Ina Garten, Adam Grant, and The Office Ladies is the kind of access that doesn't feel like it should exist at this price point.
Fantasy Fangirls
From a community experience standpoint, no one is doing it like Fantasy Fangirls. Hosted by sisters Lexi Ayala and Nicole Holleman, the podcast centers on diving deep into fantasy novels. With 100k+ weekly listeners and half-a-million followers across social, this is the smallest podcast of the bunch but the most sophisticated community design. Their community isn’t a bonus feature, it’s the product. Six tiers ranging from $6/month to $30/month are designed to appeal to a casual listener all the way up to their most rabid fans.The base tier starts with community access: a private Discord server and monthly book club. Ad-free access and bonus episodes don’t kick in until the second tier. Climb the tiers and you unlock virtual live Q&As with the hosts, voting on the next deep dive episodes, community calls, live author interviews, and eventually early access to in-person events and special gifts. The smallest podcast in this group built the most intentional community infrastructure. Ad-free listening is in there, it just isn’t the point.
Forward-thinking podcast creators aren’t just creating content, they’re building a place where their listeners actually belong. Ad-free listening may have been enough to get paying subscribers in the past, but it was never going to be enough on its own. What people pay for is access, connection, and the feeling that their fandom is reciprocated.
👋 Becky here! You know I like to wrap things up with some action items for you, so...
Your Next Steps
A few things to think about this week:
Look at your current membership benefits and identify which ones create connection vs. which ones just deliver content.
Ask yourself honestly: if you stripped ad-free listening out of your membership, what's left? Is it enough to make someone feel like they belong?
Consider whether your listeners have any way to find each other... and if not, what one low-lift change could create that.
If you're a podcast brand ready to turn your audience into a community, we would love to help you with this. Book a free strategy call here.