Is your podcast too small to be considered attractive to advertisers? Does your podcast focus on a niche group that advertisers don’t know what to do with? RadioPublic might have a monetizing solution for you. RadioPublic has introduced Paid Listens.

Jake Shapiro is the Co-Founder of RadioPublic. He explained why RadioPublic was introducing Paid Listens in a post on Medium. In short, RadioPublic believes creators should be paid for their efforts. They are building a marketplace and committing themselves to bringing on brands, advertisers, and sponsors that were previously inaccessible to the majority of podcasters.

With Paid Listens, we are changing the equation by guaranteeing payments to podcasters on RadioPublic, whether you have ten listeners or ten thousand.

Here’s how it works: podcasters make ad-free episodes available in their feeds, we place ads on our platform that bookend each episode and we pay participating podcasters for every listen on the RadioPublic apps for iOS and Android at a $20 CPM.

This might be a good opportunity for smaller podcasters who want to make money from their podcast, and who are willing to have RadioPublic place ads at the start and at the end their episodes. RadioPublic says it is fine for podcasters to keep “shout-outs, and obligatory grant-funding or crowdfunding messages” in your podcast. But if there are ads you have sold in a given episode, Radio Public may not count that towards your Paid Listens.

To start, RadioPublic is offering a $20 Paid Listen rate per thousand listens, or an equivalent of a $20 CPM. They acknowledge that the Paid Listens rate could go down or up, and make it clear that it is their goal for it to go up.

When you reach $25 worth of Paid Listens you are eligible for a payout. That amount equals 1,250+ listens on RadioPublic. There is a helpful slider tool at the bottom of the RadioPublic page that you can use to discover how much earnings per year your podcast could make from Paid Listens. If that sounds good to you, it is possible to sign up for Paid Listens on the RadioPublic website.