How TBPN Built the Luxury Brand of the Creator Economy

**Jordi Hayes** (0:00)
Even the biggest creators in the world don't have a big enough audience to just use that audience to create a standalone business.

**John Coogan** (0:06)
We're on track to do like 5,000 host read ads next year.

**Colin** (0:09)
5,000 host read ads, wow.

**John Coogan** (0:11)
20 an episode, 250 episodes a year.

**Colin** (0:14)
I imagine that trades at a pretty high level to be one of those 20 spots. Safe to say that trades in the six to seven figures. Today on The Colin and Samir Show, we're joined by Jordi Hayes and John Coogan of TBPN. So if you haven't heard of TBPN yet, that's kind of by design. First of all, they just started the show about a year ago.

**John Coogan** (0:34)
You're watching TBPN.

**Colin** (0:36)
But second of all, it's designed for a very niche curated audience. TBPN is what I call a luxury brand in the creator economy. It's an extremely high quality audience, very tight knit and very high priced advertising. It's a daily news show that's live for three hours across X, YouTube and Twitch. It's kind of like sports center, but for technology. And because they took this traditional daily news format and brought it to the modern creator economy, they were able to grow really fast and get some pretty hard to get guests on. From Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg, everyone that you can imagine in technology has showed up on TBPN. So in this episode, we talk about how they did that. How did they build such a luxury brand in the creator economy? We also talk about their ad strategy. I truly have never seen anyone approach advertising the way that they do. And it's really impressive. And I think you guys will really enjoy that. So hope you guys enjoy this conversation with John and Jordi from TBPN.
Jordi, John, welcome to the show.

**John Coogan** (1:39)
Thanks for having me.

**Samir** (1:40)
It's weird to say welcome to the show because I know we're on your set.

**John Coogan** (1:43)
Yes.

**Samir** (1:43)
Welcome to the show.

**Jordi Hayes** (1:44)
Home court.

**Colin** (1:45)
Yeah.

**John Coogan** (1:45)
Yes.

**Colin** (1:46)
Explain the show to people who haven't seen it before.

**John Coogan** (1:49)
Three hour live stream daily, 11 a.m. Pacific, weekdays. So 250 shows a year, 750 hours of content.

**Jordi Hayes** (2:01)
Over 1,000 guests a year.

**John Coogan** (2:02)
We typically go long, so almost 1,000 hours of content, which feels incredibly long if you're doing a podcast that drops once a month or once a week. It also feels like we're maybe not as extreme as some of the live streamers that you've probably interviewed, where they're streaming eight hours a day. So we sort of fit into a little bit of the legacy TV mold, where a sports center, a Pat McAfee show, a Squawk box, something on CNBC, might fit a three hour daily live segment. And we just kind of stumbled into that, but we do a lot of interviews, and we also just talk about the news between us. We go back and forth, and the show's very focused on technology and business. And so we talk about those topics and go back and forth, and then hopefully have guests join us to add more context to whatever the news is of the day.

**Jordi Hayes** (2:56)
Yeah, so you can think of it as 90 minutes of us just talking, going back and forth on the stories that are most interesting to us, and then 90 minutes of guests.
And it's very much, I mean, it's live, obviously. A lot of tech content historically has been recorded in podcast format, and so it's lagging by a week or two weeks or at least a couple of days, and our industry moves really quickly. And so we were one of the first shows to put out a super high volume of content that was like right at the present, basically. And yeah, I would say from, there's a lot of interview shows out there. We do interviews, but we view them much more as conversations around what's happening in various industries, what's happening in the news broadly. And I think that's resonated a lot.

**John Coogan** (3:43)
The show is also fairly niche. It's, I say tech and business. The show TBPN stands for Technology Business Programming Network. Is that what it stands for?

**Samir** (3:52)
It was Technology Brothers.

**John Coogan** (3:53)
No, we had a precursor show that was called Technology Brothers, this play on the tech bro meme.

**Jordi Hayes** (4:00)
We were trying to reclaim the tech bro, the technology brothers. The issue is that everyone would just abbreviate it when they were introducing us. So the show we started as a weekly show was kind of like commentary reaction show where we would have a printed out stack of posts from the internet and we would just shuffle through them and read them and talk about them. And even though our audience was small early on, we realized that there was a lot of people that were our friends that were listening to every episode and we decided to take it a lot more seriously. But the issue was people would introduce us as, hey, it's John and Jordi, the tech bros. So the whole thing that we were trying to reclaim as like, we're not tech bros, we're technology brothers.