Running a host-read podcast advertising campaign across dozens of independent shows requires hundreds of back-and-forth emails, compliance reviews, and payment logistics. That operational overhead has historically kept those deals concentrated at the celebrity end of the market. RedCircle was built to automate everything except the part that actually works.

Mike Kadin is the founder and CEO of RedCircle, a Boston-based podcast advertising technology company he launched in 2018. The company now employs 30 people, has processed more than a billion host-read ad insertions, and placed what Mike estimates as tens of thousands of distinct campaigns across thousands of independent podcasts. Its model gives brands a way to deploy host-read campaigns at scale via technology and gives independent podcasters access to direct brand deals that have historically flowed to celebrities and large media companies.

Photo credit: Melissa Ortendahl

Mike joined Uber as one of its first 250 employees and spent nearly five years there, eventually managing a 40-person engineering team building the company’s communications platform. Before that, he taught physics and AP calculus at a Boston-area charter school. Both chapters informed how he thinks about building for users. 

“We’ve always been about getting creators paid,” he says. “We don’t think about the business’s number-one goal as growing our revenue. We think about it as growing their revenue.”

Twenty Emails Per Line Item

The problem RedCircle is tackling announced itself early. When Mike and his co-founder, also a former Uber engineer, began testing the market by running a small number of host-read deals by hand, the friction was immediate.

“There’s definitely a missing piece here for technology to play a role,” he recalls. “Making it possible for these deals to go down without 100 different back-and-forth emails and spreadsheets and PDFs.”

A host-read campaign across dozens of independent shows requires vetting each creator for brand alignment, distributing talking points, collecting and reviewing ad reads, handling exceptions when the wrong promo code gets read, and processing payments when the campaign closes. Each step has historically required a human. Once an advertiser presses send on RedCircle’s platform, the system notifies podcasters, distributes scripts, reviews ad reads using AI, and automates payment at the end. No team is required to manage the pieces.

The transparency runs in both directions. Podcasters see exactly what a brand is offering before they accept, including the dollar amount, the terms, and RedCircle’s cut from the deal. 

“There are services like YouTube, for example, where the cut that they’re taking is not even a published amount,” Mike says. “We’re not trying to exploit podcasters. We’re trying to deliver for them.”

Mic Check and the Scaling Problem

At scale, authentic content produces compliance problems. Across thousands of shows and tens of thousands of campaigns, wrong promo codes get read, talking points get missed, and ad reads wander off-brief. The traditional fix, having a person listen to every read, does not scale. RedCircle’s answer is Mic Check, an AI layer that reviews every host-read ad before it airs. The system scores each read from 0 to 100 on alignment, creativity, and compliance, checking whether the talking points provided match what was actually recorded, flagging incorrect promotional codes, off-brand language, and other compliance problems before the ad runs.

“The AI said they did this correctly,” Mike explains, describing how the tool shifts conversations with brands about re-records. “If you want to ask them to record again, we can, but I don’t think they’re going to be required to. We’re in the middle here, trying to service both sides.”

Mic Check does not evaluate tone or enthusiasm. That judgment still goes to a human. What it eliminates is the compliance listening burden across dozens of simultaneous campaigns. The goal is not to replace what the creator does but to protect it. “We keep the human in the loop for the thing that’s most important,” Mike says. “For the creative parts, for the relationship pieces.”

Where the Leverage Sits

RedCircle has always included a podcast hosting product. For years, that hosting was also a requirement: shows had to use RedCircle’s infrastructure to access its advertising platform. A product called OpenRAP changed the logic.

OpenRAP uses VAST integrations to allow podcasters on other hosting platforms to plug directly into RedCircle’s advertising demand without moving their shows. The reasoning, Mike explains, is that podcast hosting was always incidental to the company’s actual purpose. “Hosting for us has always been a means to an end,” he says. “Being a podcast host, it meant we could do the ad stitching and provide the reporting.”

Once RedCircle built enough infrastructure to replicate that automation for externally hosted shows, the case for requiring migration weakened. The leverage was not in the hosting layer. It was in years of accumulated tooling for managing the complexity of host-read advertising at scale.

“We’ve built a lot of wisdom about how to make these deals work,” Mike says. “That is the core of what we offer, not the fact that it’s integrated into our hosting.”

The podcasting ecosystem’s technological fragmentation, which Mike initially underestimated, has since become a structural advantage. Thirty to forty hosting companies operate independently. “The complexity means no one system is in charge,” Mike says. “That means no one player can kind of take over.”

Podcasting’s Fat Torso

Conventional Creator Economy analysis assumes a long tail: a few at the top earning meaningfully, and most earning almost nothing. Podcasting, Mike argues, has a different shape.

Because podcast listeners tend to have higher household incomes and greater educational attainment than audiences on most other platforms, advertisers pay more to reach them. High CPMs combined with high engagement create what Mike calls a “fat torso,” a substantial middle tier where independent podcasters can earn more than comparable audiences in other media.

“The amount of revenue that can be earned by one podcaster in that middle area is a lot higher than I think is possible in other media,” he says. “Because the CPMs are high, the engagement is high, and the audience is attractive to advertisers.”

The highest earners on RedCircle share a consistent pattern. Content quality comes first. Advertising gets framed as a service to the audience rather than an interruption. The most successful podcasters also maintain multiple touchpoints beyond the feed itself. Newsletters, strong social presence, and in some cases their own apps create additional opportunities for brand referrals. 

“You don’t make the most money on a podcast by focusing on how to make money on a podcast,” Mike says. “You make the most money by producing extremely high-quality, engaging content that your listeners cannot live without.”

The Performance Channel Brands Keep Overlooking

RedCircle’s forward path involves two parallel bets: what counts as a podcast will keep changing, and brands will eventually update how they measure the channel.

On the first, Mike is direct. Younger audiences often associate podcasting with YouTube videos, not RSS feeds. Social presence and video are increasingly part of what it means to distribute as a podcaster. “We’re going to continue to expand,” he says, “from a host-read audio advertising company to a creator monetization company, wherever podcasts are consumed.”

On the second, Mike argues that podcast advertising has been misclassified as a brand awareness channel long after the measurement tools changed. Attribution in podcasting has advanced enough to assign listener behavior to household-level purchase data and measure incrementality, putting it alongside connected TV in terms of performance accountability.

“There are enough strong signals, grounded in not magical math, that will show you the spend you’re putting in is ending up on your business’s bottom line,” he says. “You can treat it as a performance channel.”

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