John McDermott and his creative partner spent 2023 building podcasts that run under 10 minutes, right as the rest of the industry pushed toward hour-long video. Three years later, he says the format makes them a living.

John co-founded Caloroga Shark Media in October 2023 with Mark Francis, running the company out of the New York City metropolitan area. The two split creative duties: John hosts “Daily Comedy News” and “5 Good News Stories” and writes for “Palace Intrigue,” the company’s flagship show about the British royal family, while Francis produces and voices it. Together, they built a catalog of daily and near-daily audio shows aimed at listeners who want a fast update, not a long sit.

John spent a decade at WOR-AM in New York before a decade running comedy and entertainment programming at SiriusXM, then four years as EVP of programming at Cadence13, where he managed relationships with Crooked Media and Pushkin Industries. That background shaped his read on what keeps an audience listening. “Audio at its best is about community,” he says. “The host might be the hero of the people, as Howard Stern in his heyday was that type of thing.”

That community-first instinct is also why John resists a fixed runtime, a habit that defines how Caloroga Shark Media builds its daily shows.

The Runtime Follows the News Volume, Not a Formula

“Daily Comedy News” usually lands around 12 minutes, John says, because there is rarely enough comedy news to fill more. “There’s not an hour of comedy news every day,” he explains. Some days run long. When they do, he pushes stories to the next episode rather than padding the runtime.

John applies the same logic to slow news days, which he calls “low rent days” internally. A holiday weekend Friday will draw fewer listeners regardless of effort, so he adjusts expectations rather than the show’s quality. “It’s not that you don’t try or you don’t hand in a good show, but maybe that’s not the day you hand in your best show,” he says.

The Subscription Price Reflects Apple’s Cut, Not a Market Study

Caloroga Shark Media earns programmatic ad revenue through its hosting platform, Spreaker, and sells an ad-free tier called “Caloroga Plus” for $5 a month through Apple Podcasts. John arrived at that number by working backward from Apple’s revenue split. “$8 sounds too much. $3, once Apple takes its 30% cut, isn’t enough,” he says.

The company also runs a Substack newsletter tied to its royal family coverage, which John says performs better than he expected, and cross-promotes other shows through podcast-to-podcast ad swaps. He describes the combination, not any single line item, as what adds up to a sustainable income.

Ad Reads Are Screened by Personal Belief, Not Client Budget

John draws a line between reads he can deliver as fact and reads that require him to vouch personally. “You never make a host read anything that they don’t believe in,” he says. A factual mention of a coffee price is one thing; claiming daily patronage he does not practice is another.

He applies the same test to categories he is neutral on rather than opposed to. “I live clean. I don’t vape. Other people vape. I don’t care if you vape,” he says, describing his willingness to read a factual vaping ad without personally endorsing the habit. 

He has turned down at least one ad over a personal belief conflict, though he declined to name the advertiser or topic on the record.

AI Narration Fills a Voice Gap, Not a Staffing Cut

Caloroga Shark Media’s narrative shows, including “White Smoke,” a real-time series built around a papal succession, and the alternate-history series “The Man Who Lived,” imagining John F. Kennedy survived Dallas, use AI-generated narration. Neither founder’s voice fit the material, John says: his accent reads as New York City, Francis’s as Australian. The company discloses the practice on air.

He credits a conversation with James Cridland, who writes the Podnews newsletter, for how he now frames the disclosure, comparing it to electric drums on a 1980s rock record. The company has since pulled back from AI-narrated topical shows as competitors flooded that niche, John says, calling it “uncool” territory once other players moved in. He is careful to distinguish the practice from job elimination. “When we use AI, we didn’t lay anyone off. It’s not like we fired Freddy and started using an AI. There was no Freddy,” he says.

The company also operates Podbotz, a self-serve tool that helps non-creators plan and build their own shows. John frames it as separate from Caloroga’s scripted lineup and says the company would police misuse. “We don’t anticipate, nor do we see anyone using it to make thousands of hours of AI slop. We’d probably take it down if it were being used for that,” he says.

John Separates Podcasting Into Three Lanes by Cost, Not Prestige

John argues the term “podcasting” has narrowed to mean something specific in 2026. “We have somehow in 2026 allowed podcasting to mean CAA-represented celebrities interviewing other CAA-represented celebrities on Netflix,” he says.

He sorts the format into three lanes: celebrity interview shows built for streaming deals, YouTube video podcasts chasing algorithmic reach, and lean audio shows built for cost efficiency. By his own rough math, a YouTube podcast needs about a million views to generate $5,000 in a month, or roughly $60,000 a year before taxes if sustained every month. “I have found the most effective combination of time, money, humans is just put out audio podcasts,” he says.

He does not view solo creators as a threat to that model. “I like the word colleagues there. I’ve really gotten comfortable staying in my own lane,” he says, drawing a distinction between his daily audio output and video-first shows built around bigger names and production teams.

A YouTube Tool Could Reshuffle Who Wins, Not Who Works

John says he left a YouTube presentation at Podcast Show London optimistic about upcoming AI visualization tools for audio-first shows, which he hopes could lift shows like his in a video-favoring algorithm without requiring a full production team.

He is less certain about the effect on jobs further down the production chain. Caloroga Shark Media did not hire a dedicated cover art designer, a role John says used to support a full-time salary, opting instead for AI tools and Canva. He expects marquee, celebrity-driven shows to keep their production teams intact, but sees more exposure for supporting roles on mid-tier shows, including video editing.

On what he wants the word “podcast” to mean in a decade, John does not offer a prediction. “I can’t even tell you 10 minutes from now what podcasting is,” he says. “We’ll see.”

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