If you’re a regular tech reader and keep up with the news in general, you’ve likely heard of PumaPodcast, one of the brightest rising stars of Philippine online news and podcasting. Going five years strong, it’s holding fast against the rough weather of our current media climate. If you haven’t, though, then we’re here to get you acquainted.
We spoke briefly to PumaPodcast CEO Carljoe Javier for a candid recap of where PumaPodcast has been, what it’s up to now, and why it does what it does.
[This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.]
Please tell us about the prevailing spirit of PumaPodcast, now that it’s half a decade old.
The vision for PumaPodcast is building a world that listens. The mission is to spread the joy, power, and value that is in listening. It’s about building conversations in an increasingly fractured world. We have this sense that maybe, if we can have a place to listen to each other, we can make the world better. Even though we started out with podcasting, we’ve expanded into other things that are adjacent to it, to ideally build more discourse.
What are PumaPodcast’s memorable milestones so far?
I think it’s noteworthy that we have survived. The typical startup is dead at three years, and now we’re at five. It doesn’t mean we’re purely sustainable, but we are surviving in a brutal, harsh, disappearing media landscape. As a small startup in a small market, it took us almost four years to get to one million listeners. And then it took us another year to get to two million.
In the early days, between year one and year two, we received the Human Rights Press Award. And then, if I’m not mistaken, we were the first podcast to win an Anvil [Award]. After that, our milestones were really about getting to work with brands and doing important work while being able to survive in an awful environment.
Let’s explore that a bit more. What are your thoughts on the disappearing media landscape you mentioned earlier, and PumaPodcast’s place in it?
It’s collapsing on all sides. To survive, either you have to have the brand power and resources of something like the New York Times or you have to be super small. And I don’t know where we fit. We’re somewhere on the smaller side, so it’d be nice to have resources. But I do think even the bigger media companies need to rethink how they’ll wind up positioning themselves.
Last year saw brutal layoffs and the devaluation of entities like BuzzFeed. Pushkin Industries cut 30%, NPR did layoffs, Spotify Podcast did layoffs. Everywhere you look, there’s some kind of closure or layoff or downsizing of the space. But it’s also matched by a sort of advertiser evaporation. The space becomes unstable, and then the advertisers go poof. And that’s when you think about the global context.
Locally, we are only now starting to build real relationships. We’ve worked with some companies, advertisers, for some small sponsorships. But podcast advertising isn’t automatic for a lot of companies. It’s a maybe, an add-on when there’s extra budget. Not in the same way that TV or outdoor or all the traditional advertising spaces are.
Even online, we know that media organizations are getting gutted because the value of an online ad is so low compared to, say, the impact that you would get from advertising with an influencer. Your typical micro-influencer doing a Facebook story or an Instagram reel for you is going to return much higher than doing an advertorial in a website. And that’s just the raw numbers of it on both sides.
The cash is gone. All the cash of the media explosion in the time of BuzzFeed and Facebook is gone. Those are the things to look at. And then, inevitably, in the Philippines, you have the CNN closure, you have ABS-CBN on its back foot because of everything that happened. And in general, TV viewership is also going down.
And then there’s podcasting here. Some people, they listen to Filipino podcasts, and that’s great. And then there are some people who don’t even know that Filipino podcasts exist. They just only listen to the international stuff, the serials, and the daily stuff. And then, you have the people who are aware of podcasts, but they don’t listen. You also have people who have no idea what podcasts are, they just heard the word or maybe they’ll watch something on YouTube, and then they’ll say that that’s a podcast. It’s still a really challenging “Wild West” kind of space.
Let’s talk tech. What’s in PumaPodcast’s toolbox? How have your processes evolved over time?
We used to be super old-school when we started. Honestly, we may have had some people on the team who could splice tape together. We were using Audacity because it was free, and we would record using Zoom microphones. There would be a bunch of people on laptops because we were only doing one thing, which was a daily newscast of four or five news stories every day.
They were working out of a coworking space that was inside a warehouse. If you opened the door, there would be hollow blocks, and random boxes where things were kept. There were no lights there, so they were recording by the light of their phones and laptops. And Roby Alampay would walk in there and record with a Zoom mic. And then, they would have to transfer the file. Very, very old-school kind of thing.
Now, all our software is upgraded. Very crucial. But also, hardware-wise, almost everybody has sort of built a home studio. And it’s kind of amazing how when we started five years ago, Zoom really was our best bet. We had RØDE and Blue Yeti, these other brands in the $100-$300 range to get good audio. There were so many things that were different to get good sound. And now we use PhP2,000 Maono USB mics to straight-in record using stuff like StreamYard and Zencastr.
And then, on the other hand, on the backend of everything, where we can employ and integrate AI, we do. We never put out a product that has been created by AI, but almost everything that we put out now has been enhanced in some way. Doing edits with AI or using transcription software, it’s kind of mind-blowing. It’s about the efficiency that you can build into those systems.
We were part of an AI journalism challenge last year. And that’s basically what we did: find where in the news-making process it makes sense, and then integrate AI there so that you can increase your ability to create news, and then remove anything that doesn’t need to be done by a human. And then give the humans time to then do things that are better done by you.
How would you describe your ongoing journey at the helm of PumaPodcast?
It’s stressful. [laughs]
I never signed up to be at the helm. It was like a battlefield promotion. The thing that content bros who are telling you to be a CEO don’t tell you is that sure, it’s great to have that title, but if you’re actually doing it right, some of the challenges that you decide to carry are really big. There are kinds of decisions that have to be made at the organization level, like hiring and firing.
I still host a few podcasts, but most of my day is not spent making podcasts like I used to. I used to be writing episodes and editing, involved in every step of every kind of thing, and now it’s really a lot of facilitating and decision-making, trying to figure out how to keep the company going.
I want to put the company in a position where it can move from being a startup to a sustainable company. In the Philippine podcasting landscape, there’s a lot of podcast companies, and I think we are unique in our positioning. Our position has always been to build upon journalistic values and have a very clear editorial line. We do take a stand on things, we do publish the news. And for a time, we were the only audio-first news. Other companies would make news, but it would be TV-first and then adapted to audio or articles. But we were the first audio-first news.
We have a very clear sense of those values. And the aspiration, the success point, is to continue to build a company that will hold on to those values but will survive the market. And those are the two things: the values are easy, but they’re also not, right? It’s hard to put up a set of values that people will buy into. It’s also hard to survive a hostile market. Being able to marry those two and sort of believe that there are people who will want to be part of an organization like this.
If we hold these values, there are people who will want to engage with, listen to, and share the kinds of things that we do. And then at its most evolved point, which we’re trying to be in a position for, is there will be a market of sponsorships, corporations, brands, et cetera, who will want to be involved in this kind of very mission-driven, values-driven way.
I want to build all this up so that as a CEO, I can have really good succession. I’m a dude, and there’s way too many dudes running companies. And there’s too many middle-aged men running companies. I don’t think that I am the person who is going to figure out what the solution to journalism is, or how to make things better. There are big, big, big problems. And I’m not the guy who’s going answer those things. My aspiration is to build a machine that can answer those things. And then to place someone who will have the vision to answer those questions.
If you were to compile PumaPodcast’s greatest hits, what would be in it?
The first biggest thing for us was “Tokhang sa Tokhang,” our award-winning show on the drug war, because it’s super important.
Season one was still during the time of Duterte, but we really got to dig in and understand the plight of people. Each episode was a different set of people: the one with mothers who lost husbands or sons, the one about artists and the artistic response, the one of the police and how they were taking all of it. That was really a big step for us and for Philippine podcasting to do something like that.
Next, we collaborated with Philippine Daily Inquirer, hosted by Pam Pastor: we did “Super Evil.” And we did two seasons of that.
Season one was about the Calauan, Laguna murders, and then season two was the Ampatuan massacre. When you say true crime, that’s it. That’s us showing what can be done in true crime here. I think true crime in the Philippines is not committed by a serial killer or a crazy person. It’s always political.
Because those are the serious things, we should also mention the fun stuff. A very fun and recent thing is, we have a show called “5 Minutes Lang.”
It’s like an adulting podcast, a five, six-minute segment where we ask someone who stands as a kuya or ate to explain something to a Gen Z or younger millennial. We’re quite proud of that.
One of the more popular ones that gets recommended is “What’s AP? Araling Panlipunan Rebooted,” which is our history podcast.
It recenters a lot of our history, taking the assumption that the way that we were taught Filipino history was very boring, and then it finds ways to make it fun and interactive and more modern.
Are there any topics or programs that you’d love to do someday?
I’d love to collaborate with global brands. Personally, not specifically for PumaPodcast, my blue-sky dream would be to have a spin-off of Netflix’s Somebody Feed Phil and call it Somebody Feed Carl. For PumaPodcast, though, the kinds of projects that we would want to do, we’ve already been doing some really interesting stuff. My dream for those is for more people to be able to listen to them.
For example, we have a show called “Bago Ang Lahat.” It takes the two ways that you can take “bago ang lahat,” which is “before everything,” and “everything is new.”
We have episodes about people who have changed and shaped Philippine history, but we look at them in their youth. We look at someone like Washington Sycip, whom most people will only know as the park or the firm. But he joined the U.S. Army to be a codebreaker in World War II.
We did one about Jovito Salonga, who was a prayer leader while he was jailed. Before we got to know him as all of these other things, for his political action, he was a small guy leading prayers in jail. It’s a show that shines a light on Filipinos in history, which should be inspiring to young people because we’re showing what these people were like. And they’re just kind of like you.
I think the content is there, and I think we’ve been doing work that we believe in. But the code that needs to be cracked in podcasting is discovery. Because before, the market wasn’t that saturated. When there’s one hit podcast, everyone’s listening to that hit podcast. But now, even if you put in all of the production….
If you think about how big Serial was when it had its moment—and there’s never been another like it, everyone was listening to this thing—I think it’s not so much a challenge of content, but it’s a challenge of us finding audiences and audiences finding us. That’s our big blue-sky dream. It’s not a specific piece of content. It’s really the ability to find audiences and serve them this thing that we know they will enjoy.
What’s the best way to engage with PumaPodcast as listeners and as supporters?
Before, we did a thing called PumaPatak, which was like a buy-us-a-coffee kind of thing. Officially, we can’t take donations because we are for-profit. But basically, you’d be sending money to us so that we can produce more episodes of things that people like. Like I said before about the broken business models, and sort of advertising, that’s exactly a thing there.
I don’t think that 100% listener support is ever going to happen for us anytime soon in the Philippines. That would be a really big audience paying a big amount. Even though telcos have made it much easier to pay for streaming services compared to before, it’s still hard to get people to pay for streaming and it’s hard to get people back into paying for news content.
We grew up used to buying newspapers every day. Why? Because you just had to buy the newspaper to get the news. And when we would watch TV, we were annoyed by the ads, but we knew that that was the cost of watching free TV. But now, there’s this general expectation that stuff is free. I think that’s one of the great challenges that the digital age has given us: we have infinite access to things. But infinite access means that the value of production, and the value of creation, is driven down.
Creative work never really was worth so much money. But it never was worth so little as it does now. And, and even as a news purveyor, if, if I run into a paywall, I get annoyed too. Like, damn, there’s a paywall. Can I just pay for this article? No way. You need to pay for the month. And then what happens is, you forget that you have a subscription. And now I’m looking at all of these things as the barriers we also face to getting us to be sustainable.
If we can get people used to the idea of, “I’m not just contributing to you, but I’m actually paying so that other people who can’t afford to pay can continue to enjoy,” it would be less transactional and more social in nature. We kind of forget that there is a social good being created here.
At the very least, our mission-driven programming, we feel like it needs to be open, needs to be free to people, needs to be high quality. It needs to be trusted. It can’t just be dudes on a mic. We need to fact-check. We need to go through the proper process when we publish something. And that costs money.
That all brings us back to us hoping for two things: One, that people will listen, because the more listeners we have, the more opportunities we have with brands who want to support us. And two, that beyond listening, people become part of our communities, find us on the socials, and find ways to engage. That’s super helpful.
Eventually, when we do little drives to ask for support, getting that financial support for an organization like ours is really important. Especially because we make some things that are popular with some audiences, but we don’t make the things that are the most popular for most audiences. There needs to be space for organizations like us that are doing work like this. And we need to find people who are committed to that idea that organizations like us need to exist.
Wrapping up, what are the upcoming challenges on PumaPodcast’s radar?
There’s a lot of puzzles that we need to be thinking about, like the ethical challenges that have been created by today’s immense tech access. I wind up thinking about that a lot because in a world of infinite information, once all of the current information has been ingested by AI, we’re going to need new information. And we’re going to need to continue to create new stories. If organizations like ours—media, journalism, storytelling—if we cease to exist, what new information then can be generated?
New work must continue to be generated. And for that to happen, there has to be some incentive. All of the money is going into AI, into tech initiatives, tech innovation. But that tech innovation actually is undermining a fair amount of the value creation. If you put a bunch of money into AI, and AI is just scraping the Internet in a way that the people who are producing information won’t benefit from it while the AI companies getting subscriptions scraping will, what are they going to scrape from eventually? I think there has to be some level of the tech space that begins to move more ethically. And begins to acknowledge the ethical ramifications of what a lot of these developments mean. Especially for us, the small newsrooms.
There’s also the level of political capture that can occur because of the vulnerability of news and media organizations. Getting an influencer when you’re doing a campaign for fried chicken is the same process as getting an influencer when you’re doing a campaign for a politician. It’s super easy. And that’s not to undermine influencers. That’s just what this marketplace currently looks like.
For media organizations like us that are trying to build within a pro-democracy space, it’s harder for us to find opportunities and funding. It’s much easier for bad trade actors, politicians, et cetera to capture media in this super-compromise. That’s something I’m thinking about, trying to triangulate the money and the values and the platforms that are all in play. And how tech is really pulling a lot of the revenue away so that there’s very little leverage for a media organization to thrive.
If we allow all of this to die, then what happens?
PumaPodcast and its portfolio of programs are available on all current audio streaming services.
