Indie Media Club

The episode contains a handful of concrete operational details (revenue split, content cadence, team structure) but is heavily padded with rambling answers, throat-clearing, and surface-level observations. The density of genuinely novel, non-obvious ideas per minute is low, and the closing lightning round is almost entirely platitude.

“keep your eyes on like revenue per 1000 visits. So fully stack all of the different revenue streams per page. And then, and even on that, on top of that, put a dollar on your opt ins for that page too.”

“I have content that's just like in the, this like purgatory middle and it's just sitting, like that's dollars that's being just opportunity costs.”

The episode largely recycles well-worn indie media advice: diversify off Google, build your email list, know your audience, start with personal experience. The one mildly fresh angle - using commerce platforms as an organic audience acquisition channel - is raised but left underdeveloped.

“other channels of commerce or digital products is very effective... Those are customers that buy from you organically there that become email and can become long term readers”

“you'll get like something you can download off Shutterstock that's ranking Google image search in the top three or whatever. So that part baffles me.”

Kyle Kroeger is a genuine practitioner who built a real publishing business to meaningful scale ($500K+ revenue, 15M visits), which gives him credible operator standing. However, he is a mid-tier indie publisher rather than a high-scale or prominently recognised figure, and his answers reveal some operational gaps (no per-article ROI tracking, no clear persona work).

“in 2023, they rank for over half a million keywords, have more than 15 million visits generating in excess of half a million in revenue”

“As a finance person, you think that I would have that nailed down, but maybe I have some PTSD.”

The episode earns points for several concrete figures - revenue split (66% display / 33% affiliate), content cadence (2 new articles + 1 revamp per day), team size (16 - 18), email as ~10% of traffic, and named tools (Affilimate, MainWP, Make.com). These specifics are genuine and useful, though many discussion threads remain vague and hand-wavy.

“we do have higher skew to display, call it 66%, so two thirds, one third. With two thirds being display, one third being affiliate.”

“We're doing about two new articles a day and one revamp being reformatted back on the site per day... Current team size, 16, 18, I want to say.”

The host shows some genuine curiosity and lands a few sharp follow-ups (asking exactly how the audience survey was administered, pressing on biggest mistakes), but questions are frequently long, compound, and self-answering, giving the guest an easy out. There is no substantive pushback or productive disagreement at any point.

“What did asking them look like? Was that an email or poll? How did you do that?”

“Can you share what your biggest screw up in that process was? Or what would you do differently in 2024”