Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Loinger. On last week's show,

we aired an interview that I did with David Pacman, the liberal YouTuber who has over 3 million subscribers.

I had wanted to talk to him to get a sense of what he thinks Democratic lawmakers and content

creators could be doing differently online to reach more people

in a media universe dominated by right-wing voices. This is the extended version of that conversation,

with a bunch of stuff that we couldn't fit in the radio show added back in. To kick it off,

I asked him how he got his start in this business.

Well, I started interestingly in community radio and then started self-sindicating my show to a bunch of other radio stations.

Later came the online platforms, so the audio podcast, the YouTube channel, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

And then in August of last year, I made the decision

that we were no longer going to provide the show to broadcast affiliates, television, and

radio simply because that's not where our audience was. It became a lot of work at our expense

for a diminishing audience. And so we made the call right now our audiences on

these online platforms. You know, we combine about 250 million views a month on those platforms.

That's really where we need to focus. And we became sort of online first in August of 24.

In terms of what has helped you build an audience on YouTube, when did you

figure out that you had something that had legs? Was there a kind of light bulb over the head

moment? There's no day where it was like, now we've got an audience. Then I'm sort of joking,

but I just do this every day. And so if the audience

grows a little bit every month, it feels like you're sort of doing the same thing every day.

I think when the show made its first dollar was a big step. And I mean, first employee, first

real bona fide W2 employee was probably around 2012 or 2013.

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