At 3 p.m. EST each weekday, the moment The Herd goes off the air on Fox Sports television network and across more than 400 local radio stations, Colin Cowherd’s job as one of the most well-known sports talk hosts in the country ends, and he immediately begins working in a role he’s come to enjoy perhaps even more—running his own media company. If the 62-year-old Cowherd is like a franchise quarterback for Fox in the morning, he switches positions to describe his work at The Volume in the afternoon. “This is my NFL general manager job,” he says. “I just own it.”

Because he’s earning NFL quarterback-sized paychecks from Fox Sports and iHeart Media subsidiary Premiere Networks, which produce his show for TV and radio respectively and pay him a combined $16 million per year, according to Forbes estimates, Cowherd has chosen to build his company without taking a salary or a single dollar of outside investment. In this boom time for independent content production companies—in 2020, Spotify paid a reported $250 million for Bill Simmons’ The Ringer and iHeart shelled out $200 million last year to podcast deity Charlamagne Tha God to build out his Black Effect network—it may prove to eventually be a far more lucrative venture.

Since its founding in 2021, Cowherd has built The Volume into a podcast network with 60 employees and 25 shows, from hosts including ex-athletes Richard Sherman and Jeff Teague, rappers Fat Joe and Jadakiss, and hot take artists like Fox Sports’ Nick Wright. The company says it draws more than 15 million podcast downloads and more than 100 million YouTube views per month. Forbes estimates the network brings in around $60 million in revenue each year and at least $10 million in profits, figures that could make the enterprise worth more than $150 million. And while Cowherd is certainly The Volume’s biggest draw, less than a third of company revenue comes from The Herd and The Colin Cowherd Podcast. According to Cowherd, every show in the network is profitable.

“We have a little Moneyball,” he says with a laugh from his home in Chicago, where he relocated last year from Los Angeles. “That sounds a little braggy, but we know what we're looking for and we have a model that works. I don't know what the hit rate is on podcasts for most companies, but for us it's 100%, everything is profitable and I would say, overwhelmingly, we're satisfied—and so is the talent.”

The business incentive for these talent-led networks is simple—create more supply to meet greater demand.........

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