'Crime Junkie' creator and co-host Ashley Flowers on creating a community of listeners

Ashley Flowers, creator and co-host of ‘Crime Junkie’, Founder & CEO of audiochuck, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss her hit podcast and how COVID-19 impacted listener numbers.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Let's talk podcast wars, because the competition is heating up. There's so much content out there. But our next guest has certainly found a way to stand out from the crowd. She currently has 33 million monthly listeners. For more on that, we want to bring in Ashley Flowers. She's the creator and co-host of "Crime Junkie," also the founder and CEO of audiochuck.

Ashley, great to have you on the program. You tell very compelling stories. You have millions of followers, like I just listed there. I've listened to a number of your episodes. Just talk to me about your ability and how you've been able to really stand out in a crowded space, and what you think makes your podcast so compelling and so successful.

ASHLEY FLOWERS: You know, I think it was really, like, what we decided to do when we formatted the show. There's this beautiful thing about podcasting. It's a special medium where you feel like you are connected to your co-host or to the host that you're hearing. And we really format it in a way that I'm telling the story, and I have my co-host, Brit, on the show. But Brit is really meant to be every person who's sitting in their car who's asking the same questions.

And I think that's what made our podcast stand out, is without being able to have that back and forth and interact with them, we gave them a way to feel like they were part of the conversation. And we picked a genre that we were really passionate about. And I think what makes us stand out is that in a space where there's a lot of true crime, really, our focus is advocacy. It always has been, always will be, and I think that resonates with our listeners.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Ashley, I was looking in your bio. You're from South Bend. I did time many decades ago in Mishawaka, old WSJV.

ASHLEY FLOWERS: Oh yeah.

ADAM SHAPIRO: [LAUGHS] I got a Studebaker poster over here. That's beside the point. Where do you find the stories? Because I'm the generation-- the true crime magazines were hot and heavy back in the days of newsstand. So where do you find the stories?

ASHLEY FLOWERS: You know, when we started, it really was out of a passion that I had. So I had been a prime junkie for 30 years. And what stories stuck out to me? What stories was I hearing about? What stories needed to be covered? And those were resonating with our listeners, too. But now that we have such a large listener base, most of our cases are coming from them directly. We have a case suggestion form online that gets tens of thousands of suggestions per month.

SEANA SMITH: Ashley, talk to me about the partnerships, because you have a number of podcasts. I know you partnered with Parcast, which is owned by Spotify. But when you decide to go into partnerships with some of these larger companies, walk us through that decision process, and I guess, where you see that maybe eventually going moving forward.

ASHLEY FLOWERS: Well, right now, I mean, there's very clean lines. So, you know, I'm in a weird spot that not a lot of people are, where I'm Ashley Flowers, the owner and CEO of audiochuck chat that runs that. And then I'm Ashley Flowers, the talent and the host. And my partnership with Parcast and Spotify is just as talent and host. So it's a very clean line.

We're not in talks to do anything bigger at the moment. I like being independent. But when I'm really looking at like partnering with other people, whether it's as a host or in a different capacity, I want to have good partnerships with a lot of people in the space. I mean, there are some big moves being made right now. The area is, like, consolidating. These bigger companies are kind of gobbling everyone up.

And, really, the space that I'm in now is I kind of want to have, like, some projects with everyone and kind of be spread across the board, because I think where we're moving to is everything is going to get more and more consolidated. It's turning more and more into what traditional TV looked like back in the day.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Any chance that-- I mean, you're clearly successful with the 33 million monthly listeners, and the total downloads, and over 500 million, as Seana was pointing out. But would you take it to TV? I mean, the scale, in combination with linear broadcast or even 5G delivery over apps, but video side would be huge, wouldn't it?

ASHLEY FLOWERS: It would. And I don't know "Crime Junkie" specifically if that's on the road map for us. You know, we've had a lot of conversations about that. But I haven't found a way to translate the magic of what we do in audio to television. And I like to be very thoughtful about everything we do. I don't want to do it just to do it. So until I find the way to translate it, I don't know that we would bring "Crime Junkie" to TV. That being said, we are working on potentially a number of TV projects in other spaces. I'm full of ideas, and we have a lot of other IP in our network that I think is right for television.

SEANA SMITH: Ashley, I assume the pandemic probably boosted your numbers a little bit. We talked about that time and time again here at Yahoo Finance, just the impact it's had on the podcast space in general. I'm curious just in terms of the uptick that you saw in some of your episodes during the pandemic.

ASHLEY FLOWERS: It honestly actually was the reverse, which I think surprises a lot of people. So initially, the pandemic, we saw a downturn like a lot of podcasts did, because I think people were stuck at home. So they went to streaming things that they could visualize until we all, like, went through Netflix and destroyed everything.

And it took a while, honestly probably about six months, to get our numbers back up to where they were before the pandemic started. And since then, we've been slowly building again and back on to our exponential climb, and finding new listeners. But I think it took the people a while to get back to their normal routines, which included podcasting. And many people were listening during their commutes, which really still aren't a thing.

SEANA SMITH: Ashley Flowers, great to speak with you, creator and co-host of "Crime Junkie,", also founder and CEO of audiochuck. We, of course, wish you all the best.