When we first launched Morning Brew Daily Show in February 2023, our goal was to bring the unique voice of Morning Brew’s flagship newsletter to life in an audioformat. Covering the latest need-to-know news with wit, friendly banter, and a healthy dose of hot takes, hosts Neal Freyman and Toby Howell make business content humorously informative and approachable across both their podcast and social channels. In our first full year of existence in 2024, we wanted to move beyond our podcasting roots and transform the show into a multimedia news destination that meets young audiences wherever they are.
Growing the podcast by delivering high-quality business coverage that keeps audiences coming back for more sat at the core of our strategy – we want to be a key part of our audience’s morning routine. However, we also saw ample room to expand into new, non-traditional distribution platforms and reach social audiences looking for bite-sized, reliable news coverage as they scroll their feeds.
Producing a daily news show is a nonstop grind. Our team researches stories each night in order to record episodes early each weekday morning, in time for daily commutes across the U.S. As a business news show, our priority is bringing our listeners all the news they need to start their day, through a business lens – even when we’re covering topics like the 2024 presidential election, we keep our focus on the ways major world events impact the business world. Our October 18 episode, for example, featured a dive into the documented economic impact of different kinds of tariffs and reactions from economists to tariff proposals from the Trump campaign. While our coverage touched on positions held by the Trump and Harris presidential campaigns, the bulk of the story focused on the way tariffs impacted consumer buying power and specific industries. The episode featured the kind of coverage our audience seeks from us, and became one of our top performers of the year, with over 120K downloads. We strategically supplement our daily news coverage with interviews with business leaders our audience wants to hear from, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Uber CEO Dara Kosrowshahi, and WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert.
We aim to meet our audience wherever they are – and for us, that meant significantly expanding our distribution in 2024. In addition to all major podcast platforms, we distribute our show on creator streaming platform Nebula, Yahoo! Finance OTT/CTV networks, and X. We recently launched a partnership with Octopus, a platform providing in-car entertainment for rideshare services, bringing our brand of business news to rideshare passengers across the U.S.
Our work doesn’t stop there, though – our winning social strategy involves creating custom content based on news stories from each day’s episode, edited into compelling, fast-paced social video. Not only does this help us build our podcast’s brand – it helps us deliver news to Gen Z audience who may get some or all of their news from social.
We continue to find ways to innovate and connect with our audience, from an IRL trivia night we hosted in October to piloting new, YouTube-exclusive content formats. We aim to connect directly with our listeners, replying to emails, sharing photos of fans dressed as Neal and Toby for Halloween, and factoring listener feedback into our development process. We believe in pushing beyond the traditional boundaries of what a podcast can be, creating a truly modern news brand built for today’s media landscape.
Downloads increased 77% year-over-year, growing to over 28M downloads in 2024. Our social videos have driven a whopping 251 million views across platforms in 2024, and our social following grew 73% this year, with over 195K followers across platforms. Our podcast audience is primarily made up of Gen Z and Millennial listeners – 73% of our audience falls in the 18-44 demo. Not only have we grown our reach across platforms, we’re reaching the exact audience we set out to reach, and continue to see positive traction heading into 2025. We’re using what we’ve learned from an incredibly successful year to build winning growth strategies for the year ahead – continuing to expand our video footprint, deliver our signature audio product, and find new ways to build community with our most dedicated fans, both on and offline.
