Alexandra Cooper, the $60M/3 year host of the Call Her Daddy Podcast

Welcome to Creator’s Digest! This article was supposed to be sent out over this past weekend but I took a mental health day break for myself over the weekend.

Anyway, expect two articles today: this one in the morning and the usual Wednesday Creator news roundup later in the day.

Anyway, let’s just jump into it.

Meet Alexandra Cooper, the 26 year old host of the massively popular podcast Call Her Daddy. Cooper goes by “Father Cooper” sometimes in reference to her podcast and audience. She is the host of one of the biggest podcasts in the world and just signed a $60M/3 year deal with Spotify.

Let’s take a look at how it all started and how we got here.

Humble Beginnings

Alex Cooper was born in August 1994. She grew up in Newtown, Pennsylvania where she attended Pennington High School and was co-captain of the women’s soccer team her senior year. Cooper was a great athlete and a soccer star. She earned All-Prep First Team honors junior and senior year.

After high school, she signed early to take her talents to Boston University enrolling as a Film & Television major and playing soccer as a D1 athlete for the Boston University Terriers women’s team. She was a great player on a team of great players but no longer making her the star of the team. In her freshman year, she appeared in 8 out of 19 games, and in 2014, she played 21 out of 21 games, moving up the ranks to making the starting roster in 2015 and scoring a game-tying goal against St. John’s in the NCAA first round match.

Graduating from Boston University

Her major in Film & TV would be her first foray into the media business and was also her first experience at editing. She attended BU from 2013-2016 graduating and entering the workforce. Upon graduating in 2016, she joined Dirty Water Media as an on-air news anchor. Dirty Water is known as “Greater Boston's most in-depth source for what's happening, trending, and being talked about in the New England nightlife, dining, music, fashion, entertainment, and sports scene.” She stayed local and learned how to tell stories, produce, edit and story tell at Dirty Water Media.

After Dirty Water, she worked at another publication before deciding to become a content creator in 2018. Her first YouTube video is actually a vlog of a cross-country trip to Beverly Hills, Los Angeles with her then best friend Sofia Franklyn. This is before their podcast. It has the same chaotic energy that makes Alex Cooper, Alex Cooper but it’s in a vlog format.

You can tell from the editing that she has a knack for being able to hold the viewer’s attention. This was the vlogging hey days when every major YouTuber was vlogging including Logan Paul, Casey Neistat and family vlogger Roman Atwood.

From this self-titled channel, you can see her style start to evolve. After a few months, she would join Barstool and start to become the Alex Cooper she is today.

Joining Barstool Sports

In early 2018, Cooper and Franklyn went on vacation in Texas and after having a talk about sex & dating, the idea of the podcast was born. The idea was for them to talk about their own lives and open it up to the world to see if others had similar struggles. Their main intent was to be raw, authentic to themselves and unfiltered. Something that many podcasts, especially female-led podcasts were not at the time. Many female-led podcasts would stray from talking about these topics considering them taboo or not family safe.

They quickly pitched the idea around and then once they started working at Barstool Sports in mid 2018, they pitched the idea to Dave Portnoy, the face of the organization.

At the time, both Cooper & Franklyn were working on a variety of Barstool projects and earning a reported base salary of $75,000/year plus bonuses for their work on various Barstool programs. Portnoy liked the idea and the first episode entitled “Sext me so I know it’s Real” of Call Her Daddy was released on October 3rd, 2018.

Starting Call Her Daddy with Sofia Franklyn

Their content was brilliant, it has proper Content-Market-Fit (CMF). That’s very similar to product market fit in the tech scene but the main difference is the content.

Does your content have a returning/recurring audience? Yes

Does your content have a way of selling items or making money? Yes

Do you enjoy making your content and can you deliver it consistently? Yes

If yes to all three, congratulations you have content market fit. CMF for short is basically the sweet spot for what makes content work and creators should seek to find their CMF so they can find out what differentiates them from the rest of the market.

For Alex & Sofia of the Call Her Daddy podcast, their main differentiator was their unadulterated topics, their candid conversations and great guests.

Their fanbase grew and was aptly called the Daddy Gang and the podcast climbed the ranks fast. By April 2020, they had amassed millions of listeners, reached the top 5 list on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and at one point were the largest female led podcast out there. With their newfound popularity and their own personal brands growing off of the podcast, they went to Portnoy and Barstool to broker a deal. They wanted more of the IP they were producing and wanted a salary raise for the amount of traffic they were bringing Barstool Sports.

Their talk with Portnoy lasted a few days and eventually while discussions are taking place Sofia & Alex take a break from the podcast to see if they can get what they’re asking for.

In the most recent episode of Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper talks about her days before working at Barstool where she worked for a media firm owned by Harvey Weinstein. She was meeting with Weinstein’s right hand man for a business dinner, mainly to talk about the idea of the podcast and what she could bring to the table.

She explains a harrowing story at the 10 minute mark of the episode: “The man’s idea of a business dinner was to take me to Catch (a restaurant) on a Friday night and then taking me to Harvey’s office at 10PM at night. Top floor, lights off, business meeting is just the two of them in an empty office. They get in the elevator and while they’re going to the top floor, the elevator stops on the 10th floor, a female employee had forgotten her laptop and had come back to get it. I latched onto her and started asking her about her day, anything to get myself out of this situation with a guy who clearly had ill intentions.”

Later in the podcast, she talks about the same person threatening her when she mentioned she wanted to pitch the idea to Barstool. “If you pick Barstool over me, I will make sure you never work another day in this industry and yes Alex, that’s a threat.”

Towards the end she talks highly of her first time meeting people at the Barstool office: “CEO woman, CFO woman, intern woman, it was the complete opposite of the Weinstein office”. She would eventually start at Barstool a few months after interviewing.

A Messy Breakup

In May 2020, Dave Portnoy drops a tell-all podcast on the Call Her Daddy page that bad mouths the girls and says he’s “never dealt with anyone as unprofessional and disloyal and greedy as Sofia & Alex”. Drama ensues….obviously. Portnoy also outlines that he had given them a very generous deal of $500K a year plus bonuses to bring the podcast back. He even adds that Barstool is now losing money on the podcast (mostly from paying staff, merch, other revenue streams and miscellaneous upkeep jobs) to the tune of $100K per episode that is not dropped.

At the time, Sophia is dating a man named Peter Nelson who is referred to as “Suitman”. He works at HBO and is reportedly also trying to get the two podcast hosts to sign a lucrative deal with them getting them away from Barstool. Alex doesn’t know that Peter wants the podcast, but Sofia does. The rest of the drama continues below, here’s an excerpt from Cosmopolitan: (I never thought I’d read this magazine, but here we are).

Then, while this fight is occuring, Alex reportedly meets with Dave privately and talks about a deal about Call Her Daddy without Sofia around. And Sofia is under the impression that the podcast will go to Wondery. This starts a heated argument and feud that lasts a few weeks. In late May, the dust settles and the parties separate.

Alex gets Call Her Daddy solo and stays with Barstool. Sofia ends up getting cut out of the deal and leaves the podcast to eventually start her own podcast called Sofia with an F.

In May 2020, a video drops with more tea where reportedly Sofia wanted $1M each as a part of renegotiating their existing three year deal and Portnoy wouldn’t budge, getting vulgar whenever compromise numbers were mentioned. Alex Cooper tells more BTS hot goss (is that what the kids call it these days?) below:

Now there’s some more details I’m skipping here for the sake of brevity of this email but if you want more tea behind the messy breakup, the suitman, Portnoy and more, read more about it here.

After the Dust Settles

Once the dust settles, Alex Cooper gets the Call Her Daddy podcast, she is still signed to Barstool Sports and is given a pretty good raise and deal to own the IP and continue doing the podcast solo, so naturally she does. Call Her Daddy returns after the hiatus where she now refers to herself as Father Cooper, inline with the brand and laying the foundation for mass scale of fans. Alex continues doing the podcast under the Barstool name and the podcast grows - it’s still in the top 1% of its category and has a massive fanbase.

Branching Out

It’s unclear exactly when the Call Her Daddy girls launched a merchandise store under the Barstool Sports umbrella but they did. The merchandise offered listeners an actual thing to purchase and of course support the show in exchange for a hoodie, apparel and more. Furthermore, the content started changing slightly. As a solo host, Cooper could only fill the time so often with just her voice, so she started having guests and doubled down on making video content on YouTube. The YouTube channel would obviously offer a visual component to the podcast that was not there before. You could see the girls facial expressions, some of the behind the scenes content when recording and of course have a secondary consumption arm when it came to people that watch podcast videos in the background while they’re doing other things.

Their guest list included: Mia Khalifa, Lana Rhoades, Logan Paul and more.

Father Cooper as she is now known was just getting started when it came to making the podcast bigger and bigger. She would eventually take Call Her Daddy to new heights in early 2021. In early 2021, the Call Her Daddy podcast became the most listened to podcast in its category for almost two weeks and was one of the most recognizable podcasts worldwide. It’s unadulterated gilmpse into a mid 20s year old life as a young woman was different than any other podcast. Coupled with video on YouTube and drama left, right and center (it’s Barstool after all), Cooper set her sights on something bigger. Being the main owner of the IP, the growth and the editing arm of the podcast, Cooper started shopping the podcast around and then found a buyer: Spotify.

Finding a new home with Spotify

For as much drama as there was, this was probably the least dramatic part. In early June 2021, Alex Cooper signed a reported $60M/3 year deal to be exclusive with Spotify. She would remain the sole host and retain all the IP. Barstool would get 50% of the merchandise that is sold through their store anyway and in all honesty, it’s not as messy of a breakup as the one between Sofia & Alex.

The Spotify exclusive deal comes with a few things:

1. Existing and new episodes of Spotify will switch exclusively over to Spotify on July 21st. Cooper and Spotify will co-produce the podcast

2. Cooper and Spotify to co-create other projects

3. Barstool Sports or Barstool is not involved in the deal

A Win-Win

This is a win-win for Father Cooper and Spotify. She gets a massive payday, the only other person who probably has a similar if not a bit larger payday is Joe Rogan who’s Joe Rogan Experience also signed with Spotify for a reported $100M for an undisclosed term limit. At the same time, Rogan has over a decade of episodes and content while Cooper has been doing this for a little over 2 years.

Second, it’s a win for podcasting. Spotify is spending big on podcasting having spent almost $1B dollars in 2019 and 2020 collectively on the space. Now signing two huge creators with vastly different audiences makes complete sense. For any platform, they want the three C’s to be successful: Content, Community and Creators. If you can port someone’s content by signing a creator, their community will follow. That is exactly the case with the Daddy gang and Cooper’s switch to Spotify.

All in all, its the 2nd highest contract for a creator by Spotify (only behind Rogan) and the first female led podcast, creator business that signed a very lucrative deal all while giving the creator (Alex) creative control.

Takeaways

Creators are demanding money that rivals NBA contracts and professional athletes. In some creator cases, their audiences are larger than a single NBA player of relative anonymity. In short, brands want to work with a creator rather an athlete, because they may get more reach.

Furthermore, Cooper is the prime example of “put something great out and watch your life change as you give everything to it.” At a young age, she wanted to be an entertainer, she just didn’t know if it was going to be on the soccer pitch or elsewhere. It turned out to be in the podcasting space and she doesn’t have to travel for games or wear cleats etc.

Lastly, this is only the beginning for Spotify. They’re uniquely positioned to verticalize the whole audio space. Last week I talked about Spotify’s launch of green room. They are going for the three C’s full steam ahead. They have great content that can be streamed, binged easily, a fantastic community called Daddy Gang and creators like Alex Cooper and Joe Rogan as well as other smaller creators. The future is bright and with creators growing across the board in terms of audio, video, editing and storytelling, the demand and payouts are only going to get higher for the top 1% of creators like Alex Cooper.

She got the freaking bag from Spotify and now only time can tell where she’ll take this.

Twitter Challenge

Lastly, I could use your help.

I’m in a Twitter challenge with another newsletter, so if you could follow me on Twitter, that’d be great. I’m trying to get to 500 followers before the other newsletter.

Wrap up

If you read this far, reply back with your favorite dessert. Mine is tiramisu.

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