Voiceover Industry

This week I had the chance to chat with Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley, two excellent voice actors who host one of the industry’s hottest podcasts, The VO Meter. As a podcaster myself and a big fan of The VO Meter, it was great to get a behind-the-scenes look at what makes The VO Meter so successful.

Here’s what Paul had to say about the podcast.

I’m thrilled to announce that This Week in VO with J. Michael Collins is bringing Graeme Spicer onto the team with an industry-first weekly news segment within the podcast.

Starting with Episode 23, which will be released this week, Graeme will bring a short roundup of the latest happenings in the world of professional voiceover, covering all aspects of our industry. Keep up to date on the stories that are making headlines in our community with this concise weekly digest, brought to you by one of our industry’s most trusted talent journalists.

Also, in the interest of ensuring that This Week in VO is in fact a weekly podcast, Graeme will fill in for me from time to time as host, stepping in when my travels or work schedule makes it impossible to host a segment that week.

More About Graeme Spicer

Graeme Spicer is not just a successful voice actor with more than two decades of experience, he is also one of the industry’s most respected moderators, interviewers, and investigators. Graeme has made his name synonymous with ethics and integrity, holding the powerful in our industry accountable and exposing abuses among those who profit from the work we do. Graeme is a frequent leader or speaker on conference and webinar panels about ethics, online casting, business, and issues facing the voiceover business.

I’m excited to add his voice to This Week in VO!

Feels crowded out there, doesn’t it.

In an age where work-from-home has become the rule instead of the exception, where we are experiencing the Great Resignation of people from jobs that treat and pay them poorly, and where on-camera and theater actors went more than a year without consistent work, the voiceover industry seems like the refuge of choice for many looking for a new source of income. Heck, even John McEnroe has gotten in on the trend….kind of.

With voiceover schools and coaches popping up like cicadas after a two-decade slumber, new aspirants are flooding into the field like never before.

By definition, that means there’s less pie for those who are already in the game, right? And those newbies? Good luck!

Well, there’s no doubt that the industry is as competitive as ever, but like with most things in life, there’s more to the story than a simple equation of more people equals less opportunity.

Voiceover is not taxi-driving. With respect to the folks at your local yellow cab company, anyone can learn how to drive and become familiar with their surroundings. With GPS, that last part doesn’t really even matter much anymore, does it? Driving a taxi is honest and hard work, but what it doesn’t require is inherent talent. A spark of creative genius and an actor’s soul is hardly a necessity. Voiceover, however, is a much different beast.

I’d guess that there are probably several hundred thousand people in North America calling themselves voice actors. Sounds like it would be pretty hard to stand out, right? But how many of these people are actually working? Chances are it’s no more than ten thousand, and out of those, maybe only a thousand or two earning anything that looks like a decent living. Indeed, it’s no surprise that when we hear major TV commercials, listen to great storytelling on documentaries, watch our favorite cartoons or play our favorite video games, the voices we are hearing are often the same few dozen people that many of us in the industry have come to know quite well over the years.

This isn’t because it’s a closed club or an old-boy network…..it is because talent and determination rise to the top.

The bottom line is that there are more people trying to do this job than ever before, but in reality it’s one in fifty or fewer that have the requisite skill to make it happen, and of those only one in five who have the business acumen to fulfill their potential. In some ways it’s like the professional poker craze of 15-20 years ago. Millions tried their hand at it, but watch the World Series of Poker and guess what, it’s still the same few dozen sharks and a handful of rising stars at the final tables.

In voiceover, what was true five years ago, ten years ago, and fifteen year ago remains true today: If you have the talent, the drive, the technical savvy and the business sense to make a go of a voiceover career, you may not get rich, but chances are you won’t go hungry either. Phil Ivey isn’t worried about the other people at the table. He’s gonna play his hand, and most of the time, he’s gonna win.

If you are a voice actor who makes any substantial portion of your income from online casting such as Voice123 or Voices.com, it’s time for you to get on Fiverr.

Buried the lede there, didn’t I?

Has JMC gone off his meds, you ask? No. Not today at least. And let me be very clear……I am NOT advocating the use of Fiverr by professional talent. I do not presume to judge anyone who earns money doing voiceovers on Fiverr or other low-budget platforms. I’m not so arrogant as to believe I can put myself in their shoes and understand their circumstances. It’s not a platform that I find appealing professionally or personally, and therefore I don’t partake, but to each their own.

However, if you are a professional talent earning professional industry-standard rates on the major pay-to-play sites, the acquisition of Voice123 by Backstage demands that you learn how to use Fiverr at your earliest convenience.

If you have been paying attention over the last two years, you’ll have noticed significant changes made to the functionality of Voice123 and Voices.com. Voice123 has had a complete makeover and has begun to incorporate more and more features designed to drive not just traffic, but engagement. From rating and ranking systems to endorsements to direct booking features and an incunabular escrow system, the changes to Voice123 are designed to create more touchpoints to keep buyers and VOs on the platform longer, all of which can potentially be monetized over time.

Voices.com has also made engagement-driven changes and has stepped out front in adding additional voiceover-adjacent services to its offerings to buyers.

These changes are only the very beginnings of the evolution of both of these platforms to become larger multi-service marketplaces based on the Fiverr model.

Why would they do this? Simple. It’s all about the Benjamins.

Fiverr has a market capitalization of $7.8 billion. Billion. With a B.

Now, to be fair, voiceover is but one component of the traffic on Fiverr, which offers a wide array of freelance services often at bargain-basement prices. However, if you add up all of the other P2Ps, including Voices and Voice123, combine them, and multiply the traffic by ten, that’s how much voiceover work is touching Fiverr every day. They are a billion-dollar company with a national-level advertising budget that dwarfs the tens of thousands that Voice123 and Voices can spend. Yes, the vast majority of that work is thirty-dollar-a-holler stuff that pros won’t touch, but that doesn’t matter to investors and big tech. Like a ride share service or food delivery app, the money is made on the churn. Every interaction with the platform is monetized, and it’s all about quantity, not quality. Private equity companies see engagement and transaction volume, and they see dollar signs.

Backstage recently acquired Mandy, a UK-based freelance platform that many voice actors and on-camera actors use, as well as several other freelance platforms that are less well-known among VOs. By adding Voice123, they are capturing as much potential traffic as their bankroll will allow. While these sites may continue to operate independently for a time, eventually you can expect them to evolve into a mega-platform that will be attractive as an acquisition target to even bigger fish like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc…., and the model that has proven most successful from a sheer revenue and traffic standpoint in this regard is Fiverr.

Voices.com are no dummies either. Guided by relationships with their own institutional investors, they are positioning themselves for their own play into the services marketplace arena on a broader scale, and over time, you can expect that platform to evolve into something that functionally and cosmetically very much resembles Fiverr as well, as they look to capitalize on the freelance services industry’s most effective model.

Meanwhile, boutique platforms like bodalgo.com, VOPlanet, and CastVoices will continue to take more talent-centric approaches that focus on quality over quantity, because the owners of these platforms are industry people first and tech entrepreneurs second who are eager to make a profit, but not obsessed with becoming billionaires. As the coming years unfold, you will see a very stark divide emerge between sites that are smaller and focused on professional quality and professional rates, and massive conglomerates that acquire competitors and focus only on traffic regardless of the value of the transaction, (which is not to say they will be entirely bereft of quality work.)

The Evolution of Online Casting

What does all of this mean for the hundreds of serious pro-VOs who earn consistently from Voice123 and Voices.com? It means you need to start learning the mechanics of Fiverr. Not because you will be using that platform specifically as a place to generate work in the future, (though with a $7.8 billion dollar valuation, who knows, they might eventually just gobble up all the other players,) but because the platforms you are familiar with will start to look a lot more like Fiverr in the not too distant future. You need to learn the algorithmic principles that drive success on Fiverr, how those who use that platform manipulate the system to rank as highly as possible, what it looks like to be ranked, rated, and held at the mercy of the buyer, (having observed quite a few of the Fiverr-centric social media groups over the past two years out of curiosity, and also because I knew this evolution was coming, the unfortunate answer is it is rather soul-sucking,) and be prepared to adapt to the coming changes. Or, perhaps, begin to de-emphasize online casting sites as part of your business plan altogether and focus on the massive growth of search-based casting, direct marketing, and building stronger relationships with the agencies and other gatekeepers who are forward-thinking enough to remain viable.

People have long complained that online casting platforms make commodities of voice actors. While there has always been an element of truth to that, many VOs have been able to use these platforms in a manner that was both highly profitable and respectful of the greater industry at large. But as these sites evolve from mom and pop startups run by smiling Canadians and Colombians into mature corporations controlled by bigger and bigger masters, the future may look a lot more like running the rate race at the direction of the folks in the C-Suite. If you plan to be a part of that future, you need to learn how it works.

Being a small business owner is rewarding in many ways, but finding the motivation to keep doing the little things that make a business successful can be challenging. As voice actors, people see our big wins splashed across their TVs, tablets, and movie screens, yet the daily grind is invisible. Here are a few voiceover motivation tips to keep your head in the game when the weight of business building starts to feel heavy on your shoulders.

1.) Have a routine, and stick with it.

If your workday has an established flow, it’s easier to get into a rhythm and feel as though you are operating at a high level. My days start with a check of my email and social media, a shower, and breakfast. Them I’m into admin. I clear my inbox before anything else, starting with messages that simply require a reply. Next are client projects that can be cleared quickly. Commercials, short narrations, promos, etc…. get done in the early part of my day. Then I clear priority auditions from agents, management, and existing clients/rosters. After this I have my task list, which includes invoicing, handling requests from coaching and demo clients, demo scripting, and other admin. Now I’m several hours into my day, and live sessions will dominate the rest of my time, while I handle emails and urgent auditions in the short gaps between sessions. Short breaks for lunch and dinner, lather rinse repeat the next day. This clear and consistent process allows me to keep my deck clear and my inbox as close to zero as possible throughout the day, so things don’t pile up. It also allows me to ease in and out of my week and avoid working weekends as much as possible.

2.) Build in downtime.

I’m a grinder. I go hard in the middle of my week with few breaks, but I intentionally book Mondays and Fridays as light as possible, and I don’t work weekends. I cram 50+ hours into the middle of my week, but that allows a lot of planned 3 and 4-day weekends, and I plan several weeks throughout the year to simply book out. Golden handcuffs clients can interfere with this, but if you build in downtime and stick with it, you’ll have something to look forward to as you are in the whirlwind, which will keep you motivated.

3.) Your income starts at ZERO every month.

I track my numbers religiously, but the number that I keep front and center on my tracking sheet is how much I’ve earned this month. For newer talent, seeing that number climb will often motivate you sufficiently, but for established talent looking at the number you’ve earned so far versus your needs/expectations for monthly income based on past performance helps to gamify the work experience, and adds motivation. No matter how much you’ve earned so far in a given year, seeing a small number staring at you on the second or third….or tenth! of the month can be enough to keep the fire under your ass burning and motivate you not to rest on your laurels or the expectation of repeat business.

Leave your comments below and let us know how YOU stay motivated!