Co-hosts of the Sonia and Simon podcast and founders of Boom Studio, Sonia Jahshan and Simon Baggott, predict that vodcasting will be the next dominant move in creator-led media.
In only eight months, their podcast has been number one on Spotify’s podcast charts eight times, with 383,000 monthly views across its ecosystem.
“That includes YouTube as our number one. That’s our number one generating machine,” Baggott said.
Why they’re betting on video
The pair told Mediaweek that video is not just a format choice; it is where audience behaviour has moved.
According to Kantar research, YouTube is Australia’s number one platform.
The research, based on a study of 2,161 weekly video viewers aged 18–64, found that YouTube outperformed both traditional TV and streaming competitors across entertainment and brand decision-making metrics.
“It’s the second most visited website in the world. We are just going where the audience is at the end of the day,” Jahshan said.
Baggott said the video also gives Boom Studio more mileage across channels.
“We do one video episode, and that gets distributed across our entire ecosystem”, he said. “So when a brand comes to us and wants to work with us, they’re not only just sitting inside the podcast, they’re sitting across our entire ecosystem.”
The traditional media fallout
A key part of Boom Studio’s pitch comes from what Jahshan and Baggott say they saw inside traditional media, and neither sounds especially nostalgic about it.
Both have backgrounds at KIIS, with Baggott from SCA, Acast, and Nova, and Jahshan from Seven.
Baggott said one frustration was doing the creative heavy lifting while others took the credit.
“In a corporate organisation that we would go and do the work and do all of the bits and pieces, and then some other a**hole would come and take all the credit for what we did,” he said.
Without dropping any names, Baggott hinted:v“Where Sonia and I worked in traditional media, it was filled with bulls**t. So traditional media was all manipulated,” he added.
Jahshan said that kind of packaging is exactly what audiences are pushing back against.
“You’re watching something that’s been cut up or displayed for a specific audience, like the things that traditional media lean into are generally like fear or surprise, and you just don’t get the authenticity,” she said. “Where a show like Simon and mine, it’s not edited, it goes out as it’s recorded.”
Baggott said the industry should not be surprised by the backlash.
“Traditional media right now is like, ‘ Why is everyone angry at us? And it’s like we treated all these people that did content creation really poorly for a long period of time now,” he said.
He also pointed to the role of traditional structures in shaping that culture, specifically content directors.
“We’d finish the breakfast show at 9:30, and a content director would come up to the content team to give feedback. Sometimes it was, ‘Hey, you better do your job, otherwise I’m going to take your mortgage off you.’ All these weird things,” he said.
Past experiences led to the development of a model that prioritises creators as the centre of every platform.
Trust is the real sell
For Boom Studio, that history is not just backstory; it is the rationale for building a model where creators are in control.
Baggott said the value now sits with creators who have built genuine relationships with audiences.
They create. They control. They sell, and most importantly, “money goes directly to the Creator.”
“The guests who come on our podcast trust Sonia and me, and the audience trusts us to turn up every single Monday and deliver an episode. So there’s trust going on there, and the only people that have that trust are the creators,” he said.
That is also the logic behind direct brand deals. Creators are no longer just media inventory; they are the relationship brands want to buy into.
Main image: Sonia Jahshan and Simon Baggott interviewing Georgie Holt (CEO of FlightStory)