A flashy, red news desk sits backed by a TV screen along with a display cabinet filled with awards and golfing memorabilia. The table is adorned with a pair of expensive-looking microphones and a laptop. From this alone, you may think I’m describing a regular sports television or radio studio. In fact, what I’m describing is the scene of The Rick Shiels Golf Show – an all-things-golf podcast that can be found on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms. The channel has amassed more than 188,000 YouTube subscribers since its inception, with over 18.1 million total views as of November 2022. The podcast is hosted by former professional golfer Rick Shiels and producer Guy Charnock, each week streaming a blend of news, product releases, interviews and general golf discussion. All this content is presented by the hosts in a conversational, humorous and light-hearted manner, making for easy on-the-move listening. “After the success of Rick’s YouTube channel, in November 2019 we decided to launch a BEFORE, WE WERE FILMING ON TWO IPHONES AND AN OLD DSLR
podcast,” says Charnock. “We had two reasons. One I’m not too proud of: everyone was doing podcasts. But the second was that we wanted Rick to share his ideas in a longer-form model. “Most of his YouTube content was around eight minutes long – sometimes 15. As a result, people really got to know Rick and his personality, which in turn built a large and loyal audience. “But we found that creators with smaller audiences had more diehard fans. Our thinking became: ‘How do we turn these casual viewers into a hardcore fanbase?’” The main channel Guy is referring to is Rick Shiels Golf, totalling 2.4 million subscribers and racking up more than 624 million total views. “We found early on that we got a great level of traction,” continues Charnock. “Our audience demographic is broad in terms of age, and has a massive younger dynamic – something people might not expect from golf.” With the growth spurt of their own podcast, let alone its genre, the team started to search for ways to achieve a crisper, more sophisticated look. This was also in response to other podcasts transforming from amateur set-ups to near broadcast-quality levels of production. “It was mid-2020 when we started filming. We didn’t have a great set-up or venue, so the videos weren’t looking brilliant. But we did find that there was an appetite for people to consume them both as long-form video, but also short, bite-sized clips. “The strategy initially was to release the clips as eight-minute, clickbait-y snippets from the podcasts. However, the response from our audience was that they wanted to watch it in its entirety. Now, we release the full episode on YouTube, which has continued to go from strength to strength.
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