DMG Media has launched a subscription podcast product, The Crime Desk, offering paying listeners exclusive episodes and adding a paywall around its older true crime series.
Jamie East, the head of podcasts at the Daily Mail and Metro publisher, told Press Gazette the launch capitalised on the “juggernaut” success of Mail true crime podcasts like The Trial of Lucy Letby.
Running from October 2022 to September the following year, the Letby series brought traditional daily court reporting into the podcast format.
“The Trial” brand has since been expanded with similar series covering the murders of Ashling Murphy and Brianna Ghey as well as the cases of Wandsworth Prison escapee Daniel Khalife and Gavin Plumb, who planned to kidnap and kill presenter Holly Willoughby. DMG Media says The Trial podcasts have collectively amassed more than 40 million downloads.
DMG Media head of podcasts: true crime ‘can be a bit of a romp’
Subscriptions to The Crime Desk, which officially launched on Wednesday a month after the soft launch of a more limited “The Trial+” offer, cost £1.99 a month or £19.99 billed annually.
East said true crime had been “a runaway success” for the Mail. “We just couldn’t do enough of it.”
The team receives “so many listener emails and WhatsApps and comments” asking them to cover upcoming court cases, he said, but The Trial “is so labour intensive to make and it’s so difficult that you can only really have one concurrent Trial in one area”.
While The Crime Desk will not necessarily involve covering more trials, subscribers will get ad-free listening and at least two extra episodes a week in which presenters Liz Hull and Caroline Cheetham “delve into the background” of a specific case or an aspect of the justice system.
“Having said that, over the next two weeks we’ve got one [The Trial] in New York, we’ve got one live in Melbourne and we’ve got one live in London as well,” East said.
As well as The Trial, DMG Media is building out a suite of podcasts which East said would touch on “different areas of true crime”.
One, also launching on Wednesday, is the new show “Heists, Scams and Lies”, the first season of which follows crime correspondents George Odling and Andy Jehring as they attempt to hunt down £25m of diamonds, cash and jewellery stolen from the home of Formula 1 heiress Tamara Ecclestone. It will be followed a few months later by a second series “all about a Caribbean property Ponzi scheme”.
The Trial itself is also broadening out its focus: the London case the show will follow from next week centres on the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree.
“True crime doesn’t always have to be about dead women,” East said. “I think that’s one of the things that I was very keen to show. True crime is always criminal, but it’s not always depressing. It can be a bit of a romp and a bit of a wild goose chase across continents.”
He said he wanted to avoid “murder porn”, which he saw as “just poking people with a stick”.
The first season of Heists, Scams and Lies dropped in its entirety for subscribers on Wednesday, while free listeners will receive one episode per week. Series of The Trial, meanwhile, will be free while the court cases they cover are underway but – with the exception of the Letby series – will subsequently go behind the paywall.
East said: “There will always be a free Trial to air – we’ve got to have a shop window, and it’s arguably a public service as well.”
In its soft launch phase focused only on The Trial, East said The Crime Desk had seen subscriptions “well into our thousands” and at a similar conversion rate to the podcast industry standard of 5%.
DMG Media’s audio arm currently comprises around eight full-time staff – up from about five a year ago – and another dozen or so freelances. East said: “Generally, I’m not a fan of commissioning externally. Bit of a waste of time. People who commission externally generally do external because they haven’t got any ideas, and we have tons.”
Asked whether DMG Media’s podcasts were profitable, East said: “I’m not sure I should answer that – I would say we’re very close to that. Extremely close. No one’s concerned.”
The Crime Desk is a separate subscription to Mail+, the Mail Online premium website subscription product, and integrating the two offers is not currently a goal for the company. It would be “a whole hunk of work”, he said, and there would have to be “a need for it”.
“Do podcast subscribers want the Mail+ subscription as part of that? Do the Mail+ subscribers want podcasters as part of that? If not, we’ll crack on, because it’s easier not to.”
For a similar reason there aren’t yet any clear plans to launch paywalls around other types of podcast DMG Media does, East said.
“You can only really launch a subscription model around a hit. There’s no point otherwise. We’ve had big successes elsewhere – [parenting podcast] Apple & The Tree’s been successful, Soccer A-Z was successful. But it needs to be pretty bedded in before you can do it, or achieve such huge scale that it’s a no-brainer. So we’ve not quite reached that with any of the other verticals.”
Jamie East’s ‘crusade’ to end advertiser squeamishness around true crime
Like news, East said true crime suffers financially from hesitancy among advertisers who don’t want their brands to appear next to depressing or grisly material, which he was on “a bit of a crusade” to change.
“There’s no nervousness about brand safety on television. Aldi will quite happily put an advert on Channel 4 in between 24 Hours in A&E. Volvo will sponsor Game of Thrones content on Sky Atlantic. So brands don’t mind about incest or the grimmer side of true crime on television…
“True crime has by far the most engaged, loyal audience, who trust their hosts implicitly and listen to every second of every episode and hang on every word of the podcasts. And get involved – they comment, they write in, they are intrinsically linked to the podcast. That is an advertiser’s dream, and the demo[graphic] of true crime, as well, is an advertiser’s dream.”
Since the first Letby case concluded in May last year there has been significant scrutiny of the verdict from some medical professionals, journalists and statisticians, fanned by a blockbuster New Yorker story that was digitally blocked in the UK over contempt of court fears.
Asked whether DMG planned to tackle any of that controversy, East said it would not.
“The beauty of The Trial, and the simplicity of The Trial, is that it is about the trial. There is no subjectiveness, there’s no conjecture, there’s no opinion, there’s no gut feelings. We cover the trials and we present them in a binary way.
“People have very strong, polarising opinions on Lucy Letby, even within these four walls, and they’re differing depending on what desk you go to. There are other platforms for people to offer their opinions on whether she’s innocent or not. It’s not our job to do that, and I wouldn’t ask Liz or Caroline to do that either. They were in court every single day and listened to the testimony and saw the whites of the families’ eyes.
“We will cover every facet of that trial or appeal or inquiry or whatever comes from that – we will be there. But the audio department isn’t in the business of putting ellipses on the end of any of it.”
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