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It’s possible that we may never know the answer. But perhaps the greatest mystery about Serial, the astounding podcast success, was whether it would even be a success at all.

As part of my reporting for Vanity Fair’s New Establishment, the annual ranking of business and media elite, which will be published on September 8, it became clear that Serial’s producers had far more modest goals for their project—so modest, in fact, that they lost out on millions of dollars in unrealized revenue. “When we launched, we hoped for 300,000 downloads,” co-creator and co-producer Julie Synder told me. So the producers sold the first season to MailChimp, an e-mail-marketing service provider that you’d probably only know about if you listened to copious hours of podcasts. Snyder wouldn’t share the C.P.M. rate at which MailChimp agreed, but she noted that “expectations weren’t huge.” MailChimp bought Serial spots, in other words, well before Serial knew just how valuable they actually were.

Serial, after all, would eventually reach 5 million downloads on iTunes faster than any podcast in iTunes history, and has now been downloaded a staggering 97 million times. Sarah Koenig, the show’s host—and also a co-producer and co-creator—has become a legit celebrity, at least in a Vassar sort of way. She appeared on The Colbert Report, where even Stephen Colbert couldn’t resist a MailChimp joke.

After the show’s first few episodes, once Serial’s producers figured out what they had, they began to take on more established sponsors, at presumably higher rates. It seems clear that the show forfeited income on those early episodes, but when I asked Snyder if she thought that the show had lost out on tens of millions of dollars in undiscovered revenue, she pushed back. “We’d love it if it were possible to garner tens of millions in revenue on a podcast, but as things stand now, that’s impossible,” Synder told me. “We are still just a podcast.”

But she did defend her signature sponsor.

“MailChimp got a pretty sweet deal and probably way more downloads than they expected,” she said. “They were visionaries and risk-takers and reaped the reward of having faith in us.”

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