Alex Cooper’s ‘Call Her Daddy’ success is empowering women’s sports podcasters, too. Her latest deal marks a ‘landscape shift.’

Newtown’s Alex Cooper has parlayed her Call Her Daddy podcast into an empire. Her sex-positive podcast, which she began in 2018 with her roommate, Sofia Franklyn, secured a $125 million deal with SiriusXM in August, which doubled the three-year, $60 million deal she announced with Spotify in 2021.

Call Her Daddy, currently ranked as Spotify’s No. 2 podcast, recently made headlines when Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris appeared on her show. Cooper, 30, averages about 10 million listeners per episode, and features some of the biggest stars in music, entertainment, and more, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Her growth and stardom also comes as women’s sports popularity is booming, especially the WNBA, which had record viewership, attendance, and advertising this season. And while Cooper’s episodes aren’t sports-related, her voice in the media landscape addresses a goal of many female podcast hosts: meet listeners where they are and discuss topics that resonate with their audience.

» READ MORE: How Newtown native Alex Cooper used ‘Call Her Daddy’ to create a sex-positive podcasting empire

It’s exactly what two-time women’s World Cup winners Christen Press and Tobin Heath envisioned when they began their RE-Inc lifestyle company, alongside fellow former U.S. women’s national team stars Megan Rapinoe and Meghan Klingenberg.

“We have to continue, in women’s sports, to reimagine the way that we grow because of the current structures that are around sports that are limiting to women’s sports, and sometimes I think that can be frustrating,” Heath, who is one half of the The RE-CAP Show soccer podcast, told The Inquirer. “But I also think sometimes it can be exciting, particularly in the landscape of media. You referenced Alex Cooper’s massive deal with SiriusXM. We’re seeing that media is being consumed a lot different than it was, 5, 10, 20 years ago. And I think sports media is exactly the same. You really have to meet the fans exactly where they are.”

Alexander Jenkins has taught sports media in Drexel’s communication, culture, and media graduate program for about a decade, with a focus on emerging media like podcasts. When he first started teaching the course, Jenkins challenged his students to find outlets that consistently covered women’s sports, which often was challenging, he says. But times have changed, and his students can find that some of the biggest media organizations have invested significant resources in covering women’s sports.

“Where the women’s game is right now, it’s really coming on strong, and I think we see this translating into other avenues of women in sports and in entertainment and up-and-coming kinds of forms of media, like podcasts,” Jenkins said.

Within the podcast industry, hosting platforms are investing in programming around women’s sports. At Audacy, the number of women’s sports podcasts are growing, as are women’s lifestyle podcasts geared toward specific topics.

» READ MORE: Why are Amazon and ION investing in the WNBA and NWSL? Because it’s smart business.

Nine-figure deals attached to a podcast are unusual, but Leah Reis-Dennis, Audacy’s vice president of podcast content strategy and business development, mentioned Office Ladies as another show with a long-term deal. The podcast is hosted by Angela Kinsey and Jenna Fischer, who starred on the hit sitcom, The Office.

“Shows like [Call Her Daddy are] valuable to a network, for its audience, for its brand, for its host personality,” Reis-Dennis said. “We just did a big deal with Office Ladies. … And that’s another show where it’s been around for many years, so it has a really loyal and devoted following, and the hosts themselves have such a powerful brand and a powerful audience that it makes for a really attractive deal for a network.”

For the last three years, Seerat Sohi has covered the WNBA and NBA for The Ringer, a sports and culture website. At previous stops, she primarily produced written content but has pivoted from that as a host of the The Ringer WNBA Show podcast on Spotify. The Ringer launched her WNBA podcast earlier this year amid the league’s record growth.

“I think it’s really important, especially as it pertains to conversations that need to be had that are more sensitive that deal with topics like racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny,” Sohi said by email. “We’re seeing that in the WNBA coverage right now, for example, where a lot of mainstream coverage has slanted in a way that I don’t think has been really humanizing or understanding of the perspective of the players who are speaking out about these things. And I think that just having more diverse voices that can understand that experience is really important.

“I think the landscape is shifting to value authentic voices, and as more women build their own platforms, it shows there’s plenty of room for fresh perspectives and new approaches. It’s an encouraging time for women in podcasting, and I hope we continue to see that momentum grow.”

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Audacy boasts its own WNBA podcast, Queens of the Court: A WNBA podcast, hosted by the legendary Sheryl Swoopes, a three-time WNBA MVP and four-time champion, and freelance basketball writer Jordan Ligons Robinson. The podcast had a small audience in its first season, Reis-Dennis says, but now in its second season, she estimates it has five to 10 times more listeners, which helped the show secure a sponsorship from AT&T.

“I do think we have a big opportunity right now, in this kind of cultural zeitgeist moment around women in sports, to attract bigger audiences, which then attracts more brand interest and brand dollars, which then allows us to do these deals,” Reis-Dennis said. “It’s really a flywheel effect, where the momentum behind women’s sports, more broadly, is feeding back into the media sphere and is feeding our ability as networks to a support these shows that maybe were under-resourced in the past and to hopefully create more of them as we get more advertiser interest in supporting them.”

The NWSL has seen its fair share of growth as well; many USWNT stars play in the league instead of for international clubs. Press, who in August returned to Angel City FC after missing two seasons with an ACL injury that required four surgeries, pointed to the USWNT’s equal pay lawsuit as a time when women began understanding their value as athletes.

“I think so much of what we continue to have to remind ourselves and remind the younger generation and be reminded by the people came before us is as women athletes to know our value and to own it, right?” Press said. “And I think right now, we’re in a really pivotal moment of momentum for women’s sports, which is exciting, and I think that we both drive that momentum, but we also enjoy the momentum from both ends of it. As the NWSL and the WNBA get more popular as people get more knowledge in sports, it just allows us to have better storytelling, have better relationships with players and fans, and all of those things are tremendously valuable, and they drive up the value of what we’re doing and what the business of women’s sports really is holistically.”

» READ MORE: WNBA standouts Kahleah Copper and Natasha Cloud use their shoes to share powerful messages

Part of the motivation behind the RE-Inc brand was to build an authentic ecosystem around women’s sports, Heath said, and they’ve continued to expand their vision over the last five years. The pair has a clothing collection, created a community subscription platform for fans and changemakers to engage in their product and vision, and launched their podcast ahead of the 2023 women’s World Cup. Some of the features of their community platform include watching games with Heath and Press, a message board to discuss women’s sports, and with early access to other content they create.

Heath calls their movement “gal culture,” which she describes as the antithesis of “bro culture.” At the intersection of sports and women’s culture, Press and Heath’s podcast, which has 70 million views and listens on social platforms, looks to bridge the gap.

“We’re not being filtered through 10 different middlemen on what we have to say, what we can say, what we can’t say. And that’s powerful,” Heath said. “[Gal culture] is taking the camera back, taking the microphone back, and we say as women in particular, media has always been performative to women. And part of gal culture is really taking off that performative lens and bringing in the authenticity. … It is important to being able to narrate, to be able to storytell, to be able to actually make that door to sports so much bigger for women than it currently is.”

Added Press: “I think one way that we’re able to traverse sports and enter this cultural conversation is simply by showing that to more people. Like, not everyone was in that locker room; not everyone got to see what it was like to go to battle as a group of women, right? But can we empower the larger world the way that we were empowered just by being the best at what we did and what we do. I think that’s really the specialty of what we at Re-Inc are trying to do is, just bring in the larger audience into the secret of what has made us successful as athletes, so that women and girls everywhere can see a new vision for what a woman is and what a woman can be.”