Sponsor The IP Podcast

    The IP Podcast — short for The Internet Pioneers Podcast — is the first oral-history podcast dedicated to the unsung engineers, sysadmins, product managers, and operators who built the Internet in the 1990s — the people who did the hands-on work, not the names everyone already knows. No existing podcast treats grassroots Internet builders as the recurring subject of first-person oral history. The show occupies that space, and the untold stories it captures are the raw material no one else is recording.

    The audience is technical and loyal. Listeners include working network engineers, systems administrators, telecom veterans, and tech-history readers — the people who design, build, and operate the infrastructure that the sponsor's products and services depend on. This is a niche, high-attention audience that is difficult to reach through general-purpose tech media.

    This is also a time-sensitive project. The people who built the 90s Internet are aging, and some are already gone. Sponsoring The IP Podcast supports an archival oral-history project that captures untold stories from grassroots Internet builders — stories that cannot be recorded later. That is not a marketing claim — it is the operational reality of the show.

    What we offer sponsors

    • Host-read endorsements — 60–90 second spots, read by the host in the show's own voice. No pre-roll programmatic ads. One sponsor per episode.
    • Episode sponsorship — your brand associated with a specific episode and guest. The sponsor mention appears in the episode description, show notes, and on the episode page.
    • Newsletter sponsorship — one sponsored mention per mailing list episode notification, reaching a self-selected, engaged audience of technical listeners.
    • Custom packages — for sponsors with a specific story to tell to this audience — infrastructure vendors, hosting providers, networking hardware companies, telecom employers, tech-history publishers.

    Audience profile (pre-launch)

    Primary: working network engineers and systems administrators (25–55) reachable in r/networking, r/sysadmin, and NANOG/ARIN circles — the audience that buys, specifies, and operates networking infrastructure. Secondary: tech-history readers and listeners (35–65) who consume the history-of-technology genre. Discovery: 90s nostalgia audiences reached through 1–2 accessible episodes per season with social-share potential.

    Sponsorship principles

    • One sponsor per episode — the show's credibility depends on the listener's trust.
    • Host-read, not programmatic — the host reads the sponsor message in their own voice; we will not read copy we do not believe is accurate.
    • Relevant sponsors only — no surveillance-tech vendors, no companies under active regulatory action for telecom-related violations, no generic consumer products with no connection to the audience.
    • Transparent — sponsored content is labeled; the audience knows who is paying for the show.

    Sponsor interest form

    Contact

    Prefer to talk directly? Email sponsor@internet-pioneers.com or use the contact form with "Sponsorship" as the subject.