Most authority stories on this site are about a person turning a reputation into a product. Jack Davenport’s is about a cost line.
Davenport is a co-founder of Goalhanger, the London company that makes The Rest Is History, The Rest Is Politics, The Rest Is Football and a growing list of siblings. (He is the audio producer, not the actor of the same name.) The three named founders are Davenport, Tony Pastor and Gary Lineker, and the best-documented decision in the company’s recent history is one Davenport described in public: they stopped being an audio business.
The cheap model, and why it ended
In an October 2, 2025 interview with Press Gazette’s Dominic Ponsford, Davenport said the company began “very audio focused” because “we had no investment when we started.” The company’s own January 2026 press release calls Goalhanger bootstrapped since its 2014 founding. Davenport described an early team of himself, Pastor and one producer.
Then came video. Over roughly a year, Press Gazette reported, video was added to every Goalhanger podcast, and Davenport said YouTube was now the company’s biggest growth platform. He was also unusually direct about the bill: “Adding video adds two to three times as many people and subsequently cost.” A recent World War One series of The Rest Is History, Press Gazette reported, involved more than a dozen staff across video editing and social production.
His conclusion is the line worth keeping: “I don’t think that you could launch something significant with that super low cost model now.” In other words, the founder of one of the most-cited audio-first success stories was telling readers that the route he took is closed.
The hosts are the product, so they are paid like owners
Davenport also described the incentive structure. Shows are built around personalities, and hosts are paid through deals linked to how commercially successful the shows are. “We don’t believe in people turning up for a fee,” he said, “we need people to care about the success of the show.” That matters for an authority beat: the hosts’ reputations are the asset, and the contract is designed so that they behave like stakeholders in it. The same logic runs through the newsletter-as-owned-audience argument and the creator-holding-company model: the personality draws, the structure keeps.
What the numbers say — and whose they are
Three sets of figures sit around this decision. They deserve different levels of trust.
Self-reported by Goalhanger. In October 2025 the company said it had about 200,000 paying subscribers across 13 brands, about 55 staff, and about 70 million full-episode streams a month. By its January 29, 2026 press release, it said it had more than 250,000 paying members and more than 750 million full-episode views and streams in 2025 across 14 shows. These are company claims; no outside audit of them has been published.
Filed accounts. City AM reported on December 9, 2025 that accounts filed at Companies House for the seven months to the end of December 2024 showed retained earnings of £4.6 million, cash above £5 million, and headcount up from 16 to 34 (it has since passed 50). City AM’s arithmetic implied profit of about £3.1 million over those seven months, against roughly £1 million in the prior twelve. The same filing restated earlier figures, lowering retained earnings by over £500,000 and raising deferred income by over £750,000. City AM also reported that Lineker’s stake equals about a third of the company. These accounts predate most of the video rollout, so they show the model before the spending, not after.
Third-party research. On June 5, 2026 the Sunday Times 100 named Goalhanger Britain’s fastest-growing private company, with £37.9 million in 2025 sales and about 321% average annual growth over three years, according to PodcastingToday’s report of the ranking. It put headcount at 80 and said the founders keep a large majority stake.
The outside money
On January 29, 2026, Goalhanger announced The Chernin Group — Peter Chernin’s investment firm — as its first external investor, taking a minority stake and a board seat. Terms were not disclosed. In the release, TCG partner Greg Bettinelli called Goalhanger “truly one of the world’s most compelling emerging media businesses.”
The sequence is the story. A bootstrapped audio company did the expensive thing first, on its own balance sheet, and took outside capital after the video-era numbers were visible rather than to fund the pivot. What the sources do not say is how profitable the video model is: no outlet has published post-pivot profit, and the Press Gazette interview contains no revenue or valuation figure. The 2025 accounts, when filed, will be the first independent check.
What a reader can take from it
Authority at scale is not free to extend. Davenport’s own framing — twice to three times the audience, and a matching multiple of cost — is a rare case of an operator pricing the move in public. The defensible claim is narrow: Goalhanger chose the more expensive format, says its audience and membership grew with it, and an independent ranking shows sales growing fast. Whether the margin held is the number still missing.
