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"In 2009, when KLSX in Los Angeles canceled his morning radio show, Adam Carolla walked away from traditional media and became an unlikely Internet pioneer. \nThough many people associate Carolla with The Man Show or Loveline, these days he is a giant in the world of podcasting. His show has been downloaded more than 60 million times, easily beating the previous record of 4.5 million by Ricky Gervais in 2006. What's more, he's making money \u2014 at least enough to turn down a deal to go back to terrestrial radio. \nOne particularly lucrative arrangement is a revenue-sharing deal with Amazon. Fans who click through Carolla's site to Amazon know that he gets a cut of the transaction. \nCarolla\u2019s podcast zoomed to number one on iTunes because of name recognition, but it stayed there for several reasons. One is that, unlike many other podcasters, Carolla\u2019s show is daily rather than weekly. A second reason: He gets big-name guests like Alec Baldwin, Albert Brooks and Seth MacFarlane. But a lot of credit has to go to Carolla himself, who has the unique ability to riff humorously on any topic. \nMashable recently spoke to Carolla about his podcasting success. Here are some excerpts of the conversation.\nOn your show, you recently talked about turning down a lucrative deal on terrestrial radio to stay with the podcast. Do you ever regret that decision? And what was your thinking?No. And my thinking was I had a whole bunch of other irons in the fire so to speak and stuff cooking, and this podcast thing was just starting to really take off. And I just realized it\u2019s a business and I need to immerse myself in it and just go at it instead of treating it like a hobby, treat it like a job and I just dug in. \nAnd it\u2019s been paying off ever since. I mean, I didn\u2019t do it because I had a ton of blind faith. I did it because it was starting to throw off money. \nYou mentioned the Amazon relationship. How did that come about? Did they approach you?\nI wish I knew. I think we approached them. I think our sales people approached them. I mean, we\u2019re not inventing much here. Every idea I\u2019ve had in this endeavor somebody who knows something about it says, \u201COh, you\u2019re talking about a rev share,\u201D or something like that. It would be like you going, \u201CI have this vision of a stick with cotton on the end of it that people can use to clean their ears,\u201D and then someone would go \u201COh, you mean a Q-tip.\u201D This all exists, it\u2019s just we\u2019re having to actually make it work. \nWhat\u2019s your schedule for recording? Do you meet every day at the same time or is it more fluid than that?\nWe meet at the same time every day, and that\u2019s the way we do it, though we have flexibility, which is really nice \u2014 which is to say that if Jesse Ventura is around and he can only do it at 11 o\u2019clock on a Thursday, then we come in to the studio warehouse and do it then. \nAnd we\u2019ll do my weekend Ace on the House home improvement show for the weekends when my schedule opens up, like noon on a Wednesday or 4 o\u2019clock on a Friday. It will have to be ready for a Saturday, in other words. \nSo you have that flexibility, which is nice. And we have the ultimate flexibility, which is we don\u2019t record on a Friday usually, but Albert Brooks says we can come to his office on a Friday in Beverly Hills and sit down with him, so we packed up our stuff, which fits into a backpack pretty much, and went into his office on a Friday and got  an hour-and-a-half in with him. \nYou kind of pioneered a new way of doing audiobooks, which was to diverge from the text and you had an idea for a second, stand-alone audiobook that your publisher wasn\u2019t as interested in. Can you talk about that?\nI\u2019m just starting to see the potential of this stuff. We sold so many of the last audiobook and it was so different from what was on the page in my actual book-book. I thought there was so much material left over from the first book that I thought: \"Let\u2019s do a second audiobook.\" It seemed like a natural since everyone enjoyed the first audiobook so much and it was number one on iTunes for so long and up on the top 20 on iTunes for months and months. \nSo I thought let\u2019s do a second one with all the missing chapters and the bonus chapters in the paperback, and I\u2019ll record it and engineer it at my facility. And as far as my publisher, Random House, we\u2019ll just split the proceeds and make it a pure electronic download. It was one of these things where they said, \u201CWe don\u2019t want to set a precedent.\u201D  And I was like, \u201CYou don\u2019t want to set a precedent of doing nothing and getting money? I\u2019d like to set a precedent of doing nothing and getting money, but alright.\u201D\nDo you think podcasts will supplant terrestrial radio?\nIt depends on who on terrestrial radio is going to be doing podcasts. Eventually, everyone is going to go to their computer for everything. The question is: Are they going to go to their computer to download terrestrial shows or are they going  to go there and download podcasts? The notion of \u201CI\u2019m going to sit in my car and wait for a commercial to end\u201D will be right up there with television. The days of us running to the TV set because I Love Lucy started after a commercial break are gone. \nI don\u2019t know that podcasting is going to supplant terrestrial radio. I do know that  the days of sitting  by a radio and waiting for your favorite song to come on, or sitting by the TV and waiting for your show to start, those days are gone. It\u2019s gonna be: \u201CHere\u2019s what I want and here\u2019s when I want it on my terms.\u201D And maybe terrestrial radio will figure out a way to do that. But that much I know. And we will not tolerate that for talk any more than we do for music."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/05/25/adam-carolla-amazon/>