When did paid podcasts become a thing?
Half the podcasts in my queue have suddenly become paid subscriptions. Meanwhile the overall industry is losing listeners. Seems like a lousy business model to not offer a free with ads feed. What a bizarre trend.
It's that horrible situation isn't it?
The internet was riddled with adverts everywhere. Intrusive things that ate up our time and our bandwidth.
So we used ad blockers.
It became clear that even the folk that didn't use ad blockers were worthless. That is, the market decided their attention was worthless.
The bottom fell out of the advertising market, so business moved to a subscription model.
We all supported it initially. Netflix was held up as a brilliant model.
Then the subscription services got greedy and let advertising in anyway. Except that money no longer funds your experience, not does it really fund the creators. It just funds the owner of the streaming service.
Meanwhile, the lack of feedback that advertising gave as a metric means that the services are becoming worse, delivering lower quality product.
And now it's 2023 and I find myself defending advertising.
I'm a little agnostic on piracy. I don't mind if others are into it, but I use my local library. I watch older films that can be found cheaply. Sometimes I just choose to do something else.
They keep you on this hook, this notion of current culture. The excitement of the new big thing that everyone's watching, but really your fomo is being exploited, and often that's also true of people pirating the material. They are still contributing to this very social form of advertising display.
However, I'd stand by pirates who are looking to find films that have been made, deliberately, unavailable in the public space because corporations can see profit in their absence.
I guess on the general topic of monetizing podcasts... How Did This Get Made was in town last night for a live show. Thought I might bring my son who's a movie buff.
The cheapest seats (ass-end back of the balcony) were $55. Priciest seats I saw were $125. Before fees. That was a REAL fast nope for me.
I absolutely want people to get paid for what they do. I'll sub to Patreons, I'll buy (also overpriced) merch, I'll deal with ad and sponsor breaks... But I will be fucked if I'm going to spend $70+ per person to see a live recording of a podcast.
Nope, those were the pre-fee prices.
One of the podcasts I used to listen to from Gimlet went Spotify exclusive, so I stopped listening as I will not use Spotify, and lo and behold it went back to being regularly distributed this season to all the apps. I don't think being paywalled will work well for podcasts either.
I've noticed a lot in my feed making that move also. I agree this may end poorly for a lot of good podcasts.
A lot of people are already sick of everything being a subscription based product. I know I pay for too many. There are so many ways to consume media you just move on to the next thing that looks interesting and is free with ads (for now). Podcasting loses listeners, podcasters move on or go free with ads again with a much smaller audience.
People want to support quality media creators, but there's only so much in the budget. Kinda like you pay for Netflix as entertainment but podcasts are more like radio, something you listen to but could start listening to something else if need be.
Not everyone wants to be beholden to advertiser sentiment.
I really like listening to some podcasts. It really helps me to get through the day. But man, i pay for spotify to not have ads, what's the point of doing that when podcasts just play their own ads? I don't mind a 4 hour podcast having two ads or so, i'll never listen to them, and i'll never buy or subscribe to their absolute garbage, but okay. But a 45min podcast with 3 lengthy ads, fuck off. Also when podcasts suddenly have a patreon, fine, but then they make 3min episodes where they just talk about their patreon and it shows up as a new episode, fuck off.
I always thought, fine, i guess they also need to make some money for their efforts. Then i saw a youtube video about a scammer who scammed some money from podcasters. They stole 4millions or so from a podcaster. They made 4million dollars to be stolen from but have to sell raycons, which are SHIT, doordash which is the worst, stupid ass real life lootcrates, if you want to buy shit you don't even know what you get and wo on. I don't know, i think it's fucked the way it is.
Nobody wants to pay. Look at the YouTube debacle right now? People don't want to pay a subscription and they don't want to see ads so they use adblockers.
Why offer free with ads when users are just gonna block the ads anyway?
Around 2004
A shameful culprit IMO was the Kermode and Mayo film review. Two wealthy broadcasters (one extremely wealthy) who left the BBC, created an objectively worse show, half of which immediately went behind a paywall. Then they started voicing atrocious adverts and wingeing that people should pay so they could keep the lights on.
They could easily have experimented with a Patreon, but the arrogance was clear.
The only upside was that I felt no pain in dropping them like a stone, but I do miss the old show and never found a good replacement.
Some things are worth paying for.
What if we had an easy way for listeners to “throw bits”, “gift subs”, or “send super chats” to the shows they are listing to?
This is what podcasting 2.0 tries to do. It’s one of the few good uses for Bitcoin that I have found.
You can stream small pieces of bitcoin to the show per min (67 SATS/min ~ $0.0180 USD = over 60 mins is 4020 SATS ~ $1.07 USD) or send a boost that attaches a message to an amount of you choosing allowing to you give feedback almost like sending chat messages to a streamer on Twitch/Youtube.
The podcaster can see a timestamp and what episode you were listening to at the time so they know the context. There’s a lot more to Podcasting 2.0 than that but here’s links for more info.
Here is JupiterBroadcasting take on this: https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/boost/
9to5Mac did an article on it: https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/26/podcasting-2-0/
Here is info from the driving force behind Podcast 2.0:
http://adam.curry.com/html/WhatIsPodcasting20-28mcN0CfHFRjZRpkjpSf56jDCkMjTb.html
Lastly here is a link to get podcast apps that support the podcasting 2.0 standard: https://podcastindex.org/podcast/value4value
A lot of podcasts have Patreon accounts, which I’m totally fine with. I think it’s a good model. But I’m not subscribing to yet another service to access a single podcast that I’m only sort of interested in.
That’s the problem I have. I can just yeet a few SATS while I’m listing not be forced to subscribe to something. It’s all about allowing the people to make the things they love and share it with the people that love it.
You don't need bitcoins to do that streaming thing. It's been done before with actual money. For example, pay-by-the-minute phone plans.
As soon someone mentions cryptocurrency, I know their suggestion of solution can be disregarded. The problem is rarely the medium of payment.
Standard credit card processing fees are anywhere from 1.5% to 3.5% and then there’s more on top of that. Here is an article that runs down typical credit card processing fees.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/credit-card-processing-fees/
In addition to that pay by the minute foam plans are quite costly, but it is an option. Podcasting 2.0 may not be the 100% answer for everyone but diversifying your income is a good thing.
Advertising has become much less profitable after many countries have passed stricter data protection laws. It’s a good thing. Paying for services should be the norm.
Agreed. Hate it, but agree. I too, want free things, but I also want content that is not trash and not financially influenced by people who want to influence me. So if I want something nice, that means I gotta pay for it, or get it gifted to me.
This might also be because one of the biggest advertisers for podcasts went belly up. Coffeezilla made a video about it recently.
It always felt like the entire podcast industry was running off the money of like three companies but it was such a weird idea I couldn't believe it. I guess it was true.
Downvoted by kids who don’t understand that content creators don’t do it for free.
I'm old enough to have known the internet before the ads, and there were a ton of forums where you'd find both information and help for free. Obviously most hobby stuff but still.
I listened to podcasts about roguelikes for example, and hanged out on the popular video game dev forums and it was all free and good.
Serious question: what is the content people create that is so costly today?
I mean it's nice if you can live off your hobby expertise but there's also a question about monetising like everything? Or what am I missing :-) ?
Grim