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.
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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.
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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 :-) ?
Everything needs to be MoNeTiZeD today, even hobbies should be income streams.
Fuck that
if George Carlin was still alive he’d do a stand-up special about this titled “Everyone Is A Whore” or something equally subtle.
at least in America most people generally seem to look down on spending any time on anything that doesn’t make money. even if you don’t actually need any more money. the only worthwhile thing in much of society’s eyes is climbing that ladder.
Ad-supported approaches normalized both free content (in the eyes of the consumer) and also getting paid for creating even very niche content (in the eyes of the creator).
I know, but for 99% of content creation it’s costless (except time ofc) just look at Reddit!
I wonder how many people actually earn something after trying to monetise stuff, I bet very few and it just gets enshittifyed everywhere instead.
You say except time like that’s no big deal. Time is money is a cliche but if you don’t value your time neither will anyone else. I do agree with your overall point though. A lot of content is low effort.
Well these days it still happens. Most lemmy instances, including my own, are free without donations available.
Ha ha yeah mine too :-) I guess I long for those times to come back!
That’s what I do. My Youtube channel is just a repository for tutorials and demos of things I sell, and I use YouTube for the free bandwidth and don’t monetize anything.
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 :-) ?
This applies to people that create across any craft. I guess my question to you would be:
“Why do you believe you are entitled to the efforts of their hobby for free?”. If the creator is choosing to give it away for free, and you’re consuming it for free then everyone is happy.
However if the hobbyist is choosing to charge for the content, your choice to pay for it or stop consuming it. Just because they were doing it for free at one point doesn’t obligate them to do it forever for free if they don’t want to. You can lament that you don’t have it for free anymore of course, but getting upset with the creator because you’re not getting it for free seems very entitled. That creator doesn’t owe you anything.
I pay for it by being part of a community where we all try to help, as good as we can.
Can’t you see that the big ones are the ones monetising it all? This idea that everything should be monetized is because they want you to work for them so that instead of helping out someone on a forum for free, you could join this new platform where you can, eventually, earn money, but it would most probably not make you rich but some shareholder.
That also puts pressure on people not helping for free anymore, which the big platforms love, so they can sell that free advice instead…
Well, that’s how I see things.
I pay for it by being part of a community where we all try to help, as good as we can.
Can I get some clarification of which thing we’re talking about? I’m reading the thread about podcasters that were formerly making podcasts for free, and are now charging. That was what my response was to.
Your comments about being part of a community seem to talk about something else. Sure, there are plenty of hobbyist forums where everyone contributions and we all consume the results. That’s very different to a podcaster taking the time to research their topic, write a script, go through all the effort of recording, editing, and maintaining all the production infrastructure and promotion of the podcast.
Are you still talking about podcasts or community driven content on forums?
It was you who started screaming about me not wanting to pay for stuff lol.
Whatever, keep paying if you can’t find like-minded people I guess.
Screaming? Apologies if you read that tone, that wasn’t my intent.
It was you who started screaming about me not wanting to pay for stuff lol.
I was responding to this line you wrote in your first post:
Serious question: what is the content people create that is so costly today?
As for this:
Whatever, keep paying if you can’t find like-minded people I guess.
In many cases may not pay, but I also don’t expect the creator do to the work for free. I can choose to go without the content and not pay. However I don’t blame or judge the creator for charging for their work. They have a choice and I do too. I just don’t complain about the choice the creator (as a Podcaster in the context of this thread) makes if it means I have to go without. They own me nothing.
I agree. YouTube and Podcasts should NOT be the primary income or the people making them. They should make it due love of the subject. Get a real day job and do that things in their free time.
I’m also sick and tired of everything being money driven. End of the day I can EASILY live without YouTube and podcasts.
Paying for services should be the norm.
Grim
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.
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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.
Once a free podcast goes behind an exclusive paywall, it’s dead to me. That being said, there are several podcasts that I support that I exclusively listen to their patreon feeds because they are ad free.
Which ones, if you don’t mind sharing?
Dungeons and Daddies
I’m guessing that’s the one that went behind the exclusive paywall?
I was more so asking about the patreon feeds you mentioned
Sorry, I’m not the op who suggested originally.
Dungeons and Daddies is available on most podcast streaming services but they have a significant number of hilarious patreon exclusives (some of which are teased on the public platforms).
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.
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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.
Yeah the damn crypto bros destroyed any credibility that Bitcoin has, but I did say this is one the few good uses for Bitcoin I use.
I’m not saying this is for everyone, but it can be helpful to help sustain podcasting on its fans. Honestly look at how much Twitch takes from streams for bits, subs, and transaction fees kill the streamers revenue. Here is a YouTube video that express how much goes into everyone’s else’s pocket when you sub on Twitch.https://youtu.be/WIjlDLkrTjE?si=AM9_Lh3GfEkMQdO3
Using podcasting 2.0 features Jupiter Broadcasting has been able to completely cover production cost for its podcasts with funding provided from fans of the show alone. And that’s the important part. Helping podcast people love alive.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/WIjlDLkrTjE?si=AM9_Lh3GfEkMQdO3
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
