I think the transcript creation service in itself must be worth something for these guys.
Since August of 2016 I've listened to 30 days worth of podcasts and saved another 22 days worth of time by skipping introductions, listening faster than 1x, etc. The most annoying thing I'm facing is that I've heard hundreds of stories and the audio cannot be indexed easily. If I want to send a friend to a specific episode for a certain story, I have no good way to remember if it was the Freakonomics podcast, This American Life, Story Collider, Planet Money, or one of the 20+ other podcasts I listen to.
I'd love a system which would make available a searchable transcript of every podcast. I couldn't pay for transcribing all of them, but I'd pay 50 cents/podcast. Google tells me 1.75/minute will get a transcription from the top listed service, so if we had 210 people like me, we could transcribe an hour of audio.
I speed-read. I don't speed-listen. And my lifestyle has zero podcast-compatible travel time. So there's a whole world of great content in a very user-unfriendly format for me currently.
YC does :)
For the YC podcast we chose to host with Backtracks because they offer transcription and allow you to link back to exact times in the episode, sort of like YouTube.