I'm hoping someone rolls podcasts into a music subscription service so that I don't need to listen to these ads. I know that Spotify has done this a bit, but iirc their selection is pretty limited.
JRE.. skip the first 5-7 minutes until you pass the "Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night all day!" and you are set as well. Same with Tim Ferriss.. but there it's about 4 minutes
But mostly I listen to the ads.. they are usually less than a minute anyway (especially since I listen to everything at 1.5 speed... some at 2.0)
1. As the article mentioned, there is a lot of growth with advertising here. Until that starts to taper off the "big" players in the podcast market (either creators or networks) will be hesitant to sign those types of deals. When they keep getting more advertising dollars it seems silly to move over to a Spotify like system.
2. Smaller players (often independent creators) are less organized and harder to get into that sort of system. This was not a problem for Spotify, or other streaming services, because the music industry had a well established Artist -> Label setup that does not exist for huge swaths of the podcast market.
I see your point about onboarding. I wonder if one of them could just ingest all the podcasts on the internet, strip out ads and collect revenue for them, and then offer them a way to claim the revenue and/or opt-out.
They have rates between $5500-$6500 per read and do three ads per episode. I doubt they would make $21000 per episode on Spotify.
The CPMs for podcast are currently much higher than any other type of media besides video.
They were both charging those rates before the "podcast boom".
But accidental tech is a 2 hour podcast, in which time they run 3 ads, but Spotify probably runs at least 12.
IMO the biggest challenge is not going to be finding the money to pay them, but negotiating with musicians who may not be happy dividing up the pie.
When you have a small podcast, you can just do it for the love of it and not worry about money. If it gets big, you can get a small percentage of your listeners to give you money. The number of contributors should continue to rise for many years as more people discover how great podcasts can be.
It's totally viable to have 10% of listeners voluntarily pay while 90% of listeners freeload. And there needn't be any NPR guilt trip about it because they're not blowing millions on office space and executives.
Any successful podcast can be a very financially successful business for a small number of people.