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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

It's easier to just have 10% of listeners pay $10/year and go ad-free. Advertising is a pollutant and no longer necessary in the new at-scale world.

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.

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The easier, and more lucrative, method is to setup some sort of Premium/Patreon/etc. method where you can either listen to the podcast, with ads, for free, or pay $X a month to support the show and get access to an ad-free feed.

There's no need for ads at all though. If you don't have many listeners, then there's not much ad revenue anyway. And once you have a lot of listeners, you only need a tiny percentage to fund the entire thing.

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.

Sure, but once you have that large number of listeners, if ads only turn away a small percentage, there is no reason to not have them. They would just be refusing (nearly) free money.

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