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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

I think the business model for ad-supported podcasts is tough -- people can only buy so much underwear and so many stamps.com subscriptions. That is probably bad news for podcasts with high production values that are part of major for-profit organizations (like the Slate one), unless they're primarily prestige projects (which is how I perceive some of the New York Times ones). However, the medium will still have podcasts based on radio shows (including from stations like NPR or Sputnik which are government-supported and not run for profit, and so will continue doing it even if they're not making money) and smaller, independent podcasts whose more devoted fanbases support them directly through means like Patreon.

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Minor correction. Government funding is a pretty small part of NPR revenues. (Corporation for Public Broadcasting is about 2% although there are additional government funding sources.)

I agree with your broader point though. Podcasting that isn't just a hobby or a side endeavor that supports the businesses that actually bring in the money is a tough business model. Not saying that there aren't popular/quality (not necessarily the same thing) ones that can pull it off well enough to eek out a continued existence, but it's tough and isn't going to get any easier.

Sorry, you're quite right on that point. I was thinking more that they're not run with a profit motive, which I think is still fair to say. Other government-chartered radio stations, like Sputnik or BBC, are, I think, more fully government-funded.

The BBC is halfway between government funded and private, because the money is from a licence to (originally) receive TV signals, and fairly directly from that.

This is different from (UK) motor vehicle duty, where the income and the expenses have nothing much to do with each other, and more like the requirement for all (UK) motorists to have insurance.

On the other hand, the UK government gets upset every so often about BBC coverage of its policies and reacts by threatening it with a lower licence fee, so it’s not not government funded either.

> I think the business model for ad-supported podcasts is tough -- people can only buy so much underwear and so many stamps.com subscriptions.

There are other options for advertising that seem to make more sense to me.

For example, the acquired.fm podcast is sponsored by VCs and investment banks, and their ads consist of a 30 second soundbite interview with one of the advertiser's employees.

risky.biz has a bit longer sponsor interviews, but with sponsors likely relevant to the target audience.

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe advertises for an education video subscription service.

Software Defined Talk advertises for a monitoring company.

And so on.

Yes, it takes work, but it seems to work, more or less. Some of these are hobby projects, but I think risky.biz is the producer's main income.

Smart Passive Income podcast provides in depth reviews on products and advocates multiple benefits and gets affiliate links which drive people who want to use the product getting a recommendation and sales pitch from someone they already trust. Trust is the single most important commodity from a podcaster and those who use it well monetize it while providing a service to the listeners.

I'm curious what you mean by high production values. I do notice podcasts thanking their audio engineer, though I'm not entirely sure what is involved. I assume some amount of editing goes on, but is it that expensive to edit an hour of conversational audio?

Having done a lot of "audio engineer" type of work for my own podcast, I can say that there is a lot to it, and it varies depending on the sound the podcast is aiming for.

For example, if you listen to NPR interviews, you'll notice that questions and answers are articulate and succinct, with very few "ums" and "ahs " and such. This is because an editor removes most of the extra sounds, lengthy pauses, stammering, intakes of breath, etc.

There is also capturing the audio in decent quality. Having good microphones and equipment is just the first step. If recording indoors, one must account for room noise and echo. If outdoors, one must consider wind and background noise. Experienced audio engineers will be sure to record 1+ minutes of the ambient sound at the recording location, so they can use this if they need to insert any pauses. If recording multiple people, one must ensure they are all captured at a similar volume, especially if the recordings are all mixed together at capture time (if captured on separate mics/tracks this is easier to deal with). Some people also have a lot of "mouth noise" that is amplified by the mic, so you can hear clicks and squirts of saliva as they speak. It can be kinda gross, and there are tricks to working around this.

Editing the audio for content is also a substantial task. It takes skill to know what to leave in and what to remove, particularly if one wishes to be true to the speakers' intentions. Real conversation, if you listen to it, is messy. Lots of thought-switching mid-sentence, lengthy digressions, and things like that. Those are hard to listen to in a podcast, so a podcast that wishes to remain successful will need a skilled editor to smooth it all out. Often a 2 hour interview will become 25 minutes of usable audio. And it's especially tricky if recording with background noise, which will often betray the editing locations if one doesn't know how to mask them (usually with aforementioned ambient recording).

"Sound design" is another facet; if your podcast has music, audio clips, sound effects, etc., somebody needs to put them in the right place, set the volume levels correctly (some art, some science), fade in/out, etc.

So, yes, proper audio engineering takes some skill and makes a big difference in production quality.

Really comprehensive answer. Thank you. User name definitely checks out.

It can be, but it starts before that -- if you're serious you're renting a studio, and more expensive shows will have writers, music, archival research, interviews, etc. You can just have two guys talking on laptop mics, but if you want a professional-sounding product as you might hear on the radio, there's more than that going on.

To be fair, even professionally produced shows will have interviews done over the telephone, Skype, etc.

But, yeah, you get into professional production values and a lot of incremental gear and work gets involved--arguably for pretty incrementally diminishing returns. Whenever I'm involved in some way with video for some company event or web clip, I'm always a bit taken back by the amount of equipment that's set up to record a few minutes of talking head footage.

Casey Liss (host of Accidental Tech Podcast, among others) has a small writeup about that work at https://www.caseyliss.com/2014/11/22/how-i-make-podcasts

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