I’m Stopping the Fan-Supported Podcast Experiment | Hacker News Reader

I’m Stopping the Fan-Supported Podcast Experiment

tim.blog

23 pointslaurex13 comments

Of course, podcast ads are also the opposite of almost all the other ads on the Internet: They don't send your personal data and web browsing history to hundreds of shady companies, they don't slow down your webbrowsing, they aren't a vector to install malware on your system.

Thus, I have absolutely no problem with podcast ads, and if they allow a great podcast I like to be produced sustainably, that's awesome! The same way I also don't have a problem with ads in printed magazines or on billboards (yet; some of them already do track you, of course).

I find podcast ads to be far worse than every other type of ad because it's the only one that forces you to engage in the ad at 1:1 speed. My podcast app allows me to skip forward 15s but that requires interaction and I'm often in a situation where my hands are not free enough to skip through ads.

I pay for ad free versions of every podcast I listen to that offers it. If you calculate the amount of time you spend listening to the ad, multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate, then paying to make the ad go away generally makes sense. Podcasts that don't offer an ad free version, I'm much more likely to leave it lowest on my priority queue of podcasts to listen to.

A few tidbits:

18k respondents to his survey offered up $30k per month in donations .. but ads are better .. for a podcast.

He has 400M downloads from ~300 episodes.

One subscriber paid $1k per month.

Despite respondents to the survey saying they'd pay $5 or $10 he tested $9.95 and $19.95 payment levels as the minimum and 83% paid whatever the lowest was. So, prior to the subscription 24% said they'd pay $5, and only 4% that they'd pay $10 but he still managed to only lose 17% (off the subscription page) when the minimum was $19.95 .. that's kinda crazy.

#iveneverheardofhim #isheahypnotist

Edit: People listen, then go away and hunt down the products, enough that companies will pay him more than [ 30k/(1M/5) ] ~$6 per subscriber per month??

I'd never heard of him before today either.

He wrote a book called the 4 hour work week that claims he makes 40k/month by only working 4 hours a week. The amazon reviews are a mix of creepy 5 star reviews by pod people and 20% 1 & 2 star reviews mocking it. The comments on his podcast (on castbox 200k subscribers) are similar with lots of whining about the length of the adverts and how boring the show is.

After a bit more looking... absolutely fascinating. Obviously he's a complete con-artist and he works like a dog but his marketing ability is psychopathic genius.

He began his career by pushing a supplement (first for the brain, then pivoted it to performance) https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/razodglh#supplement...

Not sure how well it’s working for them, but for 3+ years i’ve been subscribed to a podcast that has two feeds, one for shorter abridged episodes with ads, and one for longer ad-free episodes for paid subscribers.

Clearly most people don’t want to pay, but if your content lends itself to this kind of basic/premium situation, I think it makes a lot of sense.

> That’s why I have a closet full of Mizzen & Main shirts and drink Four Sigmatic. Not sure I would have known about those without you.

Four Sigmatic?

> Four Sigmatic is a US company specialized in superfoods, functional mushrooms and adaptogenic herbs.

Ok. To each their own, I guess.

Subscription-based media (almost) only works for niche publications. NYT is an exception but it's only partially funded through subscriptions. The New Yorker took decades to turn a profit, and has ads as well.

Based on the fact that his user base is so large, it makes sense that advertising works best. Especially considering how many listeners he would lose if he only released it to subscribers. The user base may be more valuable to advertisers, than the podcast is to subscribers.

A la carte is annoying when everyone starts doing it. Subscription fatigue is already setting in for music and video streaming services. No reason the podcast space would be different.

Still, kudos to Tim for trying.

A la carte works remarkably well with Patreon. Personally I support 11 different video, podcast, and writers.

Perhaps that’s the real takeaway: make it easy to do a la carte, and people will.

It works well for Patreon, but Patreon content creator earnings seem to follow the same power law that afflicts much of the economy. Almost nobody makes more than a couple bucks until they have network effects strong enough to fuel orders of magnitude higher earnings outside of Patreon with traditional (annoying) merch/advertising.

That's not to shit on Patreon. I think it's the right idea but still far from effective enough to consider creative funding a "solved problem" yet.

actually it doesn't work as well for patreon as they'd like because these small transactions still cost to much. banks charge you through the nose for them, so they take a share of the profit here.

I'd hesitate to generalize this across the podcasting space. Tim's podcast is pretty unique in this regard. He _really_ does have unique and interesting advertisers, probably because his scale means he can pick basically whoever he wants.

Sam Harris did this same experiment recently and has stuck with the ad-free model. I listen to both podcasts with roughly equal frequency and interest and I immediately subscribed to Sam but not to Tim.

Not sure what the mechanics are going on here but bottom line is that both models seem to work well in different contexts.

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