The New York Times will now charge for past episodes of its popular podcasts | Hacker News Reader

The New York Times will now charge for past episodes of its popular podcasts

theverge.com

14 pointsmicroflash15 comments

They'll be cutting off a significant discovery source, though. That's how I subscribe to most of my podcasts -- somebody links to a good episode and I like it so much I subscribe.

IMO they're probably better off with the exact opposite approach -- make all the episodes but the latest one free, and put the latest one behind a firewall so people who don't pay are a week behind.

That's what almost all of the Patreon-funded creators do.

The Patreon approach works for non-news content.

But stuff like the Ezra Klein show is a mix -- some of it is more evergreen content (interviews with authors), but there's also a lot of stuff that is topical for the specific week. Getting it a week late, you might as well not get it at all.

The back catalog approach is consistent with the "news archives" approach that a lot of newspapers and magazines have -- even if you're allowed to access a certain number of free stories per month, the "archives" are all locked behind a paywall.

I think it makes sense -- the most-shared episode is probably always going to be within the most recent two, while it's the real fans who are going to go through the whole back catalog and are willing to pay.

It doesn't say anything about whether they'll remove the ads from the podcasts though.

I don't really mind paying for the podcasts, but it's going to piss me off if I still have to mash the 15s-forward button every fifteen minutes.

You can also say "hey google fast forward four minutes" instead of unlocking the phone and trying to hit that tiny button eight times.

Thanks -- I've tried with "Hey Sonos" for my (Sonos) Bluetooth speaker but it doesn't work -- it still only fast-forwards 15 seconds.

That's my big problem with youtube premium.

I don't mind creators asking people to support them on patreon, etc. But paying $X per month and still seeing sponsored content, is kind of annoying.

At least mark the sponsored content and allow premium members to skip the video when it comes on.

Worse is when the video is targeted to the hobbyist, but is sponsored by some large customer that charges thousands of dollars for a product or service. So e.g. Altium Designer costs thousands per year. But you can only get a free 90 day subscription, at which point the license cost kicks in.

If you like a podcast enough to go through back catalogue, probably worth throwing them a monthly fee every once in a while to grab everything.

That said, are there any communities out there that diligently archives podcasts? Seems like pretty effort trivial considering rss+size. I was hoping more people was going to use PLEX podcast for this, but it was bad, and got axed.

> probably worth throwing them a monthly fee every once in a while to grab everything.

How would you do that though? I'm assuming Spotify and Apple Podcasts will remove your downloads once it detects your subscription has ended.

And I assume there won't be any way to just download raw MP3 files for anything in the back catalog.

I'm assuming there's ways to bulk download out there, or it might be a project. A few of the podcast I support still use password protected rss where it was pretty straight forward to bulk archive everything. And I'll pop in 1-2 times a year to grab new exclusive stuff.

This isn't password-protected RSS, though. The article explains it requires Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and you either have to subscribe within those or link your existing NY Times subscription.

There's tools/extensions/userscripts to download from browser if there's an desktop interface. At least I assume, I use one to grab various online M3U8 audio that doesn't allow downloads. It would be a PITA for huge backlogs, but I haven't came across many services where you can't get the audio... somehow.

https://github.com/lightpohl/podcast-dl

Pretty opposite to the traditional approach of putting latest podcasts behind a paywall as "preview episodes".

No issue here, I don’t find that I go back too far anyway on their podcast. Currently have a subscription so also doesn’t impact me. I’ve always wondered if these podcasts ever make that much money, I for one never click on ads on websites nor would I hear an ad during a podcast and look into that product.

Squeezy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com