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Comment by bitpush | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea, and good job for getting ahead of the obvious criticism and doing a rev share.

However, this wont work. If there's an ad for Coca Cola, the whole reason why Coca Cola is paying the podcast host is so that the message would get to the listener. If anything, the money should be shared with Coca Cola, and not the podcast host - who has been paid already (for sponsored spots).

And at that point, it just becomes user paying Coca Cola directly, with you in the middle.

It is an inefficient system.

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The incentives are also not aligned here. You make money if there's more ads in the podcasts. In a world where there's no ads, your company wont exist.

So at some point, you'll have to start prioritizing making money ("proving your worth to users") and will start to make sure there are more ads in the podcasts, so that you can remove them.

And that is a lose-lose scenario. You will end up directly contributing to more ads in the podcast. This is called a second order effect.

In a world with no cancer, oncologists won't exist. Should they stop what they're doing now?

I know this is a flippant response, so I'll side step that and address the issue you're getting at.

You make money by solving an inefficiency.

"Payments on the web is hard. We'll make it easy" -> Stripe.

"It is hard to get a taxi" -> Uber.

"The legal system is hard to navigate" -> Lawyers.

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If your value prop is, people dont like listening to ads. The right approach is to offer subscriptions to ad-free podcasts. Buy our service for $x / mo and get ad free podcasts. But that wont be "ad blocking"

That's exactly what we offer - ad free feeds.

You dont offer anything :)

I cant copy/paste your website and rehost it on my domain (and remove ads or whatever) and claim that I'm doing everyone a favor. There's a word for it - and it is called stealing.

Not really concerned with how Coca Cola makes their money. It's about the host who might be concerned with ad revenue loss if enough people use our clean feeds to make a dent in their listener metrics.

> Not really concerned with how Coca Cola makes their money

That's a naive way of thinking. If Coca Cola see their sales are not going up ("ads are not effective"), they'll stop sponsoring podcasts, leading you to do less work, leading to people stopping to use your product.

And since you intend to make money out of this, you'll have strong incentive to keep this charade going. :)

If we're ever in a world where podcast hosts and advertisers need to rethink their business model, we've already won. Popular podcasts average 15% ads to content ratio. Worse than Cable TV. Listeners should have a way out.

> If we're ever in a world where podcast hosts and advertisers need to rethink their business model, we've already won.

Who's we? Nobody makes things for charity. Even you, who built something out of passion, is charging users for the product. You're here 'advertising' and spreading the word.

It is marketing, and it is the same thing that Coca Cola and others are doing as well. No need to get all judgemental.

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