The Program 2025 annual review: How much money does an audio drama podcast make? | Hacker News Reader

The Program 2025 annual review: How much money does an audio drama podcast make?

programaudioseries.com

98 pointsI-M-S28 comments

Hi, I'm the author of The Program audio series, a fairly successful fiction podcast that launched on HackerNews in 2018. Seven years later, this little sci-fi anthology is still ongoing, having released 37 (soon 38) episodes and surpasaing 1 million downloads.

I chronicle the ups and downs of creating a niche artistic product such as this in annual reports, the latest of which I just released last week. It offers a transparent view into what goes into making a creative project such as this, and also what you get out of it, because I share all the financial data down to specific revenue streams.

As such, I hope it can be of use to others who are undertaking a similar endeavour. Feel free to ask questions should you have any!

Cheers

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Thanks for posting this detailed history and breakdown. And congratulations on your success. As someone with a podcast in the same ballpark of downloads, I will say it's a real testament to how much people must like The Program that you have managed to monetize to the tune of ~$30K CAD in a single year with just 140,000 downloads in the same year. That's really good! People must love what you're doing and that must be very gratifying. Cheers!

A very astute observation - The Program's audience is indeed loyal if not large. I mentioned in some previous reports that I might have painted myself into too big of a niche with a sci-fi audio drama at the intersection of IT and humanities, but people who like it seem to really love it. 1000 true fans, and all that I guess.

> The Program audio series is a sci-fi anthology podcast set in a future in which Money, State, and God became fused into a single entity called the Program. Each episode is a standalone story focusing on ordinary people inhabiting this extraordinary world. And for them, it is not this future that is terrifying - it is our present.

> I’m likely further hamstrung by the fact my content is high-brow & long-form, which comes at a disadvantage in the contemporary media landscape.

I think it comes at an advantage for building a loyal fan base in audio drama podcasts though. The kind of fan base that may want to support you financially.

Sounds like a great show, will give it a listen.

To the author: do you use AI at all in the creative aspects of the production? I assume that AI assistance in creative writing is now mainstream, and an accepted tool for most writers. I am interested to know your thoughts on this subject and if you use AI then what sort of methods do you use?

Note: Google Gemini reports that "the most successful writers in 2025 use me as a "distillation machine." They write 1,000 words of raw emotion, then ask me to help them find the "300 words that actually matter"

I haven't really found a way to incorporate AI into my creative process.

I do sometimes use it as thesaurus on steroids when I can't think of the right word or if I need to check grammar / sentence structure (I'm not a native speaker). I would never use AI in the way Gemini self-reports (and I doubt that's really a thing anyway).

I might be tempted to use it for episode art if I didn't have access to a professional illustrator.

I am experimenting with some AI-generated music at the moment, but that's for background cues that I'd use canned royalty-free music for anyway (emotionally important scenes have tailored-made music done by a professional composer).

One way I'm eyeing to use AI in the future is as a way to translate what are currently audio stories into video. But I feel we're still not there.

I’m writing my first sci-fi novel, and I’m using it for two main things. One, as a basic sanity check for the story, pacing, internal consistency, character development, etc, and basic copy editing. I’ve also used it to generate images for settings to go in the lore bible, so I can pin down what I see in my head into something tangible that I won’t forget. This isn’t the only step, I have human beta readers to double check the LLM, but it often tells me easily verifiable things, and it is often right, (for instance, this sentence reads funny), so it definitely adds value in that sense. Subjective things are a bit harder to trust, but that can be the same thing with subjective feedback from humans too, though of course the difference is that the LLM isn’t going to buy my book, whether or not it loves it.

Google Gemini has literally no idea how it is being used. It made that up.

Yes it sounds like a bold statement. I called Gemini out on that and it admitted that it over-egged its confidence on that assertion.

But presumably the LLMs do have some knowledge about how they are used?

On further probing Gemini did give a plausible justification - in summary:

"Creation is easy. Selection is hard. In an era of infinite content, the "most successful" writer isn't the one who can produce the most; it's the one with the best taste. Using an LLM as a distillation machine allows a writer to iterate through their own ideas at 10x speed, discarding the "average" and keeping only the "potent."

LLMs have no knowledge (really “knowledge-like weights and biases”) outside their training set and system prompt. That plausible justification is just that — a bunch of words that make sense when strung together. Whether you’d like to give that any epistemic weight is up to you.

More like whether one is correct in giving it any epistemic weight. Not everything is opinion, some things really are clearly right and clearly wrong and attributing thought, reasoning, and analysis to an LLM is one of those things that’s clearly wrong.

Why would Gemini (the text model part) have that info? I'm sure that Google has some kinda analytics, or so on, but it wouldn't necessarily be part of training, the system prompt, or distillation directly.

The only plausible avenue I see is Gemini ingesting Google press releases about how cool their AI is.

Leave it to the reader to decide how informative that would be.

> I assume that AI assistance in creative writing is now mainstream, and an accepted tool for most writers.

It absolutely is not. In fact the Nebula awards just banned entries from having _any_ AI use involved with them whatsoever. You can't even use them for grammar correction.

I'm not sure quite how that works. Google Docs will suggest various changes which I take into account or don't. And they certainly correct misspellings. You can choose to decide that's not AI but it's a grey line.

For writing I've sometimes used LLMs to speed up some essentially boilerplate. Never used for something that's not pretty much routine that I could easily do but would probably spend some time doing so.

For anything that might be a Nebula submission, it's hard to imagine LLMs doing anything beyond the copyediting level (which may not be well-defined but seems a reasonable threshold).

The irony!

I get it; not very sci-fi.

Well, they want to preserve a role for the editor; because the editor is not just checking the grammar but also the content, and weighing in with their relative objectivity on the current state of the story, what should be improved, what was good and what didn't work, etc. and if we have AI glazing us continuously we will just produce slop; it may look like good fiction but it will not read like it, and people can tell the difference!

That’s excellent, more respectable groups need to take this kind of strong stance.

Not even grammar correction? That's lame and kinda evil.

When you submit your manuscript to a big publisher I guarantee they're using AI to check it (now). At the very least, AI is the only tool that can detect a great number of issues that even the best editors miss. To NOT take advantage of that is a huge waste.

It sounds to me like they're just trying to push out independents and small publishers. Because you know they're not going to ask big publishers if they use AI (who will likely deny it anyway... Liars).

FYI: AI is both the best grammar checker ever as well as the best consistency checker. It'll be able to generate intelligent lexical density report that will know that you used "evasive", "evaded", and "evading" too much (because it knows they're all the same base word). They're also fantastic at noticing ambiguities that humans often miss because they're like-minded and "know what you mean." (Our brains are wired like that to improve the efficiency of our repetitive tasks like reading words).

AI tools can help you improve as a writer and enhance your craft in a lot of ways. To not take advantage of that—to me—feels like burying your head in the sand and screaming, "LA LA LA LA! I don't want to think about AI because it can be used for bad things!"

I've chatted with many writers about AI and nearly all of them don't understand the technology and assume it's literally just taking chunks of other writers works and spewing them out one sentence at a time.

I literally had a conversation with a writer that thought you could take ten sentences written by AI and trace them back to ten books.

That literally *is* what they’re doing though, just not at sentence granularity—they’re doing it at both larger and smaller scales. Sometimes they may give you a plagiarized paragraph, sometimes they’ll give you a plagiarized phrase, sometimes they’ll give you a structure that they fill in with “their own” words where the structure itself was taken from something… They do nothing original.

This is informative for an indie audio podcast. I wonder how the economics and scale change for podcasts published by studios like Audible or even smaller ones like Pushkin

> Patreon offers so many more features and user benefits that it’s not even worth comparing the two.

As someone who subscribes to numerous Patreons including those which are podcasts… Patreon is horrible from a user perspective. It’s UX makes it so I hate when I have to use it. The less I need to use it, the better.

Couple that with the god awful pod casting apps that currently exist, it’s amazing podcasting is still so strong. It’s a testament to the creators that people will wade through such horrible UX to support the people and creators they do.

Genuine question: what's harming your experience in current podcasting apps?

I've been using AntennaPod for a while and used a few different ones in the past. They all seemed to work well enough.

> Genuine question: what's harming your experience in current podcasting apps?

Oh, where do I begin beyond just saying they are trash. I've used all the big names and each one seems like it was created with a the same basic idea in mind: show the latest episodes of a podcast, and have some form of pagination. Which is fine if that's all your podcast does and isn't meant to be listened to from the beginning.

But the moment your pod cast might have different shows or parts or otherwise intend to start at the beginning, it's suddenly hit or miss. Basically, it makes an assumption about how podcasts should work and ignores the reality of popular podcasts out there.

Not to mention some are just obtuse to use. I forget which one but I was trying to add a feed to a popular one and there was NO where to add my own feed. Spent five minutes looking and there was no way to add a URL feed. Like, that's core 101 functionality.

Like I said, I tried the popular ones and they all were annoying to use. I realize this comment doesn't help much, mostly because it was earlier this year that I tried them out and became frustrated so it's mostly me thinking through how much they sucked and not much on the specifics.

I think the best way I can think of it is they all did the bare minimum and stopped.

I use Apple's Podcast app because it's free, it syncs, and it while it sucks, I don't want to pay for something that isn't better than free.

I'm on iOS, so AntennaPod won't work for me.

I'm a Pocket Casts user, and see that it was one you tried.

Pocket Casts lets you select the episode order (as well as do things like group by season). I think it's pretty common to be able to add RSS feeds by putting them in the directory search field, and PC does this as well.

I've had absolutely zero problems using Pocket Casts to add custom Patreon feeds, and to listen to episodes in the other they came out.

Thanks for sharing! I've found your perspective interesting. I mostly listen to audio dramas, which are linear so I indeed didn't think about non-linear listening.

I agree that adding by URL is a must. I find other features like ability to download an episode or "Mark as played" as super useful too.

I understand where you're coming from, but after a long period of stagnation Patreon is improving massively year over year.

As for podcasting apps, I use Pocketcasts and I'm very happy with it.

> I understand where you're coming from, but after a long period of stagnation Patreon is improving massively year over year.

Yep. I've seen the improvements. My comment I feel stands for Dec 26, 2025, as an accurately reflection of their current state.

> As for podcasting apps, I use Pocketcasts and I'm very happy with it.

I tried Pocketcasts. It's what helped make up my rant above.

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