Ads Are Killing Podcasting
podcasts.rip
podcasts.rip
I actually feel a tiny bit guilty about that. The ads are why the podcasts exist. Too many might drive away listeners, but too few drives away podcasters. I'm kinda baffled that the economy of it works at all.
For a bunch of them I pay for the ad free version, though I'm curious about the economics of that. As someone with enough money to opt out, I'm exactly the person the advertisers want to reach.
So even if you completely lost the top 5% or even 20% of incomes, what remains is plenty valuable to many companies.
The problem is you will never find our podcasts on the front pages of the directories like Apple or Spotify, but we are there if you search hard enough. If you are tired of ads, look harder.
Big Tech wants the public, specifically their employees, investors and followers, to believe that there is no alternative to the use of third party intermediaries with data centers and billions in cash flow
With this PoC, the ISP makes money from internet subscriptions, the hosting company makes money from hosting trackers, but there's not _necessarily_ a business model for the podcaster. It is up to the podcaster (not a middleman^1) whether to "monetise" their work. For example, it is within the sole discretion of the podcaster, not the middleman, how the podcaster's work is used. If the podcaster wants to use their reach to promote or sell something to the audience, then that's an option, but not a requirement
Under Big Tech "feudalism", where access to the podcaster's (sharecropper's) work is intermediated by a third party, the podcaster is required to allow the intermediary to perform data collection, surveillance and advertising services with respect the podcaster's audience
The third party. not the podcaster, gets to choose the advertisers. The podcaster generally has no negotiating power. The deal is "take it or leave it"
There may also be issues around "censorship" or at least "discoverability" (as noted in parent comment) as the third party mediates access to the podcaster's work in furtherance of its own business goals, which may not always align with the goals of the podcaster. For example, the podcaster might have non-commercial goals as in the parent comment
I'm not sure it's possible to argue against a hypothetical PoC, e.g., "Don't try it", "It will never work", "It's been done before and it failed", etc. but no doubt HN replies may try
It stands to reason that the only effective argument against a specific PoC, real or hypothetical, would be for the PoC to be executed and then to fail
- Ads
- Subs
- Leadgen for some other business
You get to pick your own poison.
Also in some countries you got public radio stations producing podcasts (even podcast first formats not played on radio) - while that might Fall under subscription, while not being a subscription on anything specific.
The coverage of topics is very good in some areas (non-tech) and so so in tech
I am not interested in philosophy but I am glad that my money is used to create philosophy content that raises the overall culture in the country.
You should try that.
And by foreign state actors.
(I use Sponsorblock on YouTube too since there are platform ads and then sponsors baked into the videos.)
I wish they'd at least use something other than ChatGPT. Its "voice" is absolutely grating.
There are some podcasters that release ad-free versions on Patreon or similar platforms; but the listening experience on those platforms is so bad that while I would be fully supportive of the concept of direct payment to remove ads, the only platform that functionally supports this at this time is YouTube.
What happened to podcast RSS feeds? Many are still available but it certainly isn't universal like in the past.
It was smaller, but far from dead. More of a grassroots hobbyist phenomenon. Production quality was lower, but in some respects content quality was better because nerds nerding out without worrying about whether whatever they’re doing will attract enough listeners meant there was an incredible diversity of voices, perspectives and subject matter.
Serious podcasters need to treat it like a full time job, so they need to get their income from somewhere.
For making such bold claims in a supposedly data-driven way the data is very flimsy and badly cited. The citations are not even discoverable via the stated names and contents possibly hallucinated.
If this were an undergrad essay it would be failed.
This may be the part I like least. YouTube, and thus Google, have way too much power.
also am not familiar but I think that a lemmy community can be created with podcasts where people can share their podcasts or a mastodon/pixelfed community too.
federated options exists but the people there just don't exist or try to use it in this way.
Maybe a federated instance about podcasting (and a domain name related to it) can be established to become a de-facto (maybe non profit/donation running service) too.
I think that it could scale really a lot on OVH dedicated servers or Hetzner auction boxes and run on quite a substantially few amount of dollars for the infra that the google/youtube monopolistic power can go away.