Technology

Advertising has become much less profitable after many countries have passed stricter data protection laws. It’s a good thing. Paying for services should be the norm.

It's that horrible situation isn't it?

The internet was riddled with adverts everywhere. Intrusive things that ate up our time and our bandwidth.

So we used ad blockers.

It became clear that even the folk that didn't use ad blockers were worthless. That is, the market decided their attention was worthless.

The bottom fell out of the advertising market, so business moved to a subscription model.

We all supported it initially. Netflix was held up as a brilliant model.

Then the subscription services got greedy and let advertising in anyway. Except that money no longer funds your experience, not does it really fund the creators. It just funds the owner of the streaming service.

Meanwhile, the lack of feedback that advertising gave as a metric means that the services are becoming worse, delivering lower quality product.

And now it's 2023 and I find myself defending advertising.

Once a free podcast goes behind an exclusive paywall, it's dead to me. That being said, there are several podcasts that I support that I exclusively listen to their patreon feeds because they are ad free.

I guess on the general topic of monetizing podcasts... How Did This Get Made was in town last night for a live show. Thought I might bring my son who's a movie buff.

The cheapest seats (ass-end back of the balcony) were $55. Priciest seats I saw were $125. Before fees. That was a REAL fast nope for me.

I absolutely want people to get paid for what they do. I'll sub to Patreons, I'll buy (also overpriced) merch, I'll deal with ad and sponsor breaks... But I will be fucked if I'm going to spend $70+ per person to see a live recording of a podcast.

One of the podcasts I used to listen to from Gimlet went Spotify exclusive, so I stopped listening as I will not use Spotify, and lo and behold it went back to being regularly distributed this season to all the apps. I don't think being paywalled will work well for podcasts either.

I've noticed a lot in my feed making that move also. I agree this may end poorly for a lot of good podcasts.

A lot of people are already sick of everything being a subscription based product. I know I pay for too many. There are so many ways to consume media you just move on to the next thing that looks interesting and is free with ads (for now). Podcasting loses listeners, podcasters move on or go free with ads again with a much smaller audience.

People want to support quality media creators, but there's only so much in the budget. Kinda like you pay for Netflix as entertainment but podcasts are more like radio, something you listen to but could start listening to something else if need be.

Not everyone wants to be beholden to advertiser sentiment.

I really like listening to some podcasts. It really helps me to get through the day. But man, i pay for spotify to not have ads, what's the point of doing that when podcasts just play their own ads? I don't mind a 4 hour podcast having two ads or so, i'll never listen to them, and i'll never buy or subscribe to their absolute garbage, but okay. But a 45min podcast with 3 lengthy ads, fuck off. Also when podcasts suddenly have a patreon, fine, but then they make 3min episodes where they just talk about their patreon and it shows up as a new episode, fuck off.
I always thought, fine, i guess they also need to make some money for their efforts. Then i saw a youtube video about a scammer who scammed some money from podcasters. They stole 4millions or so from a podcaster. They made 4million dollars to be stolen from but have to sell raycons, which are SHIT, doordash which is the worst, stupid ass real life lootcrates, if you want to buy shit you don't even know what you get and wo on. I don't know, i think it's fucked the way it is.

Nobody wants to pay. Look at the YouTube debacle right now? People don't want to pay a subscription and they don't want to see ads so they use adblockers.

Why offer free with ads when users are just gonna block the ads anyway?

Around 2004

A shameful culprit IMO was the Kermode and Mayo film review. Two wealthy broadcasters (one extremely wealthy) who left the BBC, created an objectively worse show, half of which immediately went behind a paywall. Then they started voicing atrocious adverts and wingeing that people should pay so they could keep the lights on.

They could easily have experimented with a Patreon, but the arrogance was clear.

The only upside was that I felt no pain in dropping them like a stone, but I do miss the old show and never found a good replacement.

Some things are worth paying for.