Half the podcasts in my queue have suddenly become paid subscriptions. Meanwhile the overall industry is losing listeners. Seems like a lousy business model to not offer a free with ads feed. What a bizarre trend.
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.
This might also be because one of the biggest advertisers for podcasts went belly up. Coffeezilla made a video about it recently.
Downvoted by kids who don’t understand that content creators don’t do it for free.
I’m old enough to have known the internet before the ads, and there were a ton of forums where you’d find both information and help for free. Obviously most hobby stuff but still.
I listened to podcasts about roguelikes for example, and hanged out on the popular video game dev forums and it was all free and good.
Serious question: what is the content people create that is so costly today?
I mean it’s nice if you can live off your hobby expertise but there’s also a question about monetising like everything? Or what am I missing :-) ?
Everything needs to be MoNeTiZeD today, even hobbies should be income streams.
Fuck that
Ad-supported approaches normalized both free content (in the eyes of the consumer) and also getting paid for creating even very niche content (in the eyes of the creator).
Well these days it still happens. Most lemmy instances, including my own, are free without donations available.
Serious question: what is the content people create that is so costly today?
I mean it’s nice if you can live off your hobby expertise but there’s also a question about monetising like everything? Or what am I missing :-) ?
This applies to people that create across any craft. I guess my question to you would be:
“Why do you believe you are entitled to the efforts of their hobby for free?”. If the creator is choosing to give it away for free, and you’re consuming it for free then everyone is happy.
However if the hobbyist is choosing to charge for the content, your choice to pay for it or stop consuming it. Just because they were doing it for free at one point doesn’t obligate them to do it forever for free if they don’t want to. You can lament that you don’t have it for free anymore of course, but getting upset with the creator because you’re not getting it for free seems very entitled. That creator doesn’t owe you anything.
I agree. YouTube and Podcasts should NOT be the primary income or the people making them. They should make it due love of the subject. Get a real day job and do that things in their free time.
I’m also sick and tired of everything being money driven. End of the day I can EASILY live without YouTube and podcasts.
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.
I’m a little agnostic on piracy. I don’t mind if others are into it, but I use my local library. I watch older films that can be found cheaply. Sometimes I just choose to do something else.
They keep you on this hook, this notion of current culture. The excitement of the new big thing that everyone’s watching, but really your fomo is being exploited, and often that’s also true of people pirating the material. They are still contributing to this very social form of advertising display.
However, I’d stand by pirates who are looking to find films that have been made, deliberately, unavailable in the public space because corporations can see profit in their absence.
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’m guessing that’s the one that went behind the exclusive paywall?
I was more so asking about the patreon feeds you mentioned
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.
