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.
Some things are worth paying for.
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.
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.
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.
Around 2004
