Knowing there are podcasters on here I’m interested to know how this works with platforms. Podcasts are my bread and butter these days, more so than music. I do my listening on Spotify through the 15 euros or so I pay for a family subscription. Most I listen are indies done for love/enjoyment more than anything but there are also a fair few higher profile, high production value shows which catch the attention.
I imagine no money makes it’s way from Spotify (or whoever) to the creators. So is it basically free content for them to keep people like me subscribing? If correct sounds like they’ve got a good, and unfair, deal. When there’s advertising who gains? (Actually in spain where I’m listening most uk/us podcasts when they break for adverts don’t even have an advert…) Spotify etc or the creator? How does a podcast creator like Wondery to take one example fund what it does? Which doesn’t sound cheap.
But now there’s serious money being spaffed around on celebrity podcasts the likes of which I’ll never listen to. So some people are making serious money but can signing up Harry and Meghan really be worth it for Spotify?
I’ve started sponsoring a few where I can, but there are many and means are what they are.
Basically, after that ramble, there’s never been a source of entertainment that I’ve understood so little about. How on earth does it work? Is it just a bonanza of free content for the big corporates? Will independent podcasts, as the guardian asked the other day, die off? Any thoughts/enlightenment gratefully received.
Patreon seems to be the favoured way to go to “monetize” things
Advertising, or a “club” I think.
Caroline Crampton, of the fantastic Shedunnit, has a membership scheme that offers a reading club, and I think special offers.
The British History podcast does similar – a small fee and you get transcripts, a message board, and special episodes.
Great tips, Si. With these, I can understand that podcasts are worth investigating.
Caroline
https://shedunnitshow.com/
and British History
https://www.thebritishhistorypodcast.com/
sound infinitely more interesting than celebrities. Done with panache, enthusiasm and humour, by the looks of things. Good business model too. Try our free samples and subscribe if you enjoy it.
The podcasts that Spotify are trying to interest me in look frightfully dull by contrast.
When I was doing my own podcasts I just paid a monthly fee to a company who hosted the stream and created a Feed which gets picked up in iTunes and any other Podcast App that aggregates RSS feeds. Like most people it was just done for fun and and with a couple of mics and cheap audio editing software anyone can do it.
I remember at the same time Ricky Gervais tried to charge for his, and even sold them on CD (!) but otherwise it’s taken years for the commercial world to recognise the existence of Podcasts and use them for Advertising.
There are now people like Acast who are like a record label for Podcasters and I think once a Pod has a proven track record of listener figures they will sign them up and monetize them with Ads. No idea how much money that makes or whether it’s a long tail thing that hopes to turn a profit one day. Obviously with celebs getting in on that act that potentially makes it harder for amateurs to get attention and enough listeners to build up an audience and get Patreon subscribers.
The Spotify podcasts if I’m not mistaken are exclusive to Spotify so they’re not RSS feeds you can pick up with a regular Podcast App, so they’re there as an incentive to get more users signed up to Spotify
Are Ricky’s podcasts available on a coloured vinly?
Podcasts on Vinyl. Three more from them later…
Not all podcasts on Spotify are exclusive to that platform.
Podcasts that are available on iTunes and as RSS feeds can be put on Spotify too.
I support a few enthusiast pods I like via Patron – must add up if you have enough listeners though for most I doubt it does much more than cover the hosting costs.
Hello. We started our podcast http://www.nothingisrealpod.com as a hobby and we’ve taken steps to monetise it in the past year It still remains an intensive hobby! We moved over to Acast for this and they offer three ways of making money:
(1) Dynamic advertising: when you hand over the podcast file to Acast you Indicate where the ads should be, and acast will do the rest. Depending on where the podcast is downloaded they will insert advertising at the beginning, end and any appointed adbreak; ads that are specific to the locality where the podcast was downloaded. German when in Germany, Irish when in Ireland, et cetera et cetera. As far as I know, if you’re doing this through the acast app then the adverts can be even more specific. As a user of acast we can then login and see which ads have been played in which parts of the world when a podcast has been listen to. These payments are tiny and would really only scale up if you were getting 100,000+ downloads per episode – which we are not!
(2) Subscibers: Acast will work with Patreon to manage subscribers and it has its own Acast+. You decide how much and what people get. We offer bonus episodes and ad-free content for €6 / month. We are very grateful for our subscribers. I see other podcasts who are doing huge amounts of podcasting for their subscribers, 3 bonus episodes per week or what not! Ours isn’t a free-wheeling thing and it takes a bit of time to put a podcast together, plus our real lives can take over, we try to veer towards quality over quantity. For 2021 we are putting out 26 free episodes and will probably end up with a further 13 bonus episodes. That’s still 39 episodes we’ve had to put together in a year, about 48+ hours of content.
(3) Donations/tip jar: Acast also has a “give money” option. We have yet to be given a dowry by an eccentric millionaire.
There’s also merch. We have merch through RedBubble but it doesn’t generate much.
In answer to your question, what does Spotify get out of us? The dynamic advertising through acast is carried over into Spotify, so there are micro payments attached to our inserted acast ads played to people listening on Spotify. Certainly Spotify have the easier end of things – they do not give podcasters money for plays, so before we distributed through Acast, if anyone listened on Spotify it generated nothing.
Here’s another podcast that sounds fascinating. It tells the history of English in considerable detail.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
A pal of mine has now listened to 60 episodes and is really hooked. And he hasn’t even got to 1066 yet!!