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Gotta respect Marco for all the success he's had with Tumblr, InstaPaper, (briefly) Peace, and of course Overcast so far...but I kinda feel like he is worried a
by falicon 11y ago
Gotta respect Marco for all the success he's had with Tumblr, InstaPaper, (briefly) Peace, and of course Overcast so far...but I kinda feel like he is worried about the wrong thing/people here.
Who cares if other devs. or companies don't like his business model? Does that affect his users or potential customers in any real way? I don't think so.
Also - the patron model is super interesting and I'm excited to see people continue to play with and test it...but I'm not sold that it's a sustainable solution either.
The question to me is: Do people care enough to pay for podcasts? And for those that do, in their mind are they actually paying for the content or the experience/environment? What pain is this specific app itself actually fixing or removing compared to my alternatives?
Marco has proven he's amazing at building experiences and environments people love...and I think he can continue to do very well down that path...but without owning/controlling/providing the content or the 'talent' on the client side he'll never break out of being just one of the middle-men in that part of the ecosystem (and thereby evaluated and paid by users as such).
- phren0logy 11y agoI think he cares about other devs because he respects them and considers them his peers. That aside, I agree with him that the small circle of podcast devs have much more to fear from oncoming train of podcast success. That success is bringing money, and money is attracting media conglomerates with money to burn. If they spend their time bickering with each other they will be a smear on the tracks. App markets develop and business models mutate, regardless of how much developers like it or not.
- untothebreach 11y agoJust one persons experience, obviously, but I have paid for podcasts before. Free podcasts are by far the majority of what I have listened to, but I pay to get the full episodes of "The NoSleep podcast", and have donated to other podcasts when they have the option there and I have liked them enough.
- falicon 11y agoCool - but do you feel like you are paying for the content or are you paying for the experience/environment that you listen to the podcast within? My point was just that when people do pay, in their mind I think they are paying for the podcast itself...and don't really care all that much about the middle men (same basic thing with music really -- there are, of course, exceptions)
- untothebreach 11y agoOh, I see. No, I am definitely not paying for the experience/environment per se, but I did pay for a podcast app that had features that I wanted. I.e., the most popular free podcast app on Android (Stitcher) didn't have any way to speed up the audio, cut silence, etc, so I paid for an app that did have those features. Maybe it does now, this was a while ago