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Ben Thompson & James Allworth had a nice discussion recently on the podcasting space and how Spotify is posed to close over this space. https://overcast.fm/+Bi

by nikivi 6y ago

Ben Thompson & James Allworth had a nice discussion recently on the podcasting space and how Spotify is posed to close over this space. https://overcast.fm/+BihnTujyQ https://overcast.fm/+BihnTujyQ Disregarding over all the negatives of centralizing podcast discovery in one place, I would love to pay one fee and get 0 ads on all the episodes. Where the money is then distributed to the podcast hosts I listen to the most (like Spotify does already with music). It's so bizzare to me how ads are still a thing. I never ever bought anything from an ad (my mind subconsciously ignores everything I hear in an ad & often paints the product in the ad in a negative light). And I lose quite a chunk of my time speeding over (the same ads) in the episodes I listen too.

r00fus 6y ago
Spotify is free with ads though. So it's more like Joe isn't running his own ad program, but instead letting Spotify run the ads, or provide premium ad-free tier.
- nikivi 6y ago
  Sure, I'd love to have a model where if you don't pay a premium fee, you get the ads as part of the episode. However if you do pay, those ads go away. Although it does question who would pay to put ads in the first place if you can skip them. And people that will pay to skip are ones you want to target. I hope there is a model that can work that makes ads worse off than alternatives as they are cancer.
  - haihaibye 6y ago
    Spotify runs intentionally annoying and frequent ads for itself, saying they'll go away if you pay them. I pay, it's very cheap for how much I use it.
shrimp_emoji 6y ago
I just hate how Spotify is trying to bring music back into the pre-download era. As a society, we somehow decided paying for and downloading DRM-free music is acceptable (though strangely not for movies and shows), but now you have albums becoming Spotify exclusives, and (just like with movies and shows) I can either sign up for this streaming service or hope I can download 'em through torrent or YouTube[0]. :T Ech 0: youtube-dl -i -f 140 -o '%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://youtu.be/hzpDOB2JYKc?list=PLXPYMcRIi2fHdvKx6Orw2ux9Lpj3tsBC2 https://youtu.be/hzpDOB2JYKc?list=PLXPYMcRIi2fHdvKx6Orw2ux9L...
jessaustin 6y ago
Apparently as a podcast consumer you prefer the "premium" Spotify model. As Thompson and Allworth have explained numerous times, they'll never be on Spotify. Centralization is not the reason for this decision, even though it's bad for humans in general. The main reason is they want a direct relationship with their customers, which may be redundant to say because does anyone on Spotify actually have a customer other than Spotify? (OK your link to some goofy aggregator instead of the actual Exponent podcast [0] sort of undercuts this; well played.) Interestingly, Thompson has explored other funding mechanisms for his other podcasts [1]. He prefers "open and paid" to "closed and free-as-in-beer". I have "subscribed" to several podcasts that would do well to use his tech; after paying the yearly fee I was given a link to a "secret" feed that could be shared with anyone if I or the podcast app I'm using chose to do so. In many podcast apps, you can fast-forward through advertisements. When Spotify decides they have to have advertising in addition to subscriptions in order to make investors happy, their app won't allow such fast-forwarding. In that sense Spotify's new podcast model is a bit of a scam on investors. Buying talent with invested money makes sense as long as that investment is coming in. After that stops, the underlying business won't support it, and stars like Rogan will be back on RSS. [0] https://exponent.fm/ https://exponent.fm/ [1] https://stratechery.com/2020/dithering-and-the-open-web/ https://stratechery.com/2020/dithering-and-the-open-web/
Marsymars 6y ago
> Disregarding over all the negatives of centralizing podcast discovery in one place, I would love to pay one fee and get 0 ads on all the episodes. Where the money is then distributed to the podcast hosts I listen to the most (like Spotify does already with music). This is one aspect of ad-free monetization that I'm not really comfortable with. I value my content for reasons other than "how much of my time they take" - in fact, for a given amount of information, the podcast is more valuable the shorter it is. I really just want a model where I pay some dollar figure in exchange for each episode or set of episodes (or album or discography for music, etc.) - high-value podcasts are free to set higher fees, and I'll pay more for them. Basically I want podcasts on Bandcamp, I guess.

by nikivi 6y ago

r00fus 6y ago

Spotify is free with ads though. So it's more like Joe isn't running his own ad program, but instead letting Spotify run the ads, or provide premium ad-free tier.

nikivi 6y ago
Sure, I'd love to have a model where if you don't pay a premium fee, you get the ads as part of the episode. However if you do pay, those ads go away. Although it does question who would pay to put ads in the first place if you can skip them. And people that will pay to skip are ones you want to target. I hope there is a model that can work that makes ads worse off than alternatives as they are cancer.
- haihaibye 6y ago
  Spotify runs intentionally annoying and frequent ads for itself, saying they'll go away if you pay them. I pay, it's very cheap for how much I use it.

shrimp_emoji 6y ago

I just hate how Spotify is trying to bring music back into the pre-download era. As a society, we somehow decided paying for and downloading DRM-free music is acceptable (though strangely not for movies and shows), but now you have albums becoming Spotify exclusives, and (just like with movies and shows) I can either sign up for this streaming service or hope I can download 'em through torrent or YouTube[0]. :T Ech 0: youtube-dl -i -f 140 -o '%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://youtu.be/hzpDOB2JYKc?list=PLXPYMcRIi2fHdvKx6Orw2ux9Lpj3tsBC2 https://youtu.be/hzpDOB2JYKc?list=PLXPYMcRIi2fHdvKx6Orw2ux9L...

jessaustin 6y ago

Apparently as a podcast consumer you prefer the "premium" Spotify model. As Thompson and Allworth have explained numerous times, they'll never be on Spotify. Centralization is not the reason for this decision, even though it's bad for humans in general. The main reason is they want a direct relationship with their customers, which may be redundant to say because does anyone on Spotify actually have a customer other than Spotify? (OK your link to some goofy aggregator instead of the actual Exponent podcast [0] sort of undercuts this; well played.) Interestingly, Thompson has explored other funding mechanisms for his other podcasts [1]. He prefers "open and paid" to "closed and free-as-in-beer". I have "subscribed" to several podcasts that would do well to use his tech; after paying the yearly fee I was given a link to a "secret" feed that could be shared with anyone if I or the podcast app I'm using chose to do so. In many podcast apps, you can fast-forward through advertisements. When Spotify decides they have to have advertising in addition to subscriptions in order to make investors happy, their app won't allow such fast-forwarding. In that sense Spotify's new podcast model is a bit of a scam on investors. Buying talent with invested money makes sense as long as that investment is coming in. After that stops, the underlying business won't support it, and stars like Rogan will be back on RSS. [0] https://exponent.fm/ https://exponent.fm/ [1] https://stratechery.com/2020/dithering-and-the-open-web/ https://stratechery.com/2020/dithering-and-the-open-web/

Marsymars 6y ago

> Disregarding over all the negatives of centralizing podcast discovery in one place, I would love to pay one fee and get 0 ads on all the episodes. Where the money is then distributed to the podcast hosts I listen to the most (like Spotify does already with music). This is one aspect of ad-free monetization that I'm not really comfortable with. I value my content for reasons other than "how much of my time they take" - in fact, for a given amount of information, the podcast is more valuable the shorter it is. I really just want a model where I pay some dollar figure in exchange for each episode or set of episodes (or album or discography for music, etc.) - high-value podcasts are free to set higher fees, and I'll pay more for them. Basically I want podcasts on Bandcamp, I guess.