Why hasn’t the mainstream media embraced paid podcasts?
PLUS: Which media companies are succeeding with hard paywalls?
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In today’s issue, I’m answering questions submitted by my readers. If you want to submit questions for this series, you have to be a paid subscriber. Subscribe here and get 20% off for your first year:
Why hasn’t the mainstream media embraced paid podcasts?
The first question comes from Taegan Goddard:
Do you have any thoughts on the paid podcast market?
The weird thing about paid podcasts is they’ve been embraced by small podcast networks and individual creators to great success, but they’re largely avoided by traditional publishers, even those that have integrated paid subscription models for their text-based content.
Look at the leaderboard for Patreon, which currently pays out over $1 billion per year to creators. It’s dominated by podcasters. That same report estimates that podcasters on Patreon are collectively generating $3.5 million per month. That’s at least $42 million a year, and that’s just on one platform.
For years, it made sense that media companies avoided paid podcasts simply because they were difficult to scale. You had to produce a custom RSS feed for each subscriber and they had to jump through a few hurdles to get them running on their podcast player. And platforms like Spotify didn’t even allow for custom RSS feeds.
But today, Spotify has custom integrations with platforms like Patreon, and both Apple and Spotify run native subscription tools that make subscribing easier than ever. And yet, for the most part, most traditional media outlets haven’t dabbled much in paid podcasts.
It’s worth mentioning that Slate, one of the few mainstream outlets to have integrated podcasts into its membership program, is currently having its most profitable year ever. Back in 2019, Digiday reported that 50% of Slate’s revenue came from podcasts.
Late last year, The Economist announced it was moving most of its free podcasts behind a paywall, so maybe the dam is breaking. Clearly, there’s an opportunity there, but most major publishers don’t seem too interested in exploring it.
Which media companies are succeeding with hard paywalls?
The next question comes from David Ramos:
You research a ton — would love to know if you've come across more paid-only media businesses like The Information and Nebula.
So I’m going to interpret your question as referring to media businesses with hard paywalls — in other words, they don’t have any sort of metered/freemium version, and they lock down just about all of their premium content for paid subscribers.
These types of media businesses are fairly rare, for obvious reasons. Without free content, it can be incredibly difficult to organically grow your marketing funnel. Businesses with hard paywalls tend to be supremely confident that they’re offering a differentiated product that literally can’t be found anywhere else. That’s why The Information doesn’t really bother with commodity news content and instead focuses entirely on original reporting and scoops.
That being said, I have come across plenty of hard paywall publishers. To make answering your question a little harder for myself, I won’t name any large media companies that literally everyone’s heard of — like the Financial Times or Netflix.
OK, so here are three media outlets that I think are doing some impressive stuff:
The Juggernaut
The Juggernaut was founded by Snigdha Sur in 2019, and it covers the South Asian diaspora — a demographic that’s not only underrepresented in mainstream media coverage but also punches above its weight in average household income. It’s one of the few media startups to have gone through YCombinator and it’s kept all of its longform content locked behind a hard paywall from the very beginning. I actually interviewed Sur for my podcast back in 2021.
I listened to a recent interview with her for The Rebooting podcast, and Sur revealed that she’s so committed to a hard paywall that she did away with The Juggernaut’s free trial. When an article would go viral, she explained, it would lead to a rush of free trial signups and then quick cancellations. Once she jettisoned the free trial, it reduced her churn considerably and she saw a sizable jump in revenue.
In my interview with Sur back in 2021, she talked about how there are lots of talented South Asian journalists who work for mainstream outlets but rarely get to write about issues related to their culture, so they jump at the chance to write longform freelance pieces for The Juggernaut. It’s a great example of a small publication that’s hyper focused on delivering premium content to an underserved niche.
Air Mail
I have a confession to make: when Air Mail launched in 2019, I assumed it would fail.
It’s not that I don’t think Graydon Carter is a talented editor, it’s just that he came up in a bygone era when print media still had fat profit margins, and I just didn’t think he could adapt to the harsh economics of digital media. After all, that’s largely the reason why Tina Brown failed during her stint running the Daily Beast — she wasted a bunch of money acquiring Newsweek because she was too wedded to a print mentality.
But it seems like Air Mail has done a fairly good job of attracting a well-educated, affluent readership. Not only has it built a healthy subscription business, but it’s also brought in the kind of upscale advertisers that typically buy full-page ads in glossy magazines. I especially like the Wes Anderson-style design that gives the publication a distinctive flavor.
Puck
I know I’m cheating a little by mentioning Puck since I’ve praised it several times before in this newsletter, but I just really admire its approach.
Most of the media startups of the 2010s raised a bunch of money and then used it to hire large staffs of 20-somethings who were relatively inexperienced and therefore inexpensive. Puck, on the other hand, not only exclusively hires a much smaller number of seasoned veterans, but it also gives them equity and a cut of the revenue they bring in.
The end result is a relatively lean publication that punches far above its weight with producing premium content. And because it was so subscription-centric out of the gate, it was able to immediately reduce its burn rate so it didn’t have to constantly go back to investors to ask for more money.
And while Puck keeps all of its longform written content behind a paywall, it also produces multiple free podcasts where their writers come to expound on some of the topics that they cover in the publication. This allows Puck to have a pretty decent marketing funnel without giving away its core product.
Quick hits
I agree that the potential upside of Disney's Epic Games investment is huge — it just all hinges on whether it can successfully create a shared universe where gamers can interact with Disney IP in real time. [Digiday]
404Media, the writer cooperative started by former Vice journalists, says it's now "profitable" — I put that word in quotes since it's unclear what it means to be profitable when most of your revenue is presumably going to paying co-founder salaries. Either way, this is an encouraging sign for the future of writer cooperatives as an alternative to traditional media. [Nieman Lab]
In addition to having a bad strategy, The Messenger sounds like it was a hellish place to work. [WashPo]
It's probably a good thing for Hollywood that it's producing fewer TV shows. During the streaming bubble there was just a lot of dumb money funding mediocre programming, and now streamers will need to focus on what's actually resonating with audiences. [NYT]
The Cut is one of the few mainstream media outlets that's seeing its ad revenue increase. [Digiday]
This guy had no background in the music industry, but through writing his newsletter he eventually became one of the foremost authorities on the business of hip-hop. [Growth in Reverse]
What the women's suffrage movement and the income tax have to do with the passing of Prohibition [Momentary Experts]
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We invested in a podcast startup that would male it very easy to put local podcast content behind the paywall of local publishers. This had been successful in Norway since 2016 or so and helped publishers grow their subscriber base.
German local newspapers are still that: paperfocused. It didn’t catch on at all here.
I really like the Economist podcasts and subscribe to their Plus service, but based on how often they entreat their listeners to sign up for it, the numbers can’t be very good!