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Comment by zaidf | Hacker News Reader

A typical independent podcast with small-medium viewership really struggles to monetize.

It’s great if things in the German podcast scene are different than rest of the world, enabling German podcasts to make more from donations than Spotify.

But if that’s not the case elsewhere, can you really blame the podcasters? Let’s say you decide to bake specialty cookies and give them away while relying on donations. Months in, you realize the donations aren’t really covering your expenses and effort. Then someone comes along and offers you a multiple of your donations for an exclusive, enabling you to make a decent wage.

I guess you could say “you’re doing it against your cookie-loving fans”. But I could just as easily argue “your original fans didn’t help you get fair comp, so you found another set of fans/arrangement to get fair comp”

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Yes of course you could argue that. But they never asked for donations, they never asked their fans for the amount of money they need to do the thing they do.

The US values free speech very much, yet for some reason you will have a hard time to find any podcast who isn't dependend on or tied to some coporate interest (and be it the Nord VPN thing they are selling).

I am btw. willing to throw money their way, as I do with other podcasts. But the option wasn't there to begin with.

Most people don't want the hassle of running subscriptions. It's not as simple as putting a Patreon or PayPal link online - as soon as people become paying customers they start demanding things. It takes a lot of the joy out of being creative and turns it in to a job.

Having one sponsor like Spotify means you get paid but also retain a lot of freedom and distance from the audience. If I was a podcaster I'd much rather take that route, even if I lost some listeners.

> The US values free speech very much, yet for some reason you will have a hard time to find any podcast who isn't dependend on or tied to some coporate interest (and be it the Nord VPN thing they are selling).

I'm not sure I understand the "yet" here. Freedom of speech protects the ability to say things but has few implications on the incentives for saying things. It seems to frequently be cited as a variety of different things that are tangentially related to public discourse. Anyway, I'd hardly expect people in the 18th century to come up with a comprehensive framework for protecting against media outlets depending on corporate interests to monetize, if that's your concern.

I guess the point was that for a people that react very strongly to even the slightest hints of decreasing individual freedom, it's kind of ironic to have so many podcasts financed by corporate interests, which decreases their constitutional right to freely express their opinions on whatever subject.

For the podcasts I listen to, at least, they don't ever seem to feel constrained by their advertisers. At worst they seem bored by them; they don't particularly want to advertise underwear and mattresses. But generally, the advertisers are trying to reach a market that shares an interest with the people who make the podcast, and it just seems unlikely that they're ever being paid off to promote or avoid topics that they wouldn't naturally gravitate to (or from).

Perhaps that's because I'm selecting content with little political or controversial content. But even there, I suspect that people who do want that content will find that the advertisers who want them are the ones who naturally appeal to them anyway.

Consumerism in general is always insidious, but that's hardly limited to podcasting. There are a lot of paradoxes associated with being wealthy enough to be in an advertiser's demographic, and yet still be vulnerable to wanting something to make you happy.

I also do pay for podcasts, some via patreon and paypal but if I can find the IBAN I rather pay directly every month. I'm not paying much but (about 1 EUR / month / podcast) but I do it consistently.

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