Hacker News Reader

Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

Apparently he made $30M in the year before the deal.

If the deal lasts for more than 2 years, then he has made a serious error.

But you also have to assess risks. Joe is a prime candidate for getting canceled. Being on YouTube carries this risk for him.

On Spotify not only he got some cash upfront, but also significantly mitigated this risk, since platform is way more aligned (i.e. it's important business for Spotify and a footnote for YouTube).

It’s not YouTube vs Spotify, it’s Spotify vs every other platform. Lots of people just listened to his podcasts which can’t be cancelled.

That assumes that his podcast had at least 3 years of legs, which is not at all clear to me.

Is Spotify the only source of revenue from his podcast? I don't listen to JRE, but this thread suggests he's still running third-party ads on the show. Presumably then he's still getting some portion of that $30M/year on top of what Spotify pays him.

> Spotify doesn’t play or include ads that interrupt the listening experience of Premium subscribers. However, some podcast creators may include third-party advertising, host-read endorsements, or sponsorship messages in their episodes.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Other-Podcasts-Partners-etc...

Not only does he run the ads (though I suspect spotify reaps those benefits), they're randomly inserting them in the podcast now and it's annoying. Sometimes it's mid sentence.

Annoying to both pay for spotify and get hammered with ads. Granted I pay for the music, but it's still annoying as all.

Its even worse, up until a few weeks ago, you could rip his podcasts using youtube-dl. I am paying for a subscription to support him but ripping his podcasts and throwing away their garbage app in favor of Jellyfin. Now they have begun encrypting his podcasts with Widevine. :/

Since I still have to listen to ads, i'm thinking of just dropping the subscription and hoping there becomes a method to break this Widevine trash. I encounter a bug with their app on a daily basis and I am tired of it. From what I gather, there are different levels of Widevine encryption that limit video quality but the lower levels are crackable. I hope someone smarter than me tries the crack on the JRE podcast.

When this happened to me I assumed Spotify had become logged out of my account somehow. Nope, they’re injecting adverts randomly into paying customers podcasts. I cancelled Spotify that moment. I never really agreed with their attempted land grab on podcasts, this, however, I felt had really crossed a line. There are plenty of other podcasts I listen to, some without ads, supported only by Patreon, etc. so the money I spent on Spotify will get redistributed to them.

You can retire with a high standard of living for the rest of your life with that amount as a lump sum. It's not clear to me that the decision was wrong.

When is it enough money? $130M in two years, and he made an error to take it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com