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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

The legacy media industry had a huge amount of fat and inefficiency, lots of people sitting around pretending to work. Joe Rogan produces a top podcast that pulls a larger audience than the vast majority of TV shows, and does everything with about 5 employees. Regardless of what you think of him personally or the podcast content, that is amazing efficiency. And he started it before LLMs were even a thing.

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While I suspect you're not wrong about either inefficiency in large, well-funded media organziations or the efficiency of Rogan's operation, comparing his podcast to anything but a substantially similar TV show is hardly a fair comparison. Even a relatively low-budget scripted TV series is going to require a cast, writers, props, sets, costumes, hair and makeup, lighting, camera work, craft services, transportation, significantly more editing and postproduction, the list goes on, plus directors and producers and administrative personnel to manage all of this.

And that's exactly the point. It is unfair. TV shows and podcasts are both competing for the same audience, and yet the podcast can do it an order of magnitude cheaper.

> TV shows and podcasts are both competing for the same audience.

If by "audience" you mean "people," sure, but I don't think that's particularly meaninful. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that podcasts and TV shows aren't even kind of comparable or able to replace one another.

Wouldn't "audience" and "people" both just be a proxy for "time" though?

Not really, the time I set aside for shows, podcast, movies and games is all different. I am not going to give up watching slow horses to watch a podcast,

Sure, but for people without abundant time to spend alone then watching a show this evening kind of precludes also ingesting a podcast before tomorrow. It's not like the labour movements around the world have negotiated significantly more free time for the big mass of working humans since Netflix said that sleep is their biggest competitor back in 2017.

Yeah but podcast is low quality time; shows,movies are high quality, games are high quality high focus, music and podcast are lower on the rung. Its something you can have playing in the background and not pay attention.

Like the time I have for high quality stuff and low stuff are different and therefore different audiences. For Low quality stuff podcasts are fighting against tiktok

That's not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison. The inputs for an unscripted podcast are vastly different from a scripted TV show. They're different mediums for expression, and each carries different costs.

That's the point: lower cost mediums are taking audience market share from higher cost mediums, and that will force job losses in the higher cost mediums. Those mediums aren't completely interchangable but at the margins there is some substitution of audience time and advertiser dollars.

tbh I don't think there's competition between those two. From my experience podcasts fill the empty space, while TV/movies are competing for idle time with gaming, books, and short-form media.

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