Comedy Podcasts?

So Earwolf pulled the trigger on the archive paywall the other day. There has been much predictable (if slightly baffling to me) rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. I guess if you’re tight/broke and don’t want to pay for a Howl subscription you should download the back catalogue of Earwolf shows you like that haven’t yet gone behind the paywall ASAP.

The Earwolf CEO posted on Reddit yesterday that they’ll be adding a curated selection of past episodes to the non-paywall section, so there’s that. Some of the tantrums I’ve seen are definitely over the top, but I do empathize with people who are finding it difficult to adjust to paying for something that has been “free” for so long.

I can just about understand it for people who only listen to, say, one Earwolf podcast. And I sympathise with complaints about the app — it’s not great, though it’s not completely terrible either. But new episodes are still free except for the premium shows that were always behind the paywall. There’s still a fairly large amount of archive material available free. And it’s not like this is a surprise — they’ve been saying this would happen ever since they launched Howl.
My take is that if you care enough about several Earwolf podcasts to feel strongly about episodes more than 6 months old being inaccessible, then maybe you should consider paying for them so that the people making them can continue to do so. And, objectively, the Howl catalogue, even without the archives, is amazing value. I’d pay for it just for the Comedy Bang Bang! live shows, but the stand up specials alone are ridiculous. If you listen to just one every two months, it’s paid for itself.

Paywall for old episodes that were free is gross. Fuck that noise. It should not be acceptable. I could understand a system where new episodes cost a subscription for a month or a year, and then become free. I find it a pretty nasty thing to do to retroactively make things not free that once were.

Kevin Smith went back and removed all of the backing audio from the old episodes because it was copyrighted music, and couldn’t legally be used on shows that sell ads on streaming services like Stitcher.

Other places I have seen have had subscriptions for shows without ads, or other things. There would probably be a much better way to do this than what they have decided to do. I really do think that paid podcasts are really a tough sell to your average consumer, as so much is available for free elsewhere.

You do get shows without ads if you subscribe.

Why? It’s not like you already paid for them and now lose access to them. You got them for free when they came out. If you downloaded them then and haven’t deleted them, you still have them for free. You still get new episodes for free when they come out. You just have to pay if you want to access them again way down the line. For me that seems the least objectionable approach to paywalling. Especially when you look at the business realities, which is that it’s basically impossible to monetise old episodes with ads.

Well, it is completely changing a business model that ran unchanged for 5+ years is a big shock. I happily donated in the past to earwolf on some 5 dollar a month tier way back when, for a few years, but this is taking away access that I always had to the backlogs of shows I listen to. It sucks, and I think it is not the way that people should be serving podcast, and it sounds like the “How did this get made?” crew were blindsided by this paywall nonsense.

On top of that, apparently the android app barely works, and the paywall went up without warning for most folks. They were saying that they would give a large run up and warning before activating subscriptions so that people could download and save their favorites. That did not happen, and will not happen. I think that people should pay for great content, and that should be ad free, which they are doing. The Earwolf shows are great and worth paying for, but the way this was rolled out, throwing old free episodes into the vault is not the way to go about this.

It hasn’t been unchanged though.They launched the app with premium original podcasts and live shows and other stuff first. And it’s not like podcasts in general have never had paywalls before.

The actual switchover day blindsided HDTGM, and I’m not defending that, but Howl have been upfront about the fact that it was going to happen since the very beginning. If you’re an Earwolf fan, and that’s surely the people who have most stake in this, there’s no way you couldn’t know it was going to happen given that there’s bene a Howl ad in every single Earwolf podcast for a year.

Access which you never had to pay for and which you could at any point in the last year have guaranteed yourself permanent free access to. I’ve archived plenty of podcasts for fear of losing access to them, not just because of paywalls but because there’s no guarantee they’ll stay available after the podcast finishes (or even while it’s still going in many cases).

Obviously, certeris paribus everyone would prefer something to be free than have to pay for it. But if you’re going to have to pay for a podcast, I don’t get why this is worse than having to pay for new episodes, especially not given the large lead time.

That sounds shitty to me. I don’t like that I have to fear that I will lose access to something that I had before.

But it’s not like people can afford to keep hosting dead podcasts forever if they’re not making money off them. It’s just common sense to take precautions if having continued access is important to you.

Can’t go wrong with Joe Brogran - but his podcasts can be a bit long.

Couldn’t they take precautions now to ensure that their podcasts are hosted indefinitely? Or at least until the upcoming trump sponsored nuclear winter wipes out all hard drives on earth.

I find it hard to side with a large corporation taking something that was free, and making people pay for it.

Earwolf/Midroll is a large corporation now? Or are you talking Scripps? Because the Howl plan was in place before the acquisition.

And I’m not siding with them. I just don’t understand why this is worse than any other form of payroll. It was entirely avoidable, permanently, for anybody who has been listening to the podcasts affected.

Well, often times many startups like to set up their monetization systems so that they are attractive to large investment firms. So they can be acquired.

I mean, in the end, these guys deserve to get paid, but the suddenness, and wide range of the change is kind of crappy. It is clear from some of the dissent from the hosts of the shows that this wasn’t a decision that the creators got to make.

I also think that the bottom up method of monetization is a bad system. I think that the netflix system for TV works excellently. You can pay for episodes of a show as they air, or you can wait 6 months or a year for them to show up on streaming services, where you can watch all of your old favorites. I don’t think I would have watched the office or parks and recreation again, if I had to pay another service for that.

I think that restricting archives hurts new listeners the most, as they can’t listen to a show with Paul F Tompkins and go “I like that guy!” I want to go back and listen to some more shows with him, and then be walled off. That sucks. I guess I will have to ask my parents for their credit card to pay for this subscription, or I will listen to a copy someone put on youtube.

Where, you could have a system where new episodes cost money, and those too cheap to keep up with the show have to wait to listen to a new episode.

But honestly, I think that monetizing podcasts behind a subscription is a bad idea, because it restricts audience growth in a niche market.

I would also say, that I would have no problem with this system if everything prior to today was free, and anything else they made would be paywalled in 6 months. That is being upfront with people, and not monetizing something that was previously free.

People like free, and really disproportionally dislike when you make something that was once free, cost money.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/23/442921757/episode-386-the-power-of-free

I agree that people dislike it. People want free things. I just think they’re wrong. Like I say, there was no real suddenness. They have been talking about doing this for over a year.

There are loads of podcasts with Paul F Tompkins still available. There’s six months of Spont. There’s six months of CBB. There’s the entire history of TAH. There’s With Special Guest… . Sure. You can no longer listen to every single PFT podcast. But if you exhaust the freely available ones and are still hungry for more, I humbly suggest that maybe that means you should support him by paying for it.

This I largely agree with. To the extent it’s actually viable, which it seems to be so far, I prefer the MaxFun model, where donors get bonus content and can prioritise which shows get the most from their donations, but everything ordinary is free to all. I don’t really see how paywalling old episodes (and we’re talking really quite old - most podcasts will have literally dozens available for free) is any more restrictive of audience growth than paywalling new episodes. It matters a bit less for comedy than, say, gaming, but even so people prefer the new (and shows like Sklarbro Country/County are in fact topical).

I’d agree with this. We Hate Movies has specific episodes just for Patreon subscribers (Star Trek related, Animation related, etc) while leaving their flag ship show free all through their archives. Red Letter Media does something similar with extra content available to donors while keeping everything else free.

WNYC’s stable (eg Radiolab, 2 Dope Queens) is going Spotify exclusive for the first two weeks after release. Luckily for me, none of the shows I listen to is particularly time sensitive.

In other news, With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus is back from hiatus.

I see them mentioning 2 Dope Queens being 2 weeks exclusive on Spotify, but not the other WNYC’s shows. The other shows are just mentioned as being available on Spotify for both free and premium users.

Or am I missing a sentence somewhere?

The MBMBAM TV show (but no other Seeso shows, it seems) is on iTunes in the UK now… Has anyone watched it?

Apologies for another Howl plug, but The Adventures of Chickenman is now on it! I’m so stoked.

Edit: Also a bunch of other cool radio stuff, though I’ve already listened to all of them: Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and Flight Of The Conchords!

The BBC has set up a comedy podcast feed, Kench. First show is a miniseries by Ben Partridge, the guy behind the superb Beef And Dairy Network.