Half the podcasts in my queue have suddenly become paid subscriptions. Meanwhile the overall industry is losing listeners. Seems like a lousy business model to not offer a free with ads feed. What a bizarre trend.
It’s that horrible situation isn’t it?
The internet was riddled with adverts everywhere. Intrusive things that ate up our time and our bandwidth.
So we used ad blockers.
It became clear that even the folk that didn’t use ad blockers were worthless. That is, the market decided their attention was worthless.
The bottom fell out of the advertising market, so business moved to a subscription model.
We all supported it initially. Netflix was held up as a brilliant model.
Then the subscription services got greedy and let advertising in anyway. Except that money no longer funds your experience, not does it really fund the creators. It just funds the owner of the streaming service.
Meanwhile, the lack of feedback that advertising gave as a metric means that the services are becoming worse, delivering lower quality product.
And now it’s 2023 and I find myself defending advertising.
hperrin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Advertising has become much less profitable after many countries have passed stricter data protection laws. It’s a good thing. Paying for services should be the norm.
ubermeisters@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Agreed. Hate it, but agree. I too, want free things, but I also want content that is not trash and not financially influenced by people who want to influence me. So if I want something nice, that means I gotta pay for it, or get it gifted to me.
Pratai@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Downvoted by kids who don’t understand that content creators don’t do it for free.
Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 1 year ago
I’m old enough to have known the internet before the ads, and there were a ton of forums where you’d find both information and help for free. Obviously most hobby stuff but still.
I listened to podcasts about roguelikes for example, and hanged out on the popular video game dev forums and it was all free and good.
Serious question: what is the content people create that is so costly today?
I mean it’s nice if you can live off your hobby expertise but there’s also a question about monetising like everything? Or what am I missing :-) ?
hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
This might also be because one of the biggest advertisers for podcasts went belly up. Coffeezilla made a video about it recently.
clearleaf@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It always felt like the entire podcast industry was running off the money of like three companies but it was such a weird idea I couldn’t believe it. I guess it was true.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Grim