The problem is you will never find our podcasts on the front pages of the directories like Apple or Spotify, but we are there if you search hard enough. If you are tired of ads, look harder.
- Ads
- Subs
- Leadgen for some other business
You get to pick your own poison.
Also in some countries you got public radio stations producing podcasts (even podcast first formats not played on radio) - while that might Fall under subscription, while not being a subscription on anything specific.
The coverage of topics is very good in some areas (non-tech) and so so in tech
(I use Sponsorblock on YouTube too since there are platform ads and then sponsors baked into the videos.)
And by foreign state actors.
There are some podcasters that release ad-free versions on Patreon or similar platforms; but the listening experience on those platforms is so bad that while I would be fully supportive of the concept of direct payment to remove ads, the only platform that functionally supports this at this time is YouTube.
I actually feel a tiny bit guilty about that. The ads are why the podcasts exist. Too many might drive away listeners, but too few drives away podcasters. I'm kinda baffled that the economy of it works at all.
For a bunch of them I pay for the ad free version, though I'm curious about the economics of that. As someone with enough money to opt out, I'm exactly the person the advertisers want to reach.
So even if you completely lost the top 5% or even 20% of incomes, what remains is plenty valuable to many companies.
I wish they'd at least use something other than ChatGPT. Its "voice" is absolutely grating.
What happened to podcast RSS feeds? Many are still available but it certainly isn't universal like in the past.
For making such bold claims in a supposedly data-driven way the data is very flimsy and badly cited. The citations are not even discoverable via the stated names and contents possibly hallucinated.
If this were an undergrad essay it would be failed.
This may be the part I like least. YouTube, and thus Google, have way too much power.
also am not familiar but I think that a lemmy community can be created with podcasts where people can share their podcasts or a mastodon/pixelfed community too.
federated options exists but the people there just don't exist or try to use it in this way.
Maybe a federated instance about podcasting (and a domain name related to it) can be established to become a de-facto (maybe non profit/donation running service) too.
I think that it could scale really a lot on OVH dedicated servers or Hetzner auction boxes and run on quite a substantially few amount of dollars for the infra that the google/youtube monopolistic power can go away.
It was smaller, but far from dead. More of a grassroots hobbyist phenomenon. Production quality was lower, but in some respects content quality was better because nerds nerding out without worrying about whether whatever they’re doing will attract enough listeners meant there was an incredible diversity of voices, perspectives and subject matter.
Serious podcasters need to treat it like a full time job, so they need to get their income from somewhere.