When did paid podcasts become a thing?
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.
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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.