[ncallaway]

The blog post you linked appears to, in many ways, strongly undermine your argument.

You say (when linking to the blog post)

> When people say they will pay in surveys, most of them are flat out lying. Here's a recent example:

What the blog post says is that actually, the pre-launch survey closely aligned with the outcome:

> The really comical part is that I should have known, and I could have known. Actually, one could argue that I did know.

> Pre-launch polling on social media almost perfectly predicted the outcome. Here’s the tweet I used to test the waters, which had nearly 18,000 respondents. The results were:

> 72% – No, I wouldn’t donate.

> 24% – I would give $5 per month.

> 4% – I would give $10 or more per month.

> The comments on this post are really worth reading. The feedback was almost entirely positive towards ads and almost entirely “meh” about fan-supported. In other words, the answer to my question was clear from the outset: 99% of my listeners are totally OK with ads, and many of them look forward to finding new products and services through my sponsor reads.

The blog post's conclusion very much appears to be that—in hindsight—people were honest from the outset!

[pembrook]

My point on Tim's post was that a majority of his most passionate followers (people who also follow him on twitter and would take the time to answer a survey) would not pay for his content. I have no doubt the 72% contains some overlap with "people who complain about ads."

On the lying about willingness to pay reference, I was referring to actual data I've seen, which I posted below. This was from a media company I worked at (reposted here for context):

1) we surveyed users willingness to pay for a premium, ad-free content product

2) 32% said they would pay $1 or more per month

3) we launched said product

4) under 4% converted at $1 per month

[vorpalhex]

We have to be careful when we look at isolated data points. One, uh, "trick", I've seen newspapers in particular pull which will immediately cause me to not support them are confusing subscription terms.

"Special! $1 a month for 12 months". Well, that's $1 per month, that's perfectly affordable... except it's going to auto-renew at a mystery rate that you won't tell me.

My other recently seen favorites include, "Only $X for ultra premium content". What the hell is "ultra premium content"? Is it possible for me to still be walled out of parts of the newspaper? Are these like editorials (who cares) or like major stories?

"Only $1 a week". Ok, that works out to something like $52 a year but why in the world are you giving me a batshit insane term like weekly payments?

Patreon, Nextflix, and many others have this figured out: "It's $x a month. It'll stay $x a month for the immediate future and we'll let you know about price increases in advance." Done. Don't charge me by section, don't charge me in weird terms, don't throw opaque special offers at me.

[Maakuth]

Also there's no neat way to unsubscribe, you need to convince somebody via chat that you really don't want the subscription anymore. This seems quite toxic pattern and will keep me from subscribing to services doing this, such as NYT or WaPo, even at their discount rates.

[ncallaway]

> My point on Tim's post was that a majority of his most passionate followers (people who also follow him on twitter and would take the time to answer a survey) would not pay for his content

It's a fair statement that most people won't pay, but that is totally different point that the one you made in the previous comment.

Your prior comment was clear and direct. You stated that many people are flat out lying (with your emphasis on the word "lying"). Then you linked a blog post as an example of that.

I agree with the thesis that many people will not pay for non-ad supported content. I don't know that I agree that people are lying or dishonest about it. I certainly disagree with the characterization that they are flat out _lying_ about it.

[slg]

It depends what metric you are targeting. Some people create podcasts as an avenue to promote themselves, their projects, or their business. Tim Ferriss is one of those people. Other people create podcasts as their primary way to make a living. It doesn't make sense to put your podcasts behind a paywall if you are in the first group because the primary metric you care about is total listeners. However if you are in the second group a paywall might make sense since you probably don't care much about total listeners or conversion rates. The metric you care about is money and it doesn't take more than a couple thousand listeners before you can pull in a livable wage from listener supported podcasts. Just check out some of the numbers for podcasts on Patreon [1].

[1] - https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators/podcasts

[_69x2]

I think you are confusing patrons with podcast listeners.

What you see on Graphtreon is the number of patrons, meaning podcast listeners who decided to donate to the podcast through Patreon.

I don't know what the average conversion rate is, but I think it's safe to assume that patrons only make up a small percentage of total audience, I'd be surprised if it was higher than 5%.

In fact, it's probably significantly lower than 5%, my guess would be that it's more like 1%.

So, your assumption that it doesn't take more than 2000 listeners before you can pull in a livable wage is wrong, but maybe you meant patrons.

It depends on what your definition of a livable wage is, but my guess would be that you'd probably need an audience of at least 100,000 podcast listeners to make $5000/month on Patreon (assuming 1% conversion rate and an average donation of $5).

Also, it seems to me that you are confused as to how Patreon model works, creators who use Patreon don't put their main content behind a paywall, they simply throw in some extra goodies for patrons.

[slg]

I am very familiar with both podcasts and Patreon. I contribute to multiple podcasts on Patreon. Creators have a lot of freedom in how they setup their Patreon. It might not be the most common setup, but there are certainly some creators that keep almost everything behind the Patreon paywall. In those cases a listener is the same thing as a patron. That model isn't great for exposure and doesn't provide an easy avenue to grow the podcast without other means of promotion, but I have seen it be very successful for creators who already have a niche of fans who will support them. To repeat myself, the viability of the different approaches depends on what metric you are looking to optimize.