The one thing we can say with certainty is that paid-podcasting is here to stay, and is going to be very lucrative for those willing to embrace the opportunity.
Substack is by now well-known for its ambitions to be “the Netflix of newsletters”, offering creators the chance to dish out free and paid-for subscription newsletters, and while the jury is out on how successful the Substack experiment is proving, it is attracting some high-profile names to help promote the service.
That’s par for the course, as is making very lucrative deals with said high-profile names to attract and keep them on board.
That in turn attracts the eager, the ambitious and the deluded to try their arm, which at least adds volume to the Substack platform, and of course Substack hopes enough will take off such that the platform can become profitable.
But newsletters are everywhere, and easily delivered direct to those who are interested. The Substack angle only becoming meaningful because it a) manages payments that funnel back to the creators, and b) shares the data (email data in this case).
Potentially that can be game-changer for the creator, and one can immediately see the appeal, being able to directly follow up with your subscribers.
Of course that’s also true of Mailchimp or any other of the more “traditional” email newsletter services, but they do not let you put some or all of your material behind a paywall.
But it seems Substack is not satisfied with just providing a subscription newsletter platform (albeit one with one subscription tier, compared to multiple tiers with Patreon) and has been planning a podcasting element, which has just gone live.
As we begin Q2 2022 there are already so many podcasting platforms out there it’s hard to keep track, with mega-bucks players like Apple and Spotify already in on the act and mega-bucks players like Google about to join them via YouTube.
At some stage there will be a shakedown and some smaller players will go to the wall, while others emerge stronger and still others are bought out by and absorbed into the mega-bucks operations.
But the one thing we can say with certainty is that paid-podcasting is here to stay, and it is going to be very lucrative for those willing to embrace the opportunity.
