Paywalls, Podcasting, and Prejudice

Eventually, many podcasters have to make a choice between fame, fortune, or famine. Okay. That last one is less of a choice and more of an unfortunate reality for the other two. There's always the paywall option. Should you consider it?

Hello and welcome to another podcast. Pontifications with me, Evo. Tara. Plus the the decision to put content, popular content behind a pay wall is always an agonizing choice for any decent person. Podcasters included. It's a tough decision to make. Now, early on, I need to address this right away. There are those of us in the podcasting world out there who will claim that once you take a podcast and put it behind a pay wall, then it's no longer a podcast.

Like, I'm not here to debate that pedantic stuff because that's dumb. Anyhow, I'm not debating it. Let's get rid of that. Push it out of the way because it's an option. It is an option. There are many podcasters who have chosen not to make their podcasts completely free of charge anymore and now charge money to access it.

Whether that's right or wrong doesn't matter. It's a dumb discussion. We're not having it here today. What I want to have a discussion with you is should you make that choice. Now. Why would you want to make that choice? Really, it comes down to fame versus fortune or famine, as I said earlier, but realistically for a podcast to be commercially viable or some other sort of viability, which I've talked about a lot in recent weeks on the program, Jason day's on the program.

There's gotta be a given to get you the podcast or put out the energy you need to get something in return to make it viable. And if it's commercial viability, you're looking for it's money. So how does that money flow? In lots of ways it can flow in, but the two most common ways, advertising, that's because you have fame.

We build your show large enough where you can sell ads and sponsorships on it to make a lot of money. That's the fame piece of that. Or. The other way to do it is this way, making it, putting it behind a paywall, either all or some of your content behind a paywall, hence the fortune. Which one of those should you do or should you do either of those?

It doesn't really matter, but let's, let's, I want to help you walk through the thought process today of understanding what it really means to make that particular choice. And I think to help illustrate that, I want you to think of your podcast for a moment. We know, look at the size of your audience, because in this decision, should you put it behind a pay wall or not, some or all of the content, a big driving factor of yours has to be the size of your audience.

It has to be you. You can't make this decision without understanding how big your audience is or how little your audience is, and then understanding the realities of math. Because while you think that every single person who's currently subscribes to your free podcast would continue to support you if you went to a paid only option, that's not true.

So we're going to walk it through that, but I think. To help you understand that. One. I want to talk about my friend Tony, my friend, my friend Tony several years ago, really got into making crepes in a little thin, eggy, a pancake looking things that are very popular or were still aren't someplaces. He was really in the making trips, made really good crepes, would bring grapes into the office.

Got to the point where he was bringing crepes to the office and selling them the people in the office cause he made really nice grapes. Tony was deciding whether or not he should actually quit his job and go into the crepe making business because he was making crepes. People were paying him for it and he was making a little money on the side.

So for Tony, the choice was pretty simple. How many of these crepes am I selling? How many could I think I could sell if I quit my job and made this a fulltime going concern? Well, at the end of the day, Tony decided to not leave his really high paying job and make crepes because he'd have to basically start all over again.

Tony's crate business was limited to the hundred or so people that we all worked with and he was selling them to maybe five or six people. Not really a good business model for Tony to keep going. If you wanted to try and make his hand at it. Now, maybe he could go start a restaurant and buy all the equipment and get out there and do it, but he would be starting from an audience of zero and that's, that's kind of a kind of a tough road to hoe as you will.

What does that mean to your podcast? Well, just like Tony had a potential audience of hundreds or a hundred or so and only got five, the same kind of thing happens with your podcast. Once your podcast gets to a certain point and you have thousands of listeners, math starts to work in your favor, but the math of that, and you can look at any of the different companies that help put podcast and content behind a paywall.

There's glow, there's super cast, there's lots to be named. They'll probably tell you if you can get somebody on the phone to answer a hard question, is w the percentage of people who currently subscribe to your show who will switch over to the paid feed is maybe 2% maybe 2% it can be a little higher, has to be a lot less.

So like 0.2%. It's not uncommon. So here's what that means. If you have a thousand current people listening to your episodes on a regular basis, a thousand subscribers, whatever number you want to use, you can expect 20 of them if you're lucky, okay? Or 10 of them. If you're more average to become a paying person on your paid for subscription, 20 people.

If you're charging five bucks a month, that's $100 it's 100 bucks. Hey, I'll take 100 bucks. That's more than I'm making my podcast right now. Evo. True, but is that commercially viable? It's just something you get for the 1000 people that you would not have listening to you anymore. Or even if you just broke off a portion of that content.

Some of them would stop listening because they are so incensed by the fact that you went. Behind a paywall for some of your content. That's what you need to think about. What happens to your existing audience? If you do that, does it pay itself? Does it pay for itself enough? I've nothing wrong with you choosing to go behind your content behind a pay wall.

In fact, it makes really good business sense. For a lot of reasons. So I'm not here to say that's a right thing or a wrong thing. I'm here to make you think about it or to help you think about a way to make it work. If you're doing a hundred downloads or 300 downloads like this show gets, that's the total number of downloads ICF for about 30 days of any given episode.

So let's say I've got 300 people listening to me. 2% is not very many people. So me putting this show behind the paywall doesn't make a lot of sense at my current audience. If I had 10,000 Oh, maybe it would, or 100,000 Hmm. Maybe it would. But what about the other opportunities? So I'm not here to to say it's the best thing ever.

There are lots of weird hybrid models with this where you can put some count on that, some content out for free, some content behind a paywall. It's gotten a lot easier. Now in 2022 subscribe to pay walled content. It used to be kind of hard to do that. Now it's not. Those solutions I mentioned make it a whole lot easier.

So it's something to think about, something you shouldn't rush into, headlong something you should do a little bit of back of the envelope math, figuring to see if it works for you. Check with your friends. See if your fellow podcasters are considering this as well. It's viable. It's okay. The world will be okay with it.

Probably. Maybe if you decide to switch payroll to behind a paywall, a lot won't. So again, have the discussion with your friends. Send them this episode. Tell them, Hey, I was listening to podcast pontifications and Evo brought up the option of us going behind a paywall. Is that a good idea for us? What are you doing on your show?

Send them a link because more people should be listening to podcasts. Pontifications I think if you think you will help me spread the word. What do you think about this? Email me Evo. Add podcast, launched.pro. Tell me what you're thinking about and I shall be back tomorrow with yet another podcast.

Pontifications cheers.

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