Op-ed: Podcasting’s Money Problem
Jess Schmidt: "I wish I didn’t have to care about the money."
— Jess Schmidt, podcast producer, consultant, educator, author of How To *Actually* LIKE Freelancing
When I logged off of the Pod the North inaugural Zoom Town Hall a few weeks ago I felt buoyed by a strong sense of solidarity and community. But it brought me back to a question I’ve been asking myself since I started making podcasts professionally in 2019, and which was echoed by many on the call:
Why is it so hard to get funding for podcasts?
The money problem in podcasting isn’t new. The long tail of podcasting is something the industry has been talking about pretty much since the medium was born. One of podcasting’s key strengths is that it’s an inherently niche medium. Outside of the top 1% of podcasts (the majority of which are produced by celebrities and legacy media), the listenership for the 99% of all other podcasts visually and analytically falls off a cliff:
Podcasting isn’t really designed for universal popularity, like TV, movies, or video games. There’s so many elements that lay at the heart of the medium - its DIY friendliness, low-barrier entry, intimate parasocial connection between listener and creator - which make it difficult to regulate and monetize.
How can I get paid to make this show?
How can I make this show make me money?
What kind of return on investment can I expect, and when will I see that return?
These are the questions that I think haunt a lot of people in this space. And if you’re like me - having also asked these questions myself - then the answer I’m assuming you’re expecting is something like “Here’s my top 10 reasons why you’re fucking up and why you don’t have mega bucks in your pocket!!!!”
After all, that’s the kind of result you get from Google. It’s also the thing you hear if you go to most podcasting conferences (and I’ve been to a few): someone on stage who’s already found success telling you “You just need to add video! You just need to make more content! You just have to build a following on social media! It’s so easy!!!! Why aren’t you already doing this, dummy???”
Maybe it was easy for them. Maybe I am a dummy.
But I’ve been in the game long enough that I think I’m entitled to say this:
Podcasting is bad at making money.
And you know what? I don’t really care.
Would it be cool to make a shitload of money? Hell yeah. Would owning my own house be neat one day? Sure. Would I love to not be stressed about clients paying me on time, so that I can give that money to my landlords and keep a roof over the heads of myself and my furbabies? Obviously. I love travelling, and eating out at restaurants, and being able to pay for the finer things in life. I’m a Canadian, middle-class millennial. As much as I dislike capitalism, I recognize that I’m also a complicit little cog in the machine.
But even though I work in podcasting - my job is literally that I make podcasts - the podcasts themselves are not the things that pay for my life.
Companies, institutions, and non-profits are what pays me for the most part - along with some independent creators paying out of pocket
I truly can’t tell you if any of the shows that I’ve worked on have really made money, because they’re not for-sale products. I’m not measuring how much money the show made because, for the most part, there’s nothing to measure.
Podcasts are not movies. There’s no gross box-office earnings to report.
Podcasts are not TV. You can measure how many people tuned in, but unless you’re already a semi-professional operation with a provable audience size, you’re going to have a pretty hard time selling ad spots – or in the case of our post-cable world, network subscription fees.
Podcasting’s closest sibling in terms of form is probably radio, but there’s also a lot of differences between them; temporality for one, as well as ability to regulate, and those things are pretty core to what makes podcasting not radio. I don’t know that we can really use their monetization model in the same way.
I’ve heard the argument made by some that podcasting is actually the most similar to Youtube. In fact, a lot of the popularity podcasting has enjoyed is thanks to creators who came from Youtube. There’s a low hanging fruit example in he who must not be named, but also some slightly less controversial examples, like Mel Robbins. But something that unites most of those pedestalized successes (besides their celebrity) is that they are not audio-only. I’m by no means an audio-only snob, but my speciality is and always has been audio-only for all the reasons I mentioned that make podcasting special – DIY, accessibility, intimacy – all of which are arguably reduced if you add in the complication of video.
I think all the time about shows that I want to make. In fact, I have made a show off my own dime (and sweat and tears). I’ve also submitted a lot of grant proposals and project ideas to various funding bodies and media outlets, to no avail. Maybe I just need to keep trying (I’ll probably never stop trying, I’m really stubborn) but underneath all that effort is a thought that I’m never able to shake:
I wish I didn’t have to care about the money.
Deep down I know podcasting isn’t really meant to make money. I’m not saying that to be pithy, I’m just personally not making podcasts to sell stuff. I’m making podcasts to tell stories and make people feel things. Sometimes you can make money doing that, but I don’t really get why that needs to be the high water mark for success (other than the fact that capitalism says it is).
I think there should be funding to make projects just for the sake of making projects. But the direction media is headed in – more content, more presence, more AI, more consumption, more money – feels like there’s less and less space for the kind of content I love making.
Maybe this is coming off as kind of “boo-hoo, woe-is-me”, but that’s not my intention. In the words of journalist George Will, “The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.” I’d love to be surprised. I’d love to wake up tomorrow and to a Canadian media landscape willing to embrace independent audio creators the way that excellent examples like the Indigenous Screen Office have already been doing for years now.
I think as long as we’re measuring success by money, the money will be hard to come by because the bottom line is podcasting is not built for money the way other mediums are. “Doomed to fail” is maybe too strong, but there’s a serious mismatch between expectation and reality here – just look at how many networks and studios have shuttered their doors shortly after fan-fared acquisitions due to budget issues, or “low numbers”.
Much of traditional media is built on exclusivity, curation, and high barriers to entry. They’re typically velvet-roped one-way models, which in many respects is just opposite to what makes podcasting…podcasting. Not to call any one company out because it’s happening across the industry from multiple sides, but when I went to the Podcast Show in London in 2024, Spotify’s booth was literally a walled garden; complete with fake foliage, snacks, and seating that was invite-only (but I did get a free tote bag, despite being a mere peasant.)
I don’t want podcasting to become more centralized. I want discoverability to be better. I don’t want to manufacture sales tools. I want to be paid to create what I want to make. I don’t want to increase my audience reach. I want to grow my community.
I think there’s certainly a need for more funding for creators, but as an industry we also need to keep sight of the real money problem: why is the metric for success sales, when most of us aren’t actually in the business of selling anything?
Read more from Jess on her newsletter How to *Actually* LIKE Freelancing.
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