u/qartas

I’m venting. I barely listen anymore and when I do I regret it because it reminds me of the ad-free experience I enjoyed when I started paying for podcasts from the, previously revered, Economist.

Email to podcasts@economist.com

I've been a listener for years and a paying listener since the subscription program started.

But the ads continue.

So now I listen less often, and each time I think something like, "Do I really want to get through the ads to hear about Estonia being in a hard place"?

And then I say to myself, "I should keep my phone in my hand so I can skip the ads at the start"

Of course, I get distracted because I'm commuting in Melbourne and it's only two stops on the train.

And they're not even podcast ads, they're radio ads that don't think or care about who's listening. Some media buyer has put something together to get reach for someone else who's taking a cut from another agency who was paid by the local subsidiary of a multinational that doesn't pay enough tax. It's just thrown at the wall.

Suddenly there's someone singing christmas carols that have been adapted to advertise Amazon, and it's louder than I set my volume because the radio ad engineers do a trick to maximise the audio because radio isn't listened to in headphones like podcasts, it's listened to on radio where other noises are competing.

"Christ, what a shitty thing to hear as I'm going to work. I've paid for another annual subscription to a thoughtful audio publisher and I've got this god awful noise instead."

"Why am I getting this? Who would do this?"

And I remember that it's The Economist podcast paid subscription with ads that are chipping away at my enthusiasm for its brand, content, experiences, knowledge, perspective, insights, authority, loveliness and all the other good things.

"Deck the halls with greeeeat prices!"

End.

Maybe it's because you need to pay to use their compression feature?

Apart from the usual repetition and agreeable grunts, the lack of interrogation of SpaceX’s IPO was concerning.

No information about the advantages banks have in the process, the statistical lack of return (Google and Facebook as comparisons, rather than academic research which is widely available), price to revenue ratio, the makeup of spaceX as essentially three companies (x.ai, starlink and spacex) combined and many more. In under 10 minutes there was a better rundown and analysis from r/theeconomist’s The Intelligence and under 5 mins by Scott Galloway on Pivot.

I don’t expect michael to have the chops for this, and the reporter did a reasonable job, but the amount of money retail investors (30% allocation to lock in some cheerleaders) and the rule changing (15 days before joining the NASDAQ) is astounding!

We’re all going to be complicit in this IPO because it’s not being interrogated by leading and popular news/information sources like The Daily.

Not financial advice.

Before World War II Melbourne street-gangs were known as 'pushes'. During the last quarter of the 19th century journalists and courts identified gang-like street crime with young 'larrikins' or 'larrikinesses', a term applied to groups of young people who annoyed customers in busy shopping strips, or stormed pubs and shops to steal drink, food and clothing. Characteristically, the larrikin displayed contempt for authority and fought the police whenever arrests were attempted. In the argot of the street, larrikins had to be 'carted'.

For all the talk about how podcasts are a unique, intimate listening experience, we’ve inevitably ended up with radio ads on podcasts.

I remember Midroll, Gimlet and others (7AM in Australia) making ads that appreciated the medium and the listening experience.

Then, thanks to a lack of enthusiasm and financial invective, many podcasts were handed radio ads and listeners are worse off for it.

If you work in the industry or get a day in what ads run on your podcast, please try and deliver ads that appreciate the listener. They’ll probably appreciate (and remember) the ads and the product more too.

Midroll in the late 2010s would come out with great studies on this. And as they and other podcast-first companies were consolidated we lost the opportunity for premium revenue amounts and premium ads for the audience.

Please note: this cannot be true for the whole industry. There are people making great podcast ads too. Thankfully there’s a great amount of diversity still in the medium.