Never Not Funny Podcast to Adopt Subscription Model
Host Jimmy Pardo and producer Matt Bellknap announced that the popular podcast Never Not Funny will adopt a paid subscription model for the upcoming 3rd season. Access to the full season of 26 episodes will cost $19.95. The first twenty minutes of each 80 minute podcast will still be available for free.
Pardo and Belknap have really worked at getting paid for this podcast. First by bringing the concept of a season to podcasts, they sold the first season as a digital album. They’ve also tried bringing on an underwriter in exchange for on-air promotion. It’s not surprising that they continue to search for ways to realize some monetary benefit from Never Not Funny.
It’s certainly going to be an interesting experiment. For one thing the iTunes Music Store doesn’t support paid-subscription or charge per download podcasts, so listeners won’t be able to just add the podcast from iTMS. Instead they’ll have to manually add an rss feed to iTunes (which is easy to do, but not many people know how).
Also, freemium conversion is typically between 1% and 4% of total listeners. According to my financial forecasting napkin, that means that each 10,000 ( listeners I am guessing that NNF listenership is on the order of 10^4) should gross the podcast USD8000 for each 26 week season.
From my experience podcast listeners tend to stick with a particular podcast for about six months before moving on. So, a podcast that has a growing listenership is not simply gaining listeners, but gaining them faster than it’s losing them. As listeners leave the paid podcast, it may be more difficult to recruit new listeners to upgrade than it is to subscribe current fans, thus eroding revenue. If this is a problem, then one solution might be to have ‘Shakespeare in the park’ seasons for free followed by ‘theater’ seasons for subscribers.
I wonder how this scheme will be administered? If I had to do this, I’d probably break out my favorite web framework and create a web app that:
- Allows users to create an account on the app.
- [:Handwaving] process the credit card transaction [/:Handwaving] and mark the account as subscribed to the podcast season.
- Ensures that the user is a valid subscriber when the rss feed of the podcast is accessed. After all, it’s just an xml file.
- Profit!
Step 3 there is tricky though. Ideally, you’d want for your users to authenticate with a username/password combo. But, do all podcatchers support http authentication? If you can’t authenticate that way, then you’re probably stuck doing something really cack handed like creating a ‘secret’ rss feed for each user and monitoring them for abuse. Which is asking for all sorts of administrative misery. Of course, there are at least three services that appear to have this worked out. Podbean, Subscribecast, and Audible all have paid podcast systems that are surely more robust than my thought experiment here.
Let me be perfectly clear - Never Not Funny is a really great podcast. I hope that this works out for them.
