'This American Life' and The Risk of Oversubscription
I had missed this 5-minute update from Ira Glass and This American Life. It was brought to my attention by Samantha Hodder’s Bingeworthy newsletter, which is all about the world of podcasts and podcasting.
Samantha Hodder
That short update was in fact a plea for help: Glass said that the show’s ad revenue had fallen off a cliff (the same one that many shows across the industry had already encountered), and it expected the coming year’s ad dollars to be a third less than what they were bringing in a few years ago.
As a result, they were starting a subscription model. Not that it would be required to hear the show at all, but one that was clearly calculated to help keep the lights on, to enable to keep making the show they always have.
None of this is particularly untrod ground for Glass and Co. I mean, This American Life started as (and still is) a public radio show, and one of the ways they grew in those early days was to record unique pledge-drive messaging that stations could use if they agreed to carry the show. Public radio is in the DNA of the show, and public radio lives and dies by pledge drives.
But it’s shocking to hear this podcast going this route. It’s such a staple; it’s the OG. For it to be feeling the sting of shrinking ad support feels like a bad omen for podcasts more generally. So here’s the link to the subscription option, cleverly branded “This American Life Partners.” If you love good storytelling and are in a position to help, consider supporting this one.
More than that, the revelation has made me think of whether I’m oversubscribed. (Spoiler: Yes.) Because that caveat at in the previous section was real: “in a position to help,” which has always been a thing, is more complicated now, not for the regular economic reasons like the increased cost of living across the board (though that, too) but simply the fact that so much of what we love is going behind a paywall.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a strong supporter of subscribing to our favorite publications instead of bitching about how we’ve run up against their paywall. I’m not changing my mind on that: It remains necessary and a great use of your money.
But in this creator economy, so many of our favorites are now asking for money to make a living or simply subsidize the work they’re doing that we’re consuming. I’m thinking of namely podcasts and newsletters.
I love so many of these that there are truly too many to list, and that matters when you have to choose how much love there is to go around. When they say, quite reasonably as marketing copy goes, that you can give a month’s worth of support for the cost of a single fancy coffee. Can’t argue with it, and I can feel the knee-jerk desire to click “subscribe” every single time I hear that reasoning.
But I forget that every single one of them is making the same argument, and if I zoom out to consider what I spend on subscriptions per month in total, well then, that’s quite a different story entirely now, isn’t it?
In a roundtable of newsletter creators, Deez Links queen Delia Cai said, in an aside to a longer point: That's part of a whole other conversation about how much emails should "cost" and what they should provide in return. (The $50/year Substack norm feels so unsustainable in at least fifty ways!). She doesn’t say this lightly, as she was laid off from Vanity Fair back in May, brought back the newsletter, and started a paid tier for subscribers. I respected her take, despite the inherent contrariness to her own financial well-being, because she said what we’re all thinking. Streaming services (both movies/TV and music); publications (though fewer of us) in both digital and print (way fewer of us); apps that offer us increased productivity, digital storage space, or some other modern-life utility; podcasts; newsletters. The problem with many of these is the same: There are free alternatives, so why would I pay?
It’s often less out of necessity, and more out of a sense of allegiance. “I want to support this, even though I don’t have to for it to exist.” That’s the kind of support This American Life is counting on, and hopefully it works out for them. But if you’re a fan and hesitating to open your wallets, I feel you on this one. It’s hard to support everything we love.