The New York Times demonstrate the bifurcation of the podcast industry
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So the New York Times, one of the world’s great media brands, is to put its podcasts, including The Daily, which regularly ranks as one of the most popular and influential shows, behind a paywall.
This move comes after the paper launched an audio specific app in May 2023, which has subsequently passed a million downloads. That project, in tandem with an internal paywalling strategy that has seen Games and Recipes become key subscription generating verticals, makes the paper well placed to start controlling access to its podcasts.
According to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, shows like Serial will become entirely inaccessible to non-subscribers (this is, perhaps, part of a longer term strategy to justify the $25m the Times paid for Serial — though that price looks relatively cheap compared to the silly money sloshing about during that period. The Daily, which is perceived as a major gateway drug to the Times’ political reportage, will continue to be available for three days (or three editions) but only subscribers will receive access to the show’s full archive. (My supposition would be that podcasts produced by The Athletic will continue to be paywalled within that app, but may also be available on New York Times Audio). On the spectrum of paywalls I would consider this at the tough end: the Times is a sufficiently established media brand, and its podcasts a key part of that, to not need to offer tasters for samplings, like cubes of cheese at the end of a supermarket aisle.
There are two important things to note about this move. Firstly, it is clearly another landmark in the steady decoupling of podcasts from their free-for-all origins. For the past five years or so, plenty of enterprises have sought to reverse the foundational access provided by the podcast industry, whether that was Luminary’s plan to create a “Netflix for podcasts” (yes, I’m still mocking them for that one) or Spotify and Apple wrestling for position in the subscriber content arena. I thought for a long time that the horse had bolted on that, and a non-podcast audio product would have to emerge to serve this more transparently commercial plan. But it’s clear that the VC-fuelled industry is slowly but surely shifting the internal dynamics of podcasting, so that “podcast” remains the brand for this new sort of pay-to-access audio endeavour.
The second point would be to reinforce the bifurcation of the industry at this point. The New York Times is a media brand of a specific size, and there are only a handful at that level globally. Putting aside media conglomerates like Disney, Paramount or omnicompanies like Apple or Amazon, there are but a few journalistic outlets at the Times’ level. The BBC, perhaps, or Fox, CNN or the Washington Post. But it’s a really rarefied group.
What this group have that most other podcast companies don’t have is clout with their audiences. Like most businesses, media organisations work in a reciprocal relationship with their customers. You ask a little of them, they ask a lot of you. And that’s the basic transaction, but, at a certain point, the dial begins to shift. The clout ratio moves in favour of the provider. It’s why Arsenal can get away with selling £1000 season tickets, or Taylor Swift can charge her fans $500 for the chance to sniff her air. And while the New York Times might not exist on quite that level, it can make demands of its audience.
If I — as someone who runs an independent podcast company with several shows that need to turn a profit — want to change the business model of any of my products, I have to do it in a manner that is almost totally frictionless. If I want to introduce some paywalled content, I have to basically guarantee that there is still a product there for the free-to-access listeners. If I want to run advertising it can’t be too obstreperous, yet the density has to be high enough for it to be a valuable idea. I am basically at the mercy of the fact that the most important thing for me is still that raw audience size, that access to market.
If I were running the Times’ audio strategy I would, of course, have suggested this move some time ago. It’s clear that the podcast market is moving only in one direction, and they can do proprietary paywalling which, again, isn’t an option for me (I would have to outsource that job to Apple or Patreon or whoever, all of whom will take a 30% or so cut). It’s also clear that podcasting is, strategically speaking, only a relatively small part of a broader subscription business. But the Times has evidenced, in the past, an ability to convert partial users — people who want Alison Roman’s recipe cards, or to play Spelling Bee — into total users. Full package subscribers to the New York Times experience.
To me, finally, it suggests a closing of the era of free content. We’ve witnessed journalism, as an industry, trying to retrospectively build a wall around their output (once again, after the horses have made it halfway to Seabiscuit’s house party). Podcasts have remained free far longer than they should have (per unit of output, they are a relatively expensive form of journalism) because of the lack of sophistication hard-coded into their DNA. But the end of the RSS era, the end of Podcasting 1.0, has made it harder to justify the assumption that a podcast should be free at the point of access. And if podcasts aren’t free, what is?
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