I guess I’m glad there’s no immediate pressure for podcasts to make themselves shittier. But the idea that we’re all in helpless, passive thrall to the ad market sticks in my craw. It’s like going to a restaurant and asking your tapeworm what to order.
If you want to make a podcast, you need a certain amount of money to make it sustainable. That can come from subscriptions, or from your day job. But there’s no reason to think that your new day job has to become “shilling vacuum-packed mattresses”; that’s a totally 100% spurious connection that the advertising parasite has implanted in our brains. Ads don’t make podcasts successful; they make them worse and they prevent listeners from donating.
