Hidden Forces

Would you pay for a podcast?

I’ve taken a couple of weeks off in August to recharge my batteries before embarking on my final two months as a BBC correspondent - more on that in another post.

But I haven’t stopped spreading the word about Always On, talking to podcasts, book festivals and anyone else who wants to know about the book.

My most rewarding encounter amongst many has been with an American podcast I hadn’t heard of before, Hidden Forces. When the presenter Demetri Kofinas got in touch and told me he would need two hours of my time, and was very insistent that I must provide a high quality recording, I wondered whether this was really going to be worth the effort.

I was wrong. Demetri turned out to be extraordinarily well prepared and came up with some really searching questions that forced me to step back and think a little more deeply about the themes of the book. We discussed many of the episodes from Always On which others have wanted to focus on - the Steve Jobs iPhone launch and why it was a historic moment, the interviews with Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk.

But he wanted to dig deeper - would Apple have come up with more innovations if Jobs had lived on? How has social media changed celebrity culture? How does the British media landscape contrast with America’s? Is the social smartphone era making our attention span ever shorter?

On this last point we both end up agreeing that the existence and success of Hidden Forces is evidence that there is an appetite for long immersive podcasts, documentaries and YouTube videos alongside the short snacks served up by the likes of TikTok.

We also discussed the business models for podcasting and whether the current boom in the medium will last. I mentioned that I’d been on a couple with very different models, one without any monetisation but designed to bolster the brand of a popular ad-supported gadget news site, another a cybersecurity podcast thriving on the back of a different sponsor for each episode.

Demetri Kofinas explained that he has what he considers a more sustainable approach - he is funded by listeners. There are no ads in Hidden Forces and no sponsorship but Demetri says the whole project is supported by 2000 subscribers paying between $10 and $1000 per month.

What do they get for that? Well, each episode has some extra content just for subscribers - in our conversation it is a thirty minute segment about the different between American and British journalistic cultures including an anecdote about the Microsoft executive who nearly fired his PR team because I asked a mildly challenging question during an interview.

Now I flatter myself that I tell a good story but I’m still a little surprised that anyone would pay even $10 for that, let alone $1000. Mind you, as the Hidden Forces Patreon page makes clear, that kind of money gets you Scholar level, where Demetri effectively becomes a consultant, offering you a 60 minute private chat each month to show you how to integrate the lessons from the podcast into your business and personal life.

A back of the envelope calculation shows Demetri is earning over $20,000 a month from his podcast which, even if the time and resources devoted to making it are obviously extensive, is a pretty impressive income.

The subscriber model is also gaining traction for creative individuals in other areas. Professional gamers blazed the trail on platforms like YouTube and Twitch, persuading fans to pay for bonus features or simply out of a desire to support players they admire. Now of course Substack is showing that it can work for journalism too, with some star American writers apparently earning six figure sum by putting up a paywall.

I can’t see that working for any UK journalist nor can I see many here paying for podcasts in a news media landscape which is still in many ways more rich and varied than that of the United States, with the BBC also providing a huge amount of content for free. Maybe I’m wrong and there is an appetite to support high quality original content that isn’t produced by a major media group - but I somehow doubt it.