Asking for Money
Every week I listen to This American Life plead for donations from its hundreds of thousands of podcast listeners. They remind us that producing and getting the show out to so many people is very expensive and they need donations to survive. If you enjoy the show, donate, they say.
It seems to me that there is a very simple answer to what seems to be an increasingly dire financial situation This American Life has found themselves in: charge for the podcast.
When I first discovered the show I couldn’t get enough. The only way to get more than one episode a week was to use the crappy flash player on their website or buy episodes as audio books from iTunes for $2 a piece. I bought at least 20 episodes when the alternatives were a totally free, mildly inconvenient player or simply waiting.
Charge for it. Rather than plead with people to support something they love, force them to. Even if they lost 80% of their podcast listeners, the still huge amount of remaining listeners will continue to enjoy the show (without the begging) and This American Life becomes financially secure.
But of course this is coming from a country which is perfectly comfortable in its complicated, equivocal system of tipping to support service industry staff rather than simply charging more and paying them more.