Opinion
Best: Ad-supported podcast market is small compared to paid audio
“I think that the podcast market that can be supported by advertising is small and sad compared to the audio market that could be supported if we had an effective way to pay for it.”
Insight
Best: Market failure causes society to underinvest in cultural creators
“We think there's basically a market failure where all of society would be richer if there was more efficient mechanisms to like allocate more resources to creative people that are making kind of culture writ large”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Best: Media will see a meteoric rise of individual creators
“So I'm not saying that everything's going to be individuals and there's not going to be any big sort of media things, but I think it's going to look like there's a meteoric rise of individual creation.”
Insight
Best: Writers should offer their best content for free
“And the advice we give people is basically take your best, most accessible, most focused stuff and make that free. Right? Like make your sort of like your very thoughtful essay on a specific topic free, because that's how people are going to share it. That's h…”
Opinion
Best: Consumers now prefer paying for high-quality content
“I think the pendulum's really heavily swinging the other way now. Like people that were sort of like my generation were like the least likely to want to pay for stuff. And we are getting increasingly more likely to want to pay. And then younger generations are…”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Best: Newsletters will replace social feeds for news within five years
“I think the answer is it won't replace the social network aspect of it. The thing that Facebook and the social networks are great at is having the relationship between you and like the people, you know, in real life... The part of it that should absolutely be …”
Insight
Best: Podcast downloads resemble early internet banner ad impressions
“It feels a little bit like podcast downloads are almost like the banner ad impressions of the early internet.”
Opinion
Best: Creators with 10,000 superfans cannot make a living on YouTube
“But if you're someone that has, let's say, 10,000 fans that find you completely irreplaceable and wouldn't want to go on living without you because you're the most amazing thing in their life, but there's only 10,000 of them, you're never going to make money o…”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Best: Podcast ad rates per download will drop significantly
“I suspect as I kind of hinted before that there's a lot of podcast advertising that's in a little bit of like an emperor's new clothes state where like too much is it's overpriced. And because there's just not metrics there, it's just like waiting for like som…”
Insight
Best: Open podcasts guarantee audience delivery unlike algorithmic feeds
“When somebody subscribes to your podcast, if you make another episode, they're going to get it. In most good podcast players. Whereas if someone follows you on Twitter, and are they going to get your next tweet? Like, you never know.”
Insight
Best: Consistently read newsletters achieve passive organic growth
“I mean, just, A, because text is really easy to, like, you know, if you have, like, a webpage, you can share it, and if you get an email, you can forward it, and so we often see, this is something I think you don't see in podcasting, but if you have a newslett…”
Insight
Best: Consumers pay for online courses but not standalone videos
“People won't pay for videos, but they'll pay for online courses, which are just like a couple of videos.”
Insight
Best: Building an engaging newsletter is harder than monetizing it
“If you get to a place where you have a newsletter that people are regularly reading, like if they're just regularly opening it chances are you'll be able to charge for it if you want to at some level, because it's actually harder to make something that's good …”
Chris Best