Not directly mentioned in the article (although this is essentially what the article is about), but it’s struck me lately as very dissonant that I pay for Spotify and Youtube in order to avoid the ads, and then still have to fast forward through the sponsorship and ad reads that the content creator records into their product.

It’s a fair price to get someone’s content, and I know the revenue from that is much higher than what they’ll get from the platform’s ad share. Yet still it is irritating. The majority of content I consume idly I would never pay for. So again, a fair bargain I suppose.

There are content creators whom I’d happily support directly for the sake of the value I ascribe to their content, not just to remove their ads, but they don’t offer the option. I understand there are many reasons for any given creator why an ad supported business model may be preferable/simpler/earn more. And maybe this is just a shift in the creator economy which is more slowly dispersing than I personally would expect.

But truly from a superfan or consumer point of view, I end up valuing the paid podcasts I subscribe to on Spotify which are ad free over many pieces of content that I arguably enjoy more but are forced to skip through their ads.

I’ve paid for Ben Thompson’s content for almost 10 years now, and listen to his podcast via Spotify. I remember when he said he’d never put his podcast on Spotify, but their private/paid feed feature got him to jump and Im so glad I got to delete an extra app because of it. I’ve been listening to the McElroy brothers’ stable of podcasts for just as long, but am irritated every time I have to skip through the ad reads. I do support them through the podcast network they are a part of, Maximum Fun, but I honestly pay less than I could because I know that it doesn’t directly support them (it supports the network which in turn supports them). That’s ironic because really I should give _more_ because of that fact, but the indirection makes me uninterested in paying much above the minimum.

I love both these podcasts, and their ability to monetize are clearly different based on the product each are producing. At the end of the day though there is (in my experience) a value add provided through Ben Thompson’s business model of directly charging me for the good.

Please don’t read this as a typical HN “why doesn’t the industry cater specifically to me and the very narrow niche I inhabit”, I’m aware of many of the incentives and challenges inherent in these different business models. But as of late, with so many content creators giving the option to pay them directly in exchange for ad free experiences, paying for an ad free service like Spotify but being unable to skip ads from the creators themselves has started to really stick out to me.

I don’t know what a solution would be, nor do I look forward to paying for the majority of content I consume. In fact Im fairly confident that there is no good solution exactly because nobody wants to pay for most content and people’s time is not free. In a world where increasingly folks are putting up paywalls for content consumers see as differentiated, it starts to look more and more bleak on the ad supported side of that wall.