An Experiment Worth Watching
If you care about documentary podcasting, pull for "Hyperfixed"
Alex Goldman recently launched a new show, Hyperfixed in partnership with Radiotopia. The show is a truly entrepreneurial venture, with Alex taking a loan and putting up his own money to pay for the costs of production for what he hopes is long enough to build an audience to create a sustainable revenue model. How do I know this? Well, he’s being transparent about his finances, and recently laid out the table napkin math in a twitter post.
We are now in the “post stupid money” era of documentary podcast funding, and in what I call “The Double Bubble”. Two locuses of support for creative, longform audio are in retreat. The VC/Hollywood stream of investment in podcasts that gushed from about 2016-2022 has dried to a trickle, and public radio stations, who created the ecosystem for the documentary podcast, are struggling with declining audience and revenues. Many (including my former employer WBEZ), have made deep cuts to their podcast and creative audio offerings.
Anybody who has been in the documentary podcast racket for a few years knows there’s an interesting history here, and and Alex Goldman partnership with Radiotopia around a self-funded, entrepreneurial podcast launch, is worth watching. If Hyperfixed is successful, it might point to a new model for creators with good ideas and strong execution to create financially sustainble shows.
Alex Co-founded Reply All, which was incubated in its initial iteration as TLDR by WNYC’s On the Media. I suspect Alex and his cofounder PJ developed the show on nights and weekends while doing their On the Media day job, but they benefited from launching their project as a sub-production of a well established program.
In 2014, Alex Bloomberg recruited the show’s founders, they renamed it, and it became one of the very early programs on the Gimlet roster, and one of the first to be a hit. Bloomberg (lots of Alexes to keep track of here) launched Gimlet as an experiment to see if with substantical VC backing, it was possible to create a roster of podcasts and a business model that would sustain those shows (and reward their investors handsomely). Was Gimlet a success? A failure? Depends on how you look at it.
Radiotopia was ALSO created in 2014, and was based on a very different model. While they eventually incubated their own new programs, the shows that joined together and partnered with PRX were all small shops, often led by one creative visionary or a very small team. Nearly all of those shows began with the creators making that show for years without pay, on nights and weekends, while doing their day jobs. Offhand, those shows included 99 Percent Invisible, Radio Diaries, Love + Radio, Criminal and a few others, all scrappy programs with creative teams who love audio storytelling, and were going to find a way to do it, even if it doesn’t pay.
I’m not privy to the internal finances of Radiotopia but as an observer, and as a friend and admirer of many of the creators, it seems to me the key to their success is those shows built an audience at a time when a good podcast, with a good idea, and good excecution had a good shot at building an audience in the hundreds of thousands, without a huge marketing budget. In 2014, when people were looking for new podcasts to binge after listening to This American Life’s experimental Serial, Radiotopia had a bunch of great shows, with already loyal audiences, ready to ride the wave of audience growth.
In 2013, I was eight years into an audio production career that had felt like it was going nowhere. I remember considering learning to be a sushi chef. In 2014, I was accepted for the This American Life Fellowship, and while I was there, Serial, Gimlet, and Radiotopia all launched. I remember we ran a story from Love + Radio and I later heard from creator Nick van der Kolk that their audience doubled overnight after that. Most of the friends I had met at conferences from 2005-2012 had day jobs as news reporters, or did odd jobs, while making creative audio on their nights and weekends. By 2015, I had a grown up job with salary and benefits, as did many of my former starving artist friends. We all rode the wave of tremendous growth in podcasting and audio storytelling.
So a question I’ve thought about (and talked about with friends) is whether something like Radiotopia, or podcasts like 99% Invisible, Criminal, and Love + Radio could find a big enough audience to become financially sustainable today. Those are great shows, well made, and the result of lots of hard work, but they also emerged at a time when they were the only player doing THEIR THING on the field. They were in the right place at the right time. I’m not sure their approach would work today. We’ve had a tremendous proliferation of podcasts since then, and it’s not clear that a great bootstrapped show has a shot at building an audience in the hundred of thousands. Alex Goldman is clear eyed about the challenge of this.
All of this to say is I’m going to be paying attention to Hyperfixed. The show format is not new — there are quite a few “ask us a question” shows these days — but it’s a good format, and Alex and his team will bring their own creativity and charm to it. But as Alex points out, building audience is such a tenuous and luck-driven proposition. One celebrity guest, one “viral” episode, the right coproductions; all could help the show grow to the 200k listeners they need. I’m going to donate to the show, and I’m rooting for them at this moment, because we need new models for dedicated creators to create great audio programs.