![]() Podcoin offered a free two-week promotion after a podcaster “claimed” their show on the app, and Suzy had seen others posting about “incredible uplifts in listeners, of thousands at a time,” she said. Here were people who already listened to podcasts, being encouraged to listen to more,” she told me over email. (She’s an independent podcaster with a self-described “very limited” marketing budget.) “It felt like a win-win situation. Suzy Buttress, who makes The Casual Birder Podcast, told me she was “thrilled” when she first heard about the app since it sounded like a way for her to spread the word of her show to more listeners without having to spend money. I went in search of these Podcoin users and ended up speaking to three different people who’d experimented with the app, to find out how a system like this looks from the inside. That said, some people were obviously engaging with the app, at least if the user figures were to be believed. And although there were various streak incentives that would deliver more “podcoin,” it would still take hours of listening every day for years to earn enough for most of the rewards, a fact quickly picked up by most of the people I’ve seen discussing whether to bother with the app. Why is that some corporate overlord should aggregate all your time and leave you even unhappier than you were before while they resell your information to the highest bidder?įrom what I could see, Podcoin had no visible means of generating revenue, although there was a long-term plan to charge podcasters to have their shows featured. What is wrong with the larger app ecosystem that the idea of rewarding you for your time is so strange. For instance, this passage - part of the answer to the not-unreasonable question “How is it possible to pay me to listen?” - is wild: The more I looked into this venture, the more intrigued I became. It was created by Geoff and David Cook, siblings from the family who made and then sold it in 2011 for $100 million. It seemed a perfect distillation of some of the more questionable ventures that crop up now and then in the podcasting space. I’ve been ambiently interested in Podcoin since the first time I saw someone post about it in a podcasting Facebook group that I belong to. On that page, they also detail various checks and balances meant to ensure the listens were genuine, rather than generated by bots. In its FAQs, the company referred to the act of listening as “podcoin mining,” positioning their product as a kind of hybrid podcatcher and cryptocurrency, I suppose. The mechanism behind Podcoin was questioned by users right from the get-go (as in this Reddit thread, for instance), but here’s how it was supposed to work: For every 10 minutes of podcasts that you listened to via the app, you earned one “podcoin,” which could then be redeemed against rewards such as Bose headphones and Amazon gift cards. ![]() (Albeit seemingly without money changing hands - perhaps not surprising since the CEO of Podcoin and the CEO of The Meet Group are brothers.) Now, because it “just failed to sustain momentum,” it is going offline less than a year later. It began operation in December 2018 and claimed to hit 10,000 active daily users in April before being added to The Meet Group’s network of mobile apps. Podcoin, an app that promised to “pay you to listen to podcasts,” shuts down today. ![]() This is issue 227, dated September 24, 2019. Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts.
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