The morality of monetization
Or, how a broke podcasting grad student rationalizes her own worth and expertise
I have been podcasting for three years now. Although three years wouldn’t be enough time to call me an expert in most disciplines, podcasts are still a fairly recent phenomenon. Three years now qualifies as concentrated expertise in this strange facet of the media realm. Some will argue that the audio-blogging of the 1980s is the true roots of podcasting, but podcasting as we know it only truly caught hold by 2004. Up until recently, there were several technological limitations that made the medium difficult to widely adopt. To listen to a podcast in the early 2000s, you would have to transfer the file from a computer to an Mp3 player or iPod before listening; one podcaster aptly deemed these original shows as “made by geeks, for geeks.”
Apple launched its podcasting app in 2014, which marked a paradigmatic shift in who could access podcasts and, eventually, who could host them. Around this time, we started to see podcasts become phenomena: suddenly you couldn’t have a casual conversation without someone asking if you’d listened to Serial or This American Life. This marked a creative shift in the relationship between creators and their audiences. Akin to Truman Capote reimagining the boundaries and role of narrative nonfiction through In Cold Blood, prospective podcasters had nascent, unbridled scope in what they could create.
Since then, the podcasting ecosystem has increasingly become more fluid and easier to navigate. It holds profound potential for independent narrative storytelling, especially for BIPOC and LGBTQ2+ creators who feel their full selves being reduced, sensationalized, or essentialized by mainstream media. Specifically, the medium’s astronomical increase in recent years (and certainly during COVID-19 lockdowns) points to the ways that podcasting challenges, nuances, and re-shapes our storytelling.
Limited scripted series like Jad Abumrad’s Dolly Parton’s America or Katy and Ricardo Osuna’s Copper & Heat create an immersive audio soundscape that grant us vivid, intimate insight into our world and how we connect to it. Independent interview style podcasts like Ren Navarro’s Ren Likes to Talk or Nico Wisler’s Queer the Table hold intimate one-on-one conversations that don’t pander to a production company and highlight the important and interesting work people in their communities do, while balancing levity and depth in weekly conversations.
Then influencers and celebrities caught on to the built-in intimacy of conversations being poured directly into your earbuds. They realized that the medium offered them an opportunity to flip the script after years of getting asked irreverent and often degrading questions by talk show hosts. Some use it for good: Jonathan Van Ness’s Getting Curious is a space that usually doesn’t idolize celebrities, harnessing his own popularity to bring scientists, policymakers, and educators into an accessible (albeit very fast-paced) weekly discussion space. And then there are some that use it to talk to their famous friends about the expensive wellness products that sponsored their shows. I imagine you already know how I feel about those shows.
Like any medium, monetization remains a central and confounding element of podcasting. How money is made through podcasting is a problem to which I haven’t seen any satisfyingly real solutions for— or, how to measure one’s monetary worth through podcasting. Generally, it is based on advertisements placed before, during, or after the episode (pre-, mid-, and post-roll ads), with the potential for social media advertising opportunities if you have a big enough following to warrant a commitment.
There are no firm rules about how much one can charge, but it is almost always a linear equation based on how many listens are guaranteed, with the baseline example of 1000 listeners per episode usually given as the guiding point for $0.15 per listen for each pre-roll ad. So by that standard, if you had 1000 listens to that episode, that would be $150 in your pocket. But you quite often cannot book advertisements until you can guarantee 1000 or more listens per episode.
These rate systems ignore that most people skip past these ads with the advance 10 seconds buttons, or base a price on average listenership rather than assessing the average minutes of an episode a listener “consumes,” which may be more meaningful if you want to look at how much audience is captivated by particular shows. If my episode has 10,000 “listens” (or downloads), but the average consumer only listens to five minutes of a 45-minute episode (11% completed)… is that really an organic connection? What does it mean when a 40-minute episode has 900 downloads and a 95% completion rate? Does a download equate to a listen? I haven’t quite figured that question out myself.
Expanding AnthroDish
I’ve increasingly felt a shift in my role as a podcaster since I launched AnthroDish in 2018. My intention for the podcast has always been to prioritize science and communication, and to make this more accessible through storytelling in casual interviews. I also created the show with the goal of more readily bringing the public into the academic realm, which I am incredibly happy to say has worked with increased class use of podcast episodes at various universities. In food, there is an still a disconnect between the work academics are doing within food and the work and conversations happening in hospitality and food media. There are some incredible people doing this work, such as Dr. Emily Contois’s work on dude food and the masculinity of meat, or Dr. Amie Breeze Harper’s writings on veganism, but how often are the two worlds allowed to meet with any regularity, and on what financial terms?
The problem I run into, is that while the show continues to grow—along with my gratitude for this wider audience and platform—I remain a singular person running every element of it. I seek out and book guests, I research everything I can when mapping interview arcs and creating questions; I host the interview, source out the audio previews and quotable moments in post-production; I create the graphics for the social media promotion, I upload episodes to LibSyn; I code the website. Each step comes with a monthly cost that quickly begins to accumulate.
Podcasters have to pay monthly fees to keep your favourite shows on iTunes, Spotify, and other platforms (in podcast-speak, this is calling upkeeping the RSS feeds). Even if I were to stop creating a new episode each week, I would still have to pay for a monthly service (like LibSyn or Anchor) to host past episodes so they can show up on iTunes and Spotify. And then there are extra monthly charges for use of recording software to avoid the Zoom audio feedback echoes we’re all too familiar with at this point.
Although I enjoy every moment of this work, it is entirely a labour of love. This has felt increasingly harder to maintain during COVID lockdowns and school closures. I have never been in a comfortable financial position as a graduate student, a single mother, or as a twenty-something working part time jobs over the last ten years. At the same time, I know I have a tremendous amount of knowledge and access to science and food studies as an academic and educator that many people do not.
This is why the podcast will always remain an accessible, free resource for anyone who is interested in it. But with the pandemic, I have grappled with the amount of free labour I am doing, and how unsustainable this is in a capitalist society that showed no signs of changing—even during a pandemic. I’ve tried monetizing my podcast using different options before, but never felt content with what was required of me.
I may sound like Fran Leibowitz but bear with me: I worked with brands and products to build ads into the show, or into my social media presence and found sponsorships for short- and long-term episode uses. It covered the bases of producing and creating the show, but consistently felt like I was having to augment my show and the messages based on the sponsorships. For long-term contracts, I had to figure out ways to book more guests on the show, and sometimes was in a position of needing to find enough guests to stretch out a contract. It made me feel like I had to sacrifice my integrity to find enough guests, which meant I was staring down the barrel of my worst nightmare: creating filler.
I began to search for the elusive “content” that I’d overhear Toronto influencers speak of while tossing their vegan fur shawls over their shoulders at brunch… and that is the opposite of what I strive for with the podcast. For short sponsorships, I worried that there would be noticeable contrasts in the message of the ads and the messages I wanted to convey in the interviews. This felt incredibly disingenuous, especially given my disdain for wellness culture. Even if brands were creating something I felt comfortable vouching for, there was always an element of insincerity to it. In retrospect, it feels bizarre to have supported a product that the Kardashians are currently advertising.
Who knew my moral compass would become rooted in WWKKD? What Wouldn’t Kim Kardashian Do? Yet, here we are.
What to expect from this weekly newsletter
This newsletter will not exclusively focus on food the way the podcast does. Rather, it is an opportunity for me to explore and expand on the intersecting web of my wider interests. is a natural progression for me and my thoughts and will not exclusively focus on food the way the podcast does. Although the topics I highlight on the show allow listeners to understand what I care about and want to advocate for, the structure of the show ultimately will always remain centred around my guests perspectives, work, and expertise.
These essays will be more of a love letter to my work and an open line of communication from me to you about the issues and topics I’d like to unpack. Truthfully, I have truthfully felt nervous about writing and releasing these essays, despite starting the process with some scrapped blog attempts on my website back in 2019.
Audio feels less concrete to me: there’s more room to play around, to accidentally smash two words together as you’re speaking and laugh about it, to sit in discomfort in the space between a question and an answer. The moment I write something down on paper, it feels like a sentence I’ve committed to agreeing to what I’ve written for the rest of my life. And I feel this in spite of spending most of high school reading and highlighting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on self reliance enough times to know that it’s okay to change your mind and grow into new versions of yourself.
During this first month of writing essays on here, I will be publishing them all for free every Sunday morning (with the option to pay if you are able to do so), and then I will be switching to a mostly paid subscriber system. I will continue to be releasing seasons of the podcast as usual on Tuesdays during regular seasons, but podcasting is a service that is free for listeners and costs money as a creator.
Given that I pay a significant amount just to keep old episodes on a podcasting hosting site, there are a few resources I have not been able to create despite being asked many times. Now, this newsletter space will afford me:
Interview transcripts: I genuinely love the process and art of transcribing, the methods of translating conversation, and reflection on language that goes into it… but it’s a time suck. So, if I’m going to transcribe these podcast interviews, I’m doing it with the love and time that process deserves. I’ll likely start with some of the most popular episodes, or most-requested transcripts, and then go based on suggestion or personal preference. These can be used in classrooms or quotes or however else, with permission. I am aiming to transcribe at least 1-2 past interviews per month, which would come out on Wednesdays for paid subscribers.
Classroom lectures, materials, and activities: I will also be putting together some of the resources from my class lectures over the years, in essay form, as well as reformatting and sharing some of my class activities and discussions for those interested in using them in their own classrooms. I am hoping that these are useful outside of undergraduate classes as well. I will be sharing classroom resources monthly for paid subscribers, usually on a Monday, as additional materials based on some of the weekly essays from that month.
I’m excited about the new personal challenges and goals I will face for this newsletter. I already sat with the discomfort of whether or not to give the substack URL my full name or hide behind “AnthroDish,” a name I’ve used for the last three years. Although it is easier to use this brand that I’ve already cultivated a community and audience around, this extension will go more deeply into exploring the issues that matter to me — and to those of you I’ve met and befriended along the way.
So, each Sunday, grab a coffee or tea (and maybe a bagel that isn’t blueberry flavoured), and check your inbox to find essays on food, water, climate change, health, and technologies. I really can’t wait to share these with you!
S