Micah is the sole developer of the Adblock Podcast app — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
This interview is from the Podnews Weekly Review
Micah Engle-Eshleman: I use the standard public iTunes API, but I do some basic audio analysis to look for ads. I’m just essentially sending the [app] a list of like timings of where the ads are, and then just recording if they actually skip the ad and charging them for that. I’m downloading the audio and then serving all users the same version of the audio - so if you have users using this app, you would be seeing fewer downloads, but you’d be compensated for that. I’m not sure the ideal way to do it, but it’s the most fair.
James Cridland: So, how does the charging mechanism work?
MEE: So you sign up and you get a couple of free ad skips, and then after that you have to subscribe. It’s $4 a month, which gets you 50 ad skips and then $2 of that is set aside for podcasters. That comes out to $0.04 an ad skip. Then there’s about $0.50 of credit card processing fees in there, and Apple’s taking their cut, or Google, or whoever. So I’m getting about $1.50 of that per month, per user.
JC: You’re not going to get incredibly rich on this. You say that you share the money with the podcasters. How do you do that then?
MEE: I don’t track exactly what episode you’re skipping or when, but I do track in what the podcast was, how many credits you used, etc, and tally those up. And I have a running tally per podcast. On the website, I have a tally of podcasts that are owed more than a dollar, and how much they’ve been paid. So it’s pretty transparent. Is your podcast even listened to? And if it is, how many ads have been skipped, how much have you been paid, that sort of thing.
JC: The money that somebody could theoretically earn through this tool could be more than they could have earned through the through the advertising model.
MEE: I hope so. My basic research by Googling it, is the lowest amount I can charge users, that would still be better for the podcast creators. That was kind of my heuristic there. It’s not particularly cheap, as you can imagine: if you’re listening to a lot of podcasts like this it’s going to be expensive, but there’s really no other way to do it. I think at the end of the day, there’s not a great micropayment model for the web, and if there was, then podcasts could use that.
JC: I think we covered it very quietly at the end of last year - but I think you said you’d got hate mail?
MEE: Yeah. Well, hate-mail is too strong. I got one email that was rather nasty. I got quite a few folks being like, “What is this? Are you trying to screw over the podcasting industry?” Which is fair, right? At that point it was very much a work in progress. I was building it out. I was the sole user. So I hadn’t put a lot of time into marketing.
JC: Do you do you understand where they’re coming from?
MEE: Yeah, absolutely. If you’re a creator, and your livelihood depends on this, anything that could cut that out is a big deal. I’m also like very aware of just like what’s happened to journalism and the whole cat and mouse game of website ad blockers. With everything, you have to have a paywall now or you don’t make any money, which is bad for the web, bad for users generally, unless you can pay for a bunch of subscriptions. My hope is that this could be an alternate model where like people who at least are willing to pay, can pay in a way that’s convenient and that doesn’t require having a $5 subscription to ten different podcasts to listen to occasionally. That’s my hope. Do I think this app will survive for years? No, I don’t.
JC: Why not?
MEE: I’m not a venture backed startup. I not only do not have a lawyer, I have no desire to ever pay a lawyer. So I think, if this ever took off and a large company made me block podcasts, then that wouldn’t provide much value, and it wouldn’t be worth all of my time trying to make it work. I think that’s one possible future here. I made my peace with that years ago when I started doing this thing. But at least I’d get to the point where like people actually like this enough that people actually cared about it. So many apps never make it that far.
At the end of the day, in media in particular, like you want to have a product that people are willing to pay for. A lot of what you need is a service that makes it easy to get paid. That is almost more important than restricting your content. I think a lot of the tricky bit is like most podcast apps, like you can put links in there, but there’s no real structure to like incentivize users to pay.
One thing I was toying with, and I think this could be pretty impactful, is to have some tipping feature, I think it’d be huge. I listen to a lot of podcasts over the last year, andI don’t really want a new subscription, but I want to tip $2, you know, or something like that. That could be a really big deal. I think it could be a win win. Obviously I don’t expect everyone to see it that way, but I’m happy to chat. If people want to email me, I’m happy to talk to you about it.
The other key is the people in my app already have a paid subscription, so they’ve already opted in to pay for podcasts. It’s just like literally clicking a button - they don’t have to put in their credit card number again. There’s much less friction.
JC: What’s the best way for people to contact you?
MEE: The website has my email address there.
JC: Micah, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
MEE: Yeah, for sure. Thanks a lot.