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Nicholas Quah has a new column out on The Niemen Lab website that touches on what we wrote about yesterdayWhy Podcasting’s Elders May Be Wrong About Luminary – the industry’s instant disdain for Luminary. Luminary plans to roll out content this summer behind an $8 monthly paywall, and that doesn’t sit well with many people. Here’s Quah’s opinion.
Quau writes that Luminary has attracted a level of bile he’s never encountered before, and he says there are two reasons for that. “Its business model (closed, paywalled) strikes at the ideological heart of the medium, which champions openness, and so the co-opting of the word “podcast” in this context has real political weight to it. (RadioPublic co-founder Matt MacDonald, on Twitter: “The word ‘podcast’ MUST NOT be applied to exclusive audio content locked up and only available in a single app.”).”
The second reason, according to Quah, is Luminary’s entrance into the space with what appears to be an unlimited roll of money. “After all, money remains something that doesn’t freely flow to a ton of podcasters, and so you could say that this is a scenario where the platform ends up putting certain podcasters in loaded situations: don’t take the money, continue to struggle to figure out how to keep the lights on; take the money, get flack for doing so. (See here for an example of this.).”
Luminary didn’t do itself any favors on Twitter recently, when it posted that “Podcasts don’t need ads.” That tweet riled up the podcasters who certainly are in the market for ads to help them get out of the hobbyist category.
Here’s Quah’s take: “Intentional or not, Luminary’s very existence touched the two core nerves of the podcast community, and maybe it’s just me, but I’m getting the slightest of senses that it’s beginning to turn some corners of the community against each other. (Bears asking the question: why persist in using the word “podcasting” in the first place? Tech companies make silly new words up all the time. See: Twitter.)”
And, Quah concludes podcasting is suffering from an identity struggle. “For what it’s worth, I always thought we were going to get to this point eventually, though I was perhaps a few years too early. There will be more Luminaries, there will be more money, there will be more people and capital and power that wants a piece of this pie. Who knows what any of this will look like at the end of this new era. In any case, the adolescent days are over.”