Google funds TapeWrite for developing premium podcasting feeds
Hello Internet,
If we have learned something in 2016 is that very bad things happen when we consume our news exclusively via social media, where the only incentive for publishers is to maximise clicks and sophisticated algorithms keep us wrapped in tribalistic bubbles.
Our democracies cannot thrive without independent and serious journalism and we have a moral duty to pay for the news we consume. With that in mind, we are very excited to announce that TapeWrite is being funded by Google to develop a monetisation solution for journalists and podcasters. We kick off the development today in partnership with independent European news organisations, and we will build a monetisation solution based on the following two core principles:
Syndicated Media
This is no Netflix for audio. Podcasting is a beautiful anachronism that remains open and democratic. Publishers can choose among many quality hosting services and listeners have a wide choice of podcast apps to listen to their favourite voices. It is chaotic but no one owns podcasting and we love that.
We want to base this monetisation solution on private RSS feeds. When a listener supports a podcaster, she will get her own RSS feed that she can use in her favourite podcasting app or in our web player. Listeners do not need to change their habits to consume premium content.
Your audience, your revenue
A key aspect in the balance between media and tech is who owns the relationship with the end user. In our case it is very clear: the publisher. We will share the mail addresses of subscribers with the publishers. They are the ones who know their audience. We will focus on making the subscription process as frictionless as possible and get out of the way.
We are not in the business of selling media or advertisement. Our model is software-as-a-service. This allows us to charge a small transaction fee and let the publisher get most of the revenue. We need to flesh out the details but we will aim at charging less than 9% of the revenue as a fee, and that includes the payment processor fee. Podcasters will then at least get 91% of all the revenue generated.
Help us build this
We kick-off this project today but there won’t be a single line of code written until next year. For a few weeks we will be working on surveying our users and iterating on design. This tool is for you, the publisher. We will be launching a survey to make sure we build something that suits your need. If you want to be a part of this project please sign up here.
Note: we are being funded as part of the Digital News Initiative, which is a very noble -and needed- thing to do. Kudos to Google for this.
