New York Times podcasts, Hot Ones & Dr Disrespect

Is the podcast industry separating into two tiers? Is Hot Ones over priced? Do streamers need to be ankle-tagged?

Firstly, a million apologies for taking a few weeks off sending these newsletters out. We’ve had an election campaign sprung on us here in the UK, and I’m working double-time to get some hot, hot political content into our listeners’ ears. But that’s meant that my focus has been on – *sigh* – my actual work, rather than this newsletter. Anyhow, there are a few media stories doing the rounds that I wanted to quickly address today…

NEW YORK TIMES PODCASTS

So the New York Times, one of the world’s great media brands, is to put its podcasts, including The Daily, which regularly ranks as one of the most popular and influential shows, behind a paywall.

This move comes after the paper launched an audio specific app in May 2023, which has subsequently passed a million downloads. That project, in tandem with an internal paywalling strategy that has seen Games and Recipes become key subscription generating verticals, makes the paper well placed to start controlling access to its podcasts.

According to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, shows like Serial will become entirely inaccessible to non-subscribers (this is, perhaps, part of a longer term strategy to justify the $25m the Times paid for Serial – though that price looks relatively cheap compared to the silly money sloshing about during that period. The Daily, which is perceived as a major gateway drug to the Times’ political reportage, will continue to be available for three days (or three editions) but only subscribers will receive access to the show’s full archive. (My supposition would be that podcasts produced by The Athletic will continue to be paywalled within that app, but may also be available on New York Times Audio). On the spectrum of paywalls I would consider this at the tough end: the Times is a sufficiently established media brand, and its podcasts a key part of that, to not need to offer tasters for samplings, like cubes of cheese at the end of a supermarket aisle.

There are two important things to note about this move. Firstly, it is clearly another landmark in the steady decoupling of podcasts from their free-for-all origins. For the past five years or so, plenty of enterprises have sought to reverse the foundational access provided by the podcast industry, whether that was Luminary’s plan to create a “Netflix for podcasts” (yes, I’m still mocking them for that one) or Spotify and Apple wrestling for position in the subscriber content arena. I thought for a long time that the horse had bolted on that, and a non-podcast audio product would have to emerge to serve this more transparently commercial plan. But it’s clear that the VC-fuelled industry is slowly but surely shifting the internal dynamics of podcasting, so that “podcast” remains the brand for this new sort of pay-to-access audio endeavour.

The second point would be to reinforce the bifurcation of the industry at this point. The New York Times is a media brand of a specific size, and there are only a handful at that level globally. Putting aside media conglomerates like Disney, Paramount or omnicompanies like Apple or Amazon, there are but a few journalistic outlets at the Times’ level. The BBC, perhaps, or Fox, CNN or the Washington Post. But it’s a really rarefied group.

What this group have that most other podcast companies don’t have is clout with their audiences. Like most businesses, media organisations work in a reciprocal relationship with their customers. You ask a little of them, they ask a lot of you. And that’s the basic transaction, but, at a certain point, the dial begins to shift. The clout ratio moves in favour of the provider. It’s why Arsenal can get away with selling £1000 season tickets, or Taylor Swift can charge her fans $500 for the chance to sniff her air. And while the New York Times might not exist on quite that level, it can make demands of its audience.

If I – as someone who runs an independent podcast company with several shows that need to turn a profit – want to change the business model of any of my products, I have to do it in a manner that is almost totally frictionless. If I want to introduce some paywalled content, I have to basically guarantee that there is still a product there for the free-to-access listeners. If I want to run advertising it can’t be too obstreperous, yet the density has to be high enough for it to be a valuable idea. I am basically at the mercy of the fact that the most important thing for me is still that raw audience size, that access to market.

If I were running the Times’ audio strategy I would, of course, have suggested this move some time ago. It’s clear that the podcast market is moving only in one direction, and they can do proprietary paywalling which, again, isn’t an option for me (I would have to outsource that job to Apple or Patreon or whoever, all of whom will take a 30% or so cut). It’s also clear that podcasting is, strategically speaking, only a relatively small part of a broader subscription business. But the Times has evidenced, in the past, an ability to convert partial users – people who want Alison Roman’s recipe cards, or to play Spelling Bee – into total users. Full package subscribers to the New York Times experience.

To me, finally, it suggests a closing of the era of free content. We’ve witnessed journalism, as an industry, trying to retrospectively build a wall around their output (once again, after the horses have made it halfway to Seabiscuit’s house party). Podcasts have remained free far longer than they should have (per unit of output, they are a relatively expensive form of journalism) because of the lack of sophistication hard-coded into their DNA. But the end of the RSS era, the end of Podcasting 1.0, has made it harder to justify the assumption that a podcast should be free at the point of access. And if podcasts aren’t free, what is?

HOT ONES

Buzzfeed is trying to sell First We Feast, the company behind the extremely successful online talk show, Hot Ones. The premise of Hot Ones, if you aren’t familiar, is simple and deeply stupid. A celebrity guess joins the host – a bald bloke called Sean – for an interview about their career. There’s one twist: the duo will eat progressively spicier hot wings during the course of their conversation, culiminating in an eye watering, vomit inducing chilli concoction called Da Bomb.

Naturally, Buzzfeed believes that it can get $70m for First We Feast, and, equally naturally, the market has responded by acting like the Buzzfeed valuation is insane. But Buzzfeed is riddled with debt and urgently needs to generate cash, so they need a good price for a rare asset in their portfolio that actually has some cultural currency.

But the buying market is correct. Hot Ones is a decent offering, but is, in my opinion, a low-loyalty piece of IP.

What do I mean by that? The host – Sean Evans – is just some bloke. He was a copywriter for the Chicago tourism board who happened to be freelancing for Complex magazine when the idea for Hot Ones came up. He had no real experience before Hot Ones, and hasn’t had any significant non-Hot Ones projects. He’s a perfectly decent interviewer (and a very excellent consumer of hot sauce) but he’s not particularly funny, not particularly clever, not particularly intuitive. In another life, Evans would just another functional hack.

Which isn’t his fault (and – again – he does a great job with Hot Ones and would be facile not to attribute some of its success to him) but does suggest to me that he wouldn’t be a particularly valuable addition to another media organisation. For $70m, a buyer could have Pete Davidson or Rachel Sennott or whoever, really, eating chicken on camera.

The second is the question of the show’s premise, which is actually an age old one. You’re taking a celebrity out of their comfort zone by feeding them hot sauce, which might unsettle their PR-managed responses, but, even if it doesn’t, will likely provide excellent footage of them dry-heaving. The premise is not that different to something like Running Wild with Bear Grylls and definitely not that different at all to a segment like the one on Seth Myers’ show where he gets “drunk” with celebs. What could you replace hot wings with? Any other spicy thing, surely (curry? a chilli??), or maybe Fear Factor (which, after all, launched the presenting career of the King of Podcasting: Joe Rogan). How about Pizza Roulette? Where one piece in the pizza is made from fermenting cheese and rotten tomatoes.

(Additionally, it’s been reported that Evans appears on the show courtesy of a short contract with Buzzfeed, which has been renewed multiple times. The absence of a long and binding contract is likely to be another issue for potential suitors. After all, if the host doesn’t come with the show, $70m is a lot of moolah for a plate of chicken.)

The point is, the success of the show is predicated on too few sellable assets. Almost all of its revenue (some $30m odd) is tied to merchandise and licensing, which, again, is a far from unrepeatable formula. It’s a transaction – or failing transaction – that reinforces the importance of star power and brand building. Millions of people will be aware of the existence of Hot Ones – the show where Sydney Sweeney wretched on a drumstick – but how many will even know that format is called Hot Ones? How many will know the host is called Sean Evans? How many will know the company behind it is called First We Feast?

Instead, people see it as the YouTube celebrity hot sauce show –and that’s too low-loyalty to be worth Da Bomb.

DR DISRESPECT

But there are downsides to a creator economy too focused on creators.

That’s something we’ve witnessed this week in the murky world of gaming streamers. I’ve tried to keep up with this part of digital media for some time, and so have been aware of the existence of Dr Disrespect – a middle aged man in a wig, sunglasses and sporting a voluminous moustache – for some time. He’s a core member of that shit-posting, rage-baiting part of the internet; a visible avatar for trolldom.

Guy Beahm – he is neither a true Dr, nor a member of the presitgious Disrespect dynasty – is a 42-year-old man whose career imploded this week after allegations that he had inappropriately messaged with a minor emerged. Beahm had been banned from the streaming site, Twitch, back in 2020 but it has taken years for these allegations – which were considered an open secret in the industry – to reach public ears. “Nothing illegal happened,” Beahm wrote, in a statement confirming the rumours about his Twitch exit. “Now, from a moral standpoint I'll absolutely take responsibility. I should have never entertained these conversations to begin with. That's on me. That's on me as an adult, a husband and a father. It should have never happened. I get it. I’m not perfect and I’ll fucking own my shit.”

But with the allegations in the public arena, Beahm found himself suddenly shit-canned by his own gaming company, Midnight Society, of which he was a co-founder. "We are terminating our relationship with Guy Beahm immediately,” the studio announced.

Dr Disrespect, the name under which Beahm works, is a brand with 4.67m subscribers on YouTube. Prior to his ban, Twitch had signed him on a multi-year exclusivity deal. He was a major player in an area that most tech companies – and financial watchers – consider to be a growth area. But video games have always had a problem with finding champions who can both engage the viewing public and also uphold the high professional standards associated with a multi-billion dollar industry.

It’s not unique to video games, of course. I’ve long suggested that a start-up idea would be to offer Bad Dude Insurance for firms hiring people of sketchy reputation. Think about the loss of money Manchester United suffered when audio recordings of their winger, Mason Greenwood, surfaced. Overnight, Greenwood went from an £80m target for some of the biggest teams in the world, to a total liability. Or think about how Marvel is responding at the moment to Jonathan Majors, signed up to a multi-film deal, being convicted of assault.

But reputation management is particularly poor in the creator economy, especially give that there is almost no due diligence or vetting process. You can start streaming one week, and by the end of the year you’re broadcasting daily to a million people and earning eye watering revenue. Brands that advertise with video game streamers – predominantly video games themselves but also things like energy drinks and crypto products – are far less concerned about brand association than Nespresso or Nike. And blokes like Dr Dispespect are far riskier bets than George Clooney or Michael Jordan, all things considered.

I keep saying things like “as the industry matures there’ll be more focus on creators who don’t bring the whole shebang into disrepute”, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. That American Dream idea of coming from nowhere and changing the world still looms large in the streaming industry. But the ramifications for companies – not just Goliaths like YouTube and Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, but smaller yet well-capitalised start-ups, like Midnight Society – is severe. Put simply, you cannot predicate a multi-million dollar business on the reputation of a single person, when that single person is a 42-year-old dude who spends his days wearing a lank wig and playing video games.

NED LUDD RADIO HOUR

Here’s the latest episode of my little podcast, The Ned Ludd Radio Hour. Listen, enjoy, recommend.