The Program — 2023 year in review

The Program audio series year in review: 2023

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We’re a few weeks away from 2024, and the West looks like every dystopian film from the 1990s thought it would look.

Which is incidentally the reason why I started to work on The Program audio series, the fiction podcast I write, direct, and produce - I wanted to present a societal system different from our own. Not necessarily better, mind you! Just different. For even if most people have understandably become too jaded to think anything better is possible, I’d hope they’re still at least able to imagine an alternative.

That’s the impetus behind the show; the reason why I originally started to write annual reports about the show (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022) was to share what worked for me on my journey. Having achieved 730,000 downloads with no external funding, there’s probably an idea or two in here somewhere worthy of emulation should you start a podcast or a similar creative endeavour of your own (look for lines in bold).

Since we left off, The Program got new show art. With the podcast being an anthology of vastly different stories and genres, I opted for an abstract image that conveys the series’ mix of humanities (and what better epitomizes the classics than a Greco-Roman statue) and technology (and what’s more representative of tech than glitches).

The show also grew for another 5 episodes - a comedy about the trolley problem, an IT cosmogony, a drama about a missing father, a creepypasta parable, and a Messiah terrorist manifesto. The creative aspects of the show are by now mostly resolved - I know how to make it and the audiences know what they can expect, so the only thing I need to do is deliver more episodes.

Which immediately brings us to the most important topic: money.

Last year I presented a plan to finally make the show sustainable, by which I mean I started thinking how to turn The Program from a glorified hobby into a livelihood. Based on the (minimal) production costs and my cost of living (also minimal), I calculated I’d need to make $2500 CAD per month to continue paying my contributors their honorariums and still have enough to live off myself.

Almost a year later, I am glad to report that monthly contributions increased across all revenue streams (note that the following numbers are my approximate net earnings after deducting the other party’s cut):

So basically all my main revenue streams doubled, putting my total earnings at somewhere around $1500 per month and getting me from 28% to 60% of my goal. Practically speaking however the situation is less rosy, as my calculations were predicated on me moving to a lower CoL area, which is to say to return from Canada to Croatia. However, in the last 12 months inflation and declining standards of living made both countries noticeably less affordable. This is also why I felt the need to increase my contributors’ honorariums, which now average $200 CAD. All of this is to say that my monthly floor went up to $3000 CAD, and that in reality I’m now ~50% in my quest to turn The Program from a half time project into a full time job. Hopefully the goal posts stop moving and I manage to finally achieve this in a year or two. I say “hopefully” seeing we’re operating in a red queen economy, designed to keep providers of labour permanently in place with all surplus value going to owners of capital and rent-seekers.

In addition to above sources of revenue, which are recurring (if somewhat fluctuating), there are a few other less regular ways the show makes money:

One-time donations (mostly through Paypal), which totalled $620 in 2023.

Illustration commissions, which stalled a bit this year, so I paid the show’s illustrator Carlos for most of them out of Program’s earnings rather than having fans sponsor them. The two that did get sponsored came from my two superfans, Tim Franklin and Hendrik Richter.

Hendrik also sponsored an episode by advertising his real estate company withoutrealtor.com in the show intro. I also managed to snag one more sponsor - AR company Matterless, who having produced The Cyberdelic Podcast and commissioned a short SF story from Alastair Reynolds are no strangers to farsighted marketing strategies. I say farsighted, because at $500 USD sponsoring an episode of The Program might not immediately yield the best marketing ROI, but these are baked-in ads that will pay off handsomely once The Program is picked up by Netflix (any year now…)

Lastly, show merch is still the ginger stepchild of monetization strategies, achieving a single digit number of orders in 2023 at a profit margin that hardly justifies the “profit” moniker. But at least it puts The Program’s name out in the world, which is why I’m disproportionately happy whenever someone buys it (speaking of which, check out the new designs and get 10% off with discount code LITTLESISTERS).

Two biggest players in the podcasting space, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, also made great strides in 2023.

Apple Podcasts released an analytics update, not only for regular episode stats, but also the much needed subscriptions metrics.

On the other hand, Spotify released multiple features to help audiences discover and consume podcasts, by introducing episode previews, transcripts, and author recommendations (“Best place to start”). They also invested heavily into the community-building aspect by allowing listeners to leave comments through Q&A and Polls.

Spotify’s efforts to create a better experience for consuming podcasts are also evident through their surveys and interviews with podcasters, which I personally took part in. However, they are still sorely behind when it comes to making a genuine connection with us, podcast authors. I say this because — even after making many overtures to their team — to this day I haven’t heard back from anyone working in their podcasting division, whereas the Apple Podcasts editorial team couldn’t be more responsive, helpful, and just plain old kind.

Since we’re looking at these dashboards anyway, let’s take a moment to catch up with the latest show stats. Note that these come from my current host Acast, meaning the numbers you see cover only my tenure with them (i.e. last 18 months). Also please note that they are IAB-compliant, i.e. Acast is much more strict with their definition of what counts as a listen (which is why my overall download number is smaller than the number which Apple reports on iOS devices alone).

Top 5 countries by listenership remain almost the same (only Canada and UK switched places since last year). The big takeaway here is that the show simply wouldn’t exist without the US, with the States accounting for ⅔ of the downloads. So if your podcast is not relevant to Americans, think hard how you’re going to make up for it.

Age-wise, the majority of my audience remains in their 30s and trails off from there in both directions. I am glad to say that the gender breakdown has started to skew a bit less male - according to data from Spotify and my own audience survey, roughly 57% of The Program listeners are men, 35% are women, and 8% are non-binary & people who prefer not to divulge their gender. This is an important metric for me, for I strive to attain listenership gender parity. This is not because I want to unlock some kind of a woke achievement, but because it would signify I’m telling balanced stories with a wide appeal. I surveyed a few fellow audio drama creators and their audiences are even more male-dominated, which is unsurprising as they are all fellow sci-fi shows (only Midnight Burger has demographics comparable to mine).

Having a background in product management and marketing I am keenly aware of the importance of promotion and virality factor, which is why I always inquire how people originally learned about the show. Here are this year’s survey results:

Two takeaways here:

  1. Joining a network made a considerable difference in discoverability of the show, and is a testament to Rusty Quill’s force

  2. Interestingly enough, word of mouth accounts to just 5%, which I find surprising seeing how much effort I make into reminding current listeners to proselytize the show — and how many of them say they do so:

As reported in the last annual writeup, I also started publishing The Program’s episodes on YouTube, and I’ve been doing so every two weeks for a full year. However the channel saw no big takeoff, having amassed just 330 subscribers (VS 11.6 k on Apple Podcasts and 7.6k on Spotify).

I also noticed a much lower conversion rate between people who consume the first episode and then continue onto the second one: 789 views > 186 views on YouTube VS 23,095 listens > 14,380 listens via RSS - which is to say 23.6% VS 62.3%. None of this surprises me, seeing that YouTube, with its emphasis on video content, is (still) not the ideal home for audio-first stories.

Speaking of audio-first, the show’s composer Christien Ledroit and myself released the second volume of The Program audio series’ original soundtrack!

Unlike the first volume which we released in the form of an LP, this time we opted for a CD. Our reasoning was that people today are equally (un)likely to be able to play either format, and that any “real” listening will be done online via YouTube or Spotify. We reckoned that a physical release should be viewed strictly as an artefact for fans to display on their shelves, meaning the medium as such is secondary. As it turns out, we were both right and wrong. On the one hand, it is true that the LP had sold better than the CD. However, the CD was much cheaper to produce and ship, making it easy for us to swallow the losses (which wouldn’t have been the case with the LP). So rather than selling it, I’ve been sending out the second volume of the OST to the most loyal fans as a gift.

One more thing that didn’t exist at the time I was writing the last annual report is AI generated art - especially not readily available such as through Midjourney. And while opinions on AI generated images are varied, my personal stance is that it’s a great new tool in podcasters’ toolbox, especially as a way to generate show art. I myself started using it to illustrate episode quotes for socials and I’m very happy with the results.

Funnily enough, for a show (ostensibly) about AI, I’m currently not using it much. I’ve given ChatGPT a try and as a non-native speaker I find it helpful when it comes to some grammar questions, but I haven’t found a way to otherwise use it in my workflow.

Lastly I want to mention Apollo, a newly (re)launched app designed exclusively for audio fiction. Their mission is to become the best place to listen to fiction podcasts while also providing audio drama creators a way to earn money. Listeners can opt to pay $9.99 USD per month to get access to ad-free versions of the show + bonus content, and this income is then shared among participating shows based on how much they’re listened to. It’s a clever concept and The Program was glad to join it on its way to the moon just like the Apollo project (I just hope it doesn’t get defunded by Congress after 3 years).

That’s it for 2023. My goal for next year is to release five more episodes, hit a million downloads, finally move ahead with my other audio drama project (“Roddenberry fields forever..? More like Roddenberry fields never!”), and hopefully get another step closer to becoming one of those rare privileged artists who actually live off their art. If you’re already a fan, you can help me reach that goal here. Otherwise check out the trailer below and give The Program a listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or through its RSS link.