The Program — 2024 year in review

The Program audio series year in review: 2024

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The world survived for another year, and The Program audio series with it. This has been the 5th straight year of attaining this achievement (well, a few more in the case of the world), so this edition of our traditional annual report is even beefier than the previous ones. It is also even more honest. It was Kafka who said it best: “A good writer doesn’t take off his shirt to show off a six pack - he takes off his pants to reveal a baby dick”.

If you’re new here, you might want to first check out previous reports in this podcaster’s journey to chiselled abs and/or penis elongation. Here they are, efficiently listed as links next to total running times of all the episodes released that year:

Can you spot the year when a certain event caused me to be unemployed and allowed me to devote myself to the show full time?

The little asterisk in 2023 is meant to convey that I’m not counting the showcase episode. By this I mean the episode released in December of that year consisting of segments from three other shows I thought The Program’s audiences might appreciate.

Gospels of Thought in Wireland Literature

I don’t do many cross-promotions, which is definitely to my detriment, as being featured on other podcasts is one of the most efficient ways to grow audiences. To date, I’ve only done a cross promo with Midnight Burger, Wireland Ranch, and The Magnus Archives - the last one stretching the definition of “cross-promotion”, as it was part of my agreement to join the Rusty Quill Network, which is to say I didn’t return the favour in kind (not that The Magnus Archives needs help finding an audience). The reason I’ve done so few is that not many shows tick the same boxes as The Program does, which I like to describe as a sardonic socialist sci-fi audio drama anthology (looking back, I might have shoehorned myself into a tad too narrow of a niche).

On the other hand, the fact that such an unlikely show has been able to defy the odds for 5 straight years means I’m probably doing some things right. So let’s start with the wins.

The first of these was to start a monthly quiz. At the beginning it was directed only at Program supporters, providing them with more content as they longingly await the next episode. However, I soon realized there’s only that many questions I can come up with about the show, so I expanded the quiz thematically and opened it to everyone. The most successful theme so far was science fiction in general - in fact, you can test your knowledge now if you’ve got a few spare minutes:


I will continue doing these more general quizzes in 2025, with history being the next topic (The Program audio series is a pseudo-historical podcast, after all). The platform I use for this is Interacty, and they were generous enough to provide me with their educational pricing ($60 USD per year). I think of it as a marketing expense, for two reasons:

  1. The benefits of the quiz go beyond keeping the listeners engaged - it can also win them a t-shirt, which doubles as an ad for the show in the real world

  1. As you might have noticed if you took the quiz yourself, it’s also a way to collect email addresses, allowing me to promote the show afterwards

Which brings me to the next win, and that’s the number of emails I was able to painstakingly collect over the years.

100% fresh and organic

However, I make a point to contact people sparingly, and I emailed the entire list only once, which was to announce a Patreon membership sale (and I plan to do it the second time to notify everyone about the publication of this article).

The reason I was able to run the just mentioned membership sale in the first place is because Patreon launched three new functionalities under the umbrella of Promotions:

Autopilot, sending targeted offers to non-paying fans to help grow paid membership. The thing is automated so I don’t have much insight into it, but it converted 2 people, which is two more than I would have had otherwise.

Gifts, meaning free memberships, which enabled me to finally give access to The Program’s Patreon to my collaborators Chris (composer), Carlos (illustrator), and Nikola (webmaster).

And the aforementioned Discounts, allowing creators to give out a discount code for the first month or the year of memberships, which I took advantage of to run the holiday sale.

Unfortunately it also royally screwed me over, as I discovered the hard way that discounts had arbitrary limitations - the end date isn’t editable; there's a mandatory 7-day period between public sales; and codes cannot be reused. Running sales promotions on Shopify as part of my day job, I can tell you these design choices are deeply flawed, as flexibility to adjust dates and (re)create promos ad hoc is a critical component of marketing. To make matters worse, Patreon’s customer service had given me wrong information when I asked them about this in advance, and were unable or unwilling to manually adjust the campaign for me afterwards, severely disrupting my biggest marketing drive of the year. But hey, I guess it at least served as a pointed reminder that not owning your stack always puts you at the mercy of the one who does.

Interestingly enough, I tried to macgyver something similar myself earlier this summer, when I launched a special promotion through PayPal. It gave people an option to subscribe and receive all bonus material & monthly updates for a full year for $24 USD. 14 people took advantage of the offer - we’ll see how many of them renew once their annual membership expires in August.

The one perk the $2/mo special offer didn’t include was ad-free listening. Which actually became more important in October, which is when Acast enabled mid-roll ads on my show. Unlike pre-roll and post-roll ads, these are much more disruptive to the listeners’ experience, so I was a bit hesitant to introduce them. They are also much more lucrative however, and after five years of trying to do more with less I concluded it’s simply unrealistic to deliver a prestige audio drama on a decisively non-prestige budget. How much of a win this will actually turn out to be is an open question - we’ll see in a couple of months when the first cheques accounting for mid-rolls start rolling in.

Speaking of revenue streams, I’m glad to report that art commissions picked up this year, with all but one of the episodes released in 2024 having been sponsored by The Program’s generous listeners. It would bring me and the show’s official illustrator Carlos Costa great joy if this trend continued in 2025 (remember, benefactors get a poster of the artwork and their name immortalized).

The last win I need to mention isn’t mine, but Spotify’s. Just like Patreon, they’re continuing to improve the experience for creators on their platforms. While I’m wary of some of their moves (anything that makes podcasting less of an open system is a big no-no in my book), I have to commend the expanded analytics and discovery tools Spotify introduced.

What creatives like: Audiences gushing about their work.

This is in contrast with Apple Podcasts who seem to be stagnating, and whose decline is evident from the diminishing number of downloads originating from once the dominant player in podcasting. The only new feature I can recall that they recently launched is the ability to access the platform through a browser (check out http://apple.co/Program).

Having said that, perhaps I’m just sour because of a move that greatly sullied my view of the company - and that is the reprehensible way they’ve browbeaten Patreon into surrendering 30% of the profits raised through Patreon’s iOS app, with APPLE'S FEES BEING UP TO 6X HIGHER THAN FEES OF PATREON ITSELF. And before I hear from any Apple apologists (Appleogists?), let me note that Patreon already has a payment system handling transactions in place - negating the main value of the App Store to begin with. Furthermore, Apple has made it clear to Patreon that if transactions in the iOS app are disabled, they will be at risk of having their app removed. It is literally the stance of a mafia don: “Nice business you’ve got there… It would be a shame if something happened to it...” But that's the result of regulators being asleep at the wheel and allowing monopolists to abuse their market position unimpeded.

The most tragic part is that Apple still has the best people - their editorial team are the only ones who I actually know by name (and they probably know mine too, or at least my acronym). But no amount of individual good will can make up for systemic failures.

What creatives don't like: Taking 30% of their earnings.

Another fail this year was The Program’s outing on YouTube. Regardless of two big pushes that Rusty Quill provided to the show through their channel, it didn’t break 600 subscribers, netting on average a few hundred views per video. Unfortunately this isn’t enough to qualify for their monetization programme, which quite obviously favours frequent (and presumably shorter) content.

Want to know when you can sod off?
Get bent

Hardly able to afford to give away the product with the little ad money that each download makes, I’m definitely not in the position to give it away completely for free. So I unlisted the videos I had published, leaving just a few select episodes and a CTA inviting the viewers to look for The Program in their favourite podcasting app.

I also gave up on Buy Me a Coffee, a micro-donations platform rival to Patreon. Even though I am a fan of their work, the 3 supporters I had there meant it didn’t make sense to keep it up - especially since I can collect one-time donations directly through PayPal.

I am also sad to report that, just a couple of weeks before publishing this, I got a notification that Apollo is shutting down. A podcasting app made exclusively for audio fiction, it was a great idea that unfortunately didn’t take off. But hey, at least they did a better job sunsetting it than Google Podcasts did earlier this year.

Continuing on the failures front, regrettably I wasn’t able to secure a sponsor for any of the episodes released this year. But perhaps that’s not so surprising, seeing that — as I’ve written previously — these are best considered as donations from my more affluent listeners who don’t mind dropping $500 USD to support me in exchange for a shout out for one of their companies / side projects / various endeavours.

The last (tiny) fail is that I’m currently 60,000 downloads shy of the 1 million I set as the internal goal for the show’s 5th anniversary. But as I point out each time (more as a way to console myself than to convince others), podcasting metrics are basically a black box, as Acast currently reports 940,000 total downloads whereas Apple Podcasts tells me the show made over a million downloads on their platform alone. So: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not all metrics are equally useless however. As repeated readers of these reports might remember, I conduct a listener survey each year, and this one was the biggest one yet with 200 people responding. So let’s dig into the results, shall we.

First we had the usual questions about demographics. Here’s the breakdown of the listeners’ gender and age (Spotify reports very similar numbers, making me believe the results I got are indeed representative).

One of the most important questions is about the show’s discoverability, where we can notice a clear leader:

There’s no denying that the show’s distributor Rusty Quill remains The Program’s biggest mover. This makes me wonder if podcast networks are this important in general, or if we’re witnessing a unique strength of RQ network in particular. If you’re a podcaster and have thoughts on the matter, let me know.

In addition to quantitative, the survey also afforded me a lot of qualitative feedback. Here are some of the most salient points:

Ep # Episode title Mentions Rating No. of ratings
1 You had me at “Hello World” 11 3.59 27
2 Four ways to stop your system from freezing 12 3.64 28
3 White Algorithm’s burden trilogy 29 3.98 16
6 Black hat, white hat 8 3.58 12
7 Move past and break things 6 3.64 14
8 Parent-child processing 11 3.50 14
9 Right align, justify 11 3.81 16
10 My Turing-complete life 13 3.77 22
11 Motherboard 4 3.93 15
12 Jakob’s notebook: Quit without saving 0 3.36 11
13 This AI not to be used for fabricating paperclips 8 3.85 13
14 More parrot than predator 11 3.58 19
15 What you see is what you get 9 3.57 14
16 Force eject 0 3.64 11
17 Create, Read, Update, Delete 6 3.84 19
18 Killer app 3 3.75 12
19 Abandonware 4 3.86 14
20 Cheat code 2 3.67 12
21 Homepage not found 15 3.53 19
22 Jakob’s notebook: Antivirus solutions for home and business 1 2.82 11
23 Overclocking 12 3.88 16
24 Discreet optimization 6 3.69 16
25 Planned obsolescence 14 3.91 23
26 How to keep device drivers from crashing 20 3.56 13
27 In the blink of A.I. 5 4.00 15
28 Memory leak 5 3.76 17
29 Infinite loop 7 3.20 10
30 You don’t have sufficient privileges to make changes 8 3.71 17
31 Not safe for work 5 3.58 12
32 All unsaved progress will be lost 22 3.75 12
33 Software end of life 0
34 Stories of denial, despair, and devotion 0 3.63 8

A few points I wish to make here as well:

Those were the takeaways from the survey - let’s take a deep dive into the show’s dashboards next. To begin with, here are the top locations in 2024:

The United States are still by far the biggest market, even if a bit less so than in 2023 when they accounted for 64.71% of the downloads. As you can see from comparing the table above and below, the 8% difference between 2023 and 2024 was split across all the other markets, i.e. they all grew 1% to 2.5% without a clear runaway leader.

What’s more glaring from comparing the two tables is that the show received less downloads overall this year: 175,000 in 2024 VS 240,000 in 2023.

Earlier I noted that Apple Podcasts is losing market share, or at least that how it seems from my numbers:

And while some of The Program’s other metrics are stagnating (or even declining), the most important one - the number of patrons - is only going up:

It gives me immense joy to have such a loyal audience, whose patience is especially impressive in the light of sometimes having to wait multiple months for a new episode. Cognizant of this, I make every effort to cultivate their good will, making sure I personally greet every new patron, and even sending Christmas gifts to the most generous ones (or rather, which I will send as soon as Canada Post stops resisting the demands of its striking workers). Also, I make sure to put every person who donated more than $100 USD to me overall on the honorary patrons list even if their membership runs out, ensuring they continue to get monthly updates and bonus material.

Is this an overkill? I’m not sure. I just know that out of four creators I personally supported on Patreon, two lost my patronage after being unresponsive to my messages. One of them was an indie with a few dozen supporters (so presumably not overwhelmed by fans); the other was much bigger - so big in fact that he could have afforded a person to engage with his patrons should he no longer have the bandwidth to do it personally. The way I see it, who are they practising their art for, if not their audience? Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to grow big enough to determine if I was too naive to think like this.

Finally, let’s talk money.

For the first time ever, I’ve been tracking costs in addition to the revenue. I know this might sound strange coming from (someone purporting to be) a data obsessed professional. But for a long time I was loath to do it, lest the amount of money I was indubitably losing on the show sully the joy I was getting from making it. This is definitely no longer the case though, for I calculated I spent $5,832 CAD on production costs overall in 2024, whereas the revenue streams brought in:

Meaning I was $19,200 CAD in the black. In theory, this would be my salary as the showrunner. Spread over 12 months, it would amount to $1,600 CAD monthly, affording me 42% of $3,731 CAD average net Toronto salary. Were I to try to live on this money in my homeland of Croatia, it would translate to €808, which would put me at 53% of €1,500 average net salary in Zagreb.

However, the operative word in both cases is net, as $19,200 CAD I “made” is the pre-tax amount, meaning my stipend would in reality be even lower. This is the reason why The Program is still a project to which I can only devote half of my time, and why I supplement it with my half-time job as an IT project manager (or rather, the other way around).

It is also the reason why I started to solicit support from my listeners more aggressively. So I decided to turn episode 33 into a members-only one (it was a simple affair and felt like a bonus episode to begin with), and I’m currently running an experiment with episode 35, having broken it into three 20+ minute instalments for non-members. It will be interesting to see how these tactics affect the overall number of patrons when I pen the successor to this report a year from now.

I’d like us to end this report on a high note - quite literally so. And that’s by a snippet from Christien Ledroit’s hauntingly beautiful original choir music he composed for the final scene of episode 32 All unsaved progress will be lost. If you never listened to The Program, perhaps hearing the level of dedication we put into it convinces you to check it out.


And if you’re already a fan, perhaps it convinces you to throw a couple of bucks our way and support us in making more stories..