08/19/2025
Here's a "must read" article about the intense, but short-lived, heyday of narrative podcasts.
I made and hosted an 8-part podcast, My Fugitive from 2019-2021 - at the apex of that heyday. The show's producer, Pineapple Street Studios, is cited here as the prime example of the best narrative podcast production company - and it was. Pineapple Street made award-winning, top-echelon work. I was thrilled they took on my story to produce.
That said, as an independent filmmaker, I always am attentive to the economics of my projects and I literally could not figure out the math on this one.
I had a sense of how large the audience for the podcast would be. I knew how long it was taking to make. I knew how much they were paying me and had a relative sense of how much they were spending on the large staff assigned to the project. It was as I said to myself, "silly money."
But, I went along for the ride because it was profitable for me (especially during the pandemic when all of my filmmaking colleagues were out of work) and I was learning a whole new world of nonfiction storytelling.
My Fugitive did well, won some awards, had over 700,000 downloads. made a few "top ten" lists. Still I could never figure out how the show was ever going recoup all of the money it cost to make - and then hopefully yield a profit?"
Indeed, I had more than a passing interest in this question - I have a stake in the back end of the series. I have a revenue sharing split - and when Pineapple Street's agent didn't sell the television remake rights immediately, they reverted those rights to me. That seemed odd - and stupid. You always keep your rights, especially to back catalogue. But hey, what do I know?
Since 2021, I have been receiving statements documenting downloads and advertising revenues. My worry about the economics of all this was unfortunately correct. Advertising rates are pennies on the dollar of what you see in television and after the series was over a year old, downloads slowed to a small but steady stream. There was NO WAY this was ever going to recoup.
The era of "silly money" in podcasting is over, as this article reports. Indeed, the era of narrative podcasts is pretty much dead, they simply are too expensive to make. Pineapple Street has been dissolved, as with most of the other companies that rely on non-interview talk shows. That's unfortunate. Some of the best storytelling out there was being done in long-form episodic podcasting.
At some point, someone will figure out what the business model for audio storytelling. I hope they do. It's like creating "movies for the mind" and people love them. Just not enough people to generate advertising sales
And just in case, I've held on to the back end of My Fugitive because owning back catalogue media assets has frequently proved very profitable.
Podcasts like 'Serial,' 'The Shrink Next Door,' and 'Over My Dead Body' were once a booming industry. But times — and budgets — have changed.
