About a year ago, I gave up my full-time office job in order to start my own podcast production company. My hope was that the podcast market was changing (Apple had started opening up their analytics, and the UK was fairly flush with cash investment) and that it would be a fun time to be wading into the world of independent podcasting. I’m in my mid-20s (just about) and I felt like I would always be able to fall back into regular 9-to-5 work if things didn’t go to plan. Not that I had much of a plan, it should be said.

The first thing I did, after I quit my job (and, it should be noted, that job was a full-time podcasting one in the current affairs journalism sector) was to work on branding my little company, Podot, something that I’d actually been thinking about for several months. Look, I don’t think that I came up with anything sufficiently eye-catching that it would make a big difference to prospective clients, but it mattered to me. It mattered to me that the company existed with a coherent identity across platforms, and that it felt like something that transcended the isolation that some people feel when going freelance. I have always (well, for the past year) butt up against the idea that I am currently freelance — no, I tell people, I run my own company. The difference is fairly immaterial (and, perhaps, essentially false) but it means something to me in terms of overriding the fear that I gave up a good job just so I could wear pyjamas to work, or play Fortnite before lunch on a Thursday. I made my move because I wanted more, not less.

The second thing I did was create a show — Polling Politics — which was fundamentally home turf for me, something that I’d made, in various incarnations, hundreds of times before. This was basically what I wanted my podcast company to be: somewhere that created and published its own content, driven by direct-advertising sales. I hired presenters and started putting out the show without an advertiser attached, but, miraculously, two different sponsors carried the show over the course of 2018 and 2019, for 28 episodes.

But the show is now on hiatus and the reasons are clear and troubling. Without going into the specifics of any deals (which would be helpful but not contractually permitted) the show’s income had to, first of all, match the capital outlay I was making. Each episode had a budget of, roughly, a few hundred dollars, in terms of paying presenters, marketing the show, and then cycling what remained into the company, through which I could pay myself. But the margin was razor thing: this wasn’t a project with any money to be squirrelled away for a rainy day, or the ability to pay myself much more than what I would earn as a junior producer freelancing on a gig for the BBC or Spotify, or wherever else has money to burn.

But, you know, it was my baby, and the sort of project that I left a salary behind to do, so I could forgive it all that. Except that I was already having to do production, editing and marketing on it, and was stretched as it was, so when our second multi-month advertising deal ended, I had to get back into sales mode. And the reality was that signing a long-term commitment was getting harder not easier. It makes more sense, as a gamble, to pay for a product that has 0 listeners, if you think it could get a 100,000, than to pay for a product that has continually received 10,000 listeners (these are just example figures, nothing like the reality). After 28 episodes, it was harder to make the claim that the show was growing exponentially, or packed with untapped potential, and I couldn’t, from a time management perspective, entertain advertising deals that covered fewer than 6-episodes. It may be that, with a dedicated sales department, it’s possible to live hand-to-mouth, episode-to-episode, and hope that the right opportunities come along (and if you can do this from a logistical perspective, you can also increase your per episode price). But it wasn’t possible for me, so I put the project on pause for foreseeable future.

Added into that decision was the knowledge that the corporate, commercial work that I was doing was providing more instant, stable rewards. I have done a lot of client work over the past year, which provides some certainty in an uncertain industry, as well as an editorial portfolio very similar to what I was doing when I worked full-time. Things have changed in a year, but not that much. Il servitore di un padrone becomes Il servitore di due padroni (or molti padroni, I should say).

And this is, I think, one of the big questions of independent (or freelance) work: how much should you subordinate your passion projects to paying work? To what extent does the calculus of risk reward people who are willing to suffer financial hardship in order to break through in personal or creative terms? Is there a Sisyphean element where the more you take corporate gigs in order to support more personal work, the harder it becomes to provide those projects with the focus and attention they require?

I don’t have an easy answer for that. Of the six or seven podcasts that I am currently producing, none are what you’d call passion projects. All are, I think, good, but they’re ideas that I’ve either been hired to implement or developed with the client. It’s an important part of podcasting as an industry, and I’m grateful and privileged to have a reputation that allows me to do it, but it’s not the reason why I struck out on my own. That’s the big question that I face at the end of my year of podcasting dangerously: has this been worthwhile? Has it been worth the risk? Worth the hardships?

I don’t have an easy answer, other than to say that I’m going to give it more time and push forward in new and exciting directions. If working in podcasting has taught me one thing, it’s that podcasting can’t be done in a vacuum — it needs to better interact with digital media around it. But if it has taught me more than one thing, here are a few of those observations:

It’s getting harder to be your own man

I felt that podcasting was changing, and that I wanted to be in at the ground floor of a rare boom industry in the media. But the same forces that stirred my decision have worked their magic on other entities, and the market is shaping up to be much less indie, much less counter cultural, much less innovative, going forward. We’ve seen it with BBC Sounds, Luminary, and with Spotify’s acquisition of Gimlet and Anchor. The money being invested into the podcasting industry is going to mean that there are lots more full-time podcast producers doing the rounds, but they’re going to be indentured to big, flush corporations. In and of itself, that’s not a bad thing, especially if you’re a young graduate trying to make your way, but it will inevitably put the squeeze on indies, and, I suspect, make the sort of discursive, pinballing innovations that typified early podcasting harder to achieve.

Podcasting is starting to smell of VC money

The fact is that, half a billion dollars later, I’m not sure that Spotify have any idea how they can turn podcasting into a moneymaker, even for themselves, let alone the people making the content. Spotify is typical of the indulgence that venture capitalists have shown the tech industry generally, an indulgence that translates very poorly to content makers: it’s affected musicians pretty badly, and will do podcasters next. The fact is that making a podcast is not substantively different from making a chair. Either way you end up with an immutable product to sell. Now I can see why money would chase an app that streamlines the sale of chairs, or can extract data from its chair customers, just as I can see why it would chase an app that facilitates the sale (one way or another) of podcasts, but podcasters should be under no misapprehensions here. The money that is flooding into the industry is not for you. In these early days, it might help you get budgets (budgets that serve mainly to inflate the industry beyond its means) but in the end, it’s in the interest of the technology (the distribution methods) to drive down the amount they pay for content. The more valuable Amazon becomes as a company, the less they need to pass on to vendors using their marketplace. This is the long game for podcasting, and it should be nerve-inducing.

Content-only just isn’t scaleable

Look, I think important work is going to be done in podcasting by content-only businesses, but the reality is that, in terms of investment and income, it’s very hard to scale your podcast business without a tech product behind it. There are loads of companies doing great work in podcasting tech (and it remains necessary, because no one has fully solved the issues of discoverability, monetisation or distribution) and they’re already siphoning off most of the potential resources. Fair enough, they have a more tangible product, but I suspect that most will do what Spotify, Acast, Audioboom, Luminary…etc have done, and also produce some of their own content, closing the loop between tech companies and their content. We’ve seen Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and everyone else already do this in streaming video (not to mention the Big Boss Amazon, who serve as both the only viable online marketplace, and also a vendor capable of undercutting anyone using that marketplace), and I think it will happen more and more with podcasting, to the detriment of indie production companies (with the exception of those who have a very close, almost filial, relationship with one of these broadcasters).