Pete Curley does not like podcast ads. That might be an understatement.
” I fucking hate ads,” Curley says. “Podcast advertisements make me wish to dive through my plate glass window.”
More than a years earlier, Curley cofounded HipChat, a collective communication platform that was eventually subsumed by Slack Now, his love of podcasts and vendetta against the ads that disrupt them has caused a new job. On Tuesday, Curley released a service meant to generate earnings for podcasters separate from advertising. It’s called Podhero Yes, it is an app. Yes, it is a subscription service.
Podhero is a pivot from Curley’s previous app, Swoot, which was a podcast gamer with social aspects baked in. It was mildly effective, amassing around 15,000 users. A few of Swoot’s social functions were rollovered to Podhero, like the ability to suggest shows to pals. Curley’s pitch for Podhero is very different. He sees it as a sort of central Patreon for podcasts.
The listener pays a $6 monthly fee, the bulk of which goes to the developer. ($ 1 of that is an “optional” fee that Podhero takes as a cut, so customers can pay simply $5 a month if they prefer.) The cash then gets split evenly in between all the podcasts a user is registered for. Marc Maron gets the exact same slice of your dough as that rambling man from your improv class that you pity-followed. The idea is to make it simple for listeners to support all the creators they want at the same time.
” I always have this with charities,” Curley states, “where I want to donate to a charity, then I begin looking into it and I resemble, ‘Ehh, they type of invested a lot of money on administrative stuff’ … and after that I’m not doing anything and I’m just a piece of shit. And that’s exactly what occurs with [supporting] podcasts. We simply end up doing nothing.”
Podhero, readily available now on both iOS and Android, has social feeds that show you what your good friends are listening to.
Photograph: PodheroTo aggregate podcasts into the app, Podhero uses Apple’s podcast API, a set of tools supplied by Apple to developers who want to build podcast player apps. Any program that is available on the open web by means of an RSS feed will be visible in Podhero, however podcasts that appear solely on a streaming service like Spotify won’t.
