hi! hope you're having a good week. i absolutely love your podcast, it's one of my all time favourites of all time :) feel free to disregard this question, but are you comfortable disclosing, however vaguely, how much money the podcast made you? if it made you money at all, i have no idea about the costs involved in running a podcast. but yeah i love our presenter so much, i already know i'm going to miss new monstrous agonies drop day once it's over!
Thank you so much, I hope you're having a lovely week as well! And thanks for your kind words about the podcast - don't tell anyone but it's one of my all-time favourite too 😉
Your question got away from me a little, so my apologies if this is way more detail than you were looking for! But I think in audio drama in particular, and in creative industries in general, we really don't talk about money enough! If any other creators want to chime in, I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences!
The cost of running a podcast like MA is very low in terms of actual cash. Aside from the first lot of equipment I bought - a mic, an audio interface, a mic stand and some cables, all coming in at about £180 total - any money I've spent has been on nice-to-haves rather than absolutely necessary outlays, like upgrading my mic set-up and building a little IKEA-hack recording booth over the summer, or paying for a domain name and email.
All this to say, my costs are a little higher than they need to be because I'm bougie 💅😌 If you're wondering what the hard, necessary costs of running a show like MA would be without those choices, it's really very low once you've got a semi-decent mic and built your recording booth blanket fort.
As for how much money it's made me, accounting for those expenses which off the top of my head I'd round up to about £1000, then MA has made me approximately £3000 since November 2020 - obviously with fewer people on the Patreon etc at the start, and more now. I'm sitting at about £250 a month from Patreon right now, which is absoutely incredible to me, and makes up a decent chunk of my actual living expenses. Thank you, everyone who pledges! 💖
However, the main thing I think people forget when they're thinking about money and podcasting is that old adage, time is money. I'm a freelancer and I work from home, so I can be very flexible about when I do MA work and when I do paid work. But the time I spend in the booth recording, or editing episodes, or even on social media (hello!) is all time that I'm not spending on actual billable hours.
Personally, that works out fine for me. I'm outrageously, stupendously lucky in terms of my financial stability, and am in a position where I can say, yeah, I'll work part-time for money and spend the other hours in the week making a podcast, knowing that the vast, vast majority of my audience isn't going to be able to/want to support me financially. (For context, MA is sitting at around 350,000 total downloads right now. If everyone gave me £1 every time they listened to an episode..... 😅)
Also, MA is a relatively time-cheap show to make. I spend about a day writing, and then the actual recording, editing and posting might take another 6hrs total? So two "lost" paid working days a week, basically.
But like... have a wee think about how bare bones MA is. Up to 50% of each episode could be written by submitters, and the rest is very formulaic and easily repeatable. It's a single voice production, with a couple of scraps of music and no sound design whatsoever, if I can help it! And the episodes themselves are only 15 minutes long, cutting all your recording and editing times right the way down.
So, let's say you're a podcaster who doesn't have the freedom and flexibility that I do with regards to your day job, and you don't have the comfy cushion of savings to cover upfront costs, and you don't live somewhere with a low a cost of living as Belfast, and you want to make a show that isn't so (intentionally!) stripped back and minimal... 😬
People like to say that podcasting has a really low barrier for entry and that's true to an extent - "all you need is a mic". But I think we do everyone a disservice if we don't look seriously and honestly about the financial costs involved - including time spent on unpaid work!
All this to say, I am so enormously grateful to everyone who is able to support MA financially, whether that's with the occasional fiver on ko-fi or a regular pledge on Patreon. It really does all add up, and it makes a real, genuine difference to my daily life. £250 a month is more than I hoped to make, and I'm really thankful for everyone who has contributed.
And if you do have an extra couple of quid burning a hole in your pocket, do consider supporting the creators you love 💖🥰
