A big announcement from Search Engine

Notes on the future of our podcast

Ad-free episodes of Search Engine, plus bonus episodes

Hello! 

We have a new episode for you, an interview with Ezra Klein where he talks about what we can do about this scary moment in media, where so many of the outlets we love are dying or being gutted. It gave me a shot of hope and direction after a bleak few months.  

Here’s the episode. After the link, I’m going to jump right into some breaking news. 

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Some breaking news

We’re trying something new. We’re offering a new version of the show called Incognito Mode.

Incognito Mode is Search Engine without any ads, and with occasional bonus episodes. It’ll cost 50 bucks a year, or 7 bucks a month. (Annual subscriptions are heavily discounted because they save us a ridiculous amount of money on card processing fees.) 

If you’d like to learn more, or sign up, go to searchengine.show. You can listen to Incognito Mode wherever you already listen to podcasts. Apple, Spotify, Zune, whatever.  

We’ve wanted, for a while, a place where we could push ourselves to be looser and more experimental. Incognito Mode is going to be that. The bonus episodes offer us a testing ground for the kinds of ideas that feel like they belong in a more intimate setting.  Our own personal audio fringe festival. 

The first bonus episode should actually be out this Friday. It’s called What’s actually in your cocaine? It is a VERY candid interview with a high-level drug dealer that we conducted when we were reporting the fentanyl story. What we learned was so surprising that I’ve found myself talking about it with friends constantly. So that’ll be our first bonus episode. 

Anybody who has already been financially supporting the show out of the goodness of their hearts will have already gotten an email from me with a link to their new feed. You don’t need to sign up for anything new. You don’t need to cancel anything old. And if you have any questions, or need troubleshooting help, you can email me by responding to this newsletter.

I know it’s sort of funny that the announcement of our subscription product is riding shotgun with our episode on the death of various media funding models. This was more of a coincidence than a plan. The conversation with Ezra happened recently, while the subscription plan has been something we’ve been working on for much longer. But, the two things are linked, because Search Engine typically reflects whatever the team is thinking about deeply. 

That’s everything you need to know about Incognito Mode as a listener. We’ll have an official audio announcement about it on the Search Engine feed this week.

But because this is the newsletter, I wanted to provide a TMI version of why we’re trying this now.  

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A future for podcasting?

Just to cut to the chase here: from day one, our goal for the show has been to have our revenue evenly split between money from advertisers and money from our listeners. That’s a decision driven equally by values and by pragmatism.

Podcasting is in dire-ish straits right now. I get a little impatient with all the prophets predicting its end times, but I understand their fear. I just think it’s on us to invent new futures for ourselves. 

And I’ve come around to the view (expressed for two years by Sruthi, my co-founder) that the future of this work is listener support.

In media, typically, ads pay for the viral stuff that reaches lots of people who may have no specific allegiance to the writer or outlet. When you read or listen to something, the internet ad you see or hear is worth somewhere between a fraction of a cent and, at best, a few pennies. That is the dollar amount at which the work is being valued, and it means that ad-supported work typically succeeds by being inexpensive to produce and/or targetting large audiences.

Subscriptions, typically, support work that caters to small but loyal audiences. Podcasts are ad-supported for specific historical and technological reasons, but it’s not clear to me that they have to be. Or that we can’t have hybrid models. 

Search Engine is trying a hybrid model. We’re not the first to try it, and we don’t expect to be the last. But we’re going to run at it pretty seriously. What’s driving us is a conviction that in this chapter of the internet, some of the things we love are dead or dying. We believe that the places most likely to survive will be the places that can persuade their audiences to pay to keep them alive. 

We started making Search Engine about fifteen minutes after the podcast market crashed. We knew if the show was going to succeed, it’d have to be experimental. Not just in what we made, but in how we made it. 

I’ve said this before, but whether this experiment works for us or not, I want to keep sharing as much as we can publicly so that other people can copy our successes and improve on our mistakes. 

I feel more optimistic about our experiment than I did six months ago. But the reality is, we are still not profitable. We’re getting there, our audience is growing, but the podcast ad market remains a question mark. 

The largest obstacle we did not foresee is that our show, for whatever reason, has an unusually high amount of international listeners. Roughly forty percent. We love them, but we currently do not make money from the advertisements they hear. All the things in life you can’t predict. 

One more time, the link to subscribe is here. 

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Some thank you’s

I wanted to take a moment as we head towards the end of our first season to very effusively thank everyone at Audacy, our ad sales partner. Those are the names you hear in our credits: Leah Reis-Dennis, JD Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Moira Curran, Josefina Francis, Curt Courtney and Hillary Shupf.

Over at Audacy, I especially want to single out Jenna Weiss-Berman. 

Last year, Sruthi and I had a lot of meetings with people in podcasting. Everyone was friendly and remarkably generous with their time. But we found ourselves struggling to adequately describe our vision for Search Engine before it really existed or had a name.

Weekly, original show pitch, January 2023

An interview show that’s not exactly an interview show? A question-answering show from people religiously committed to uncertainty? It was just a slightly tricky pitch. Jenna got it. Jenna got it immediately, and has championed our little show at every chance. If you’re a creative person and you ever get a chance to work with her, jump.

Okay. That’s it for us this week. We’ll see you on Incognito Mode on Friday, and we’ll have a new Search Engine episode for you next week. 

I’m writing to you in transit, on the way home from our show’s first long distance reporting trip. It’s one of those stories that started with an incredibly silly question but led to some conversations that deeply moved me, and actually changed my understanding of a moment in history I thought we all knew. 

It won’t air for a little while, and it pains me not to be able to put it out early. You’ll know it when you hear it. 

Danke für deine Unterstützung. Wir lieben euch alle, 

PJ