Listener Support by Anchor

Now you can get paid to podcast 🎙️

2 followers

Now you can get paid to podcast 🎙️

2 followers

Starting today, any podcaster, regardless of audience size or experience level, can collect recurring monthly payments directly from their listeners. There’s never been an easier way to start generating revenue from your podcast.

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Launch tags:Web App•Fintech•Tech

Launch Team

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Maker

Hi! I'm Mike, CEO and Co-Founder of Anchor. At Anchor, our mission has always meant more than just making it easy for people to make podcasts. We’ve also always had aspirations to help people make money from their work, too. Previously, this was a real challenge for most creators: Unless your show became big enough for podcast network who could sell your show to advertisers, your options for getting paid were very limited. For independent podcasters, there was no straight forward way to get paid for your work. Today we're making that way easier with Listener Support, which lets your listeners opt into automatic monthly payments to support your hard work. Any creator in the US can activate it to start receiving these contributions from their listeners. Once you activate it, a Listener Support button will be added to your public Anchor profile. Best of all, it will also add a link in your show notes on every app or website where your podcast is available, so your listeners can sign up to support you from anywhere (like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify), even if they don’t have an Anchor account. I'm happy to answer any questions here about Listener Support or Anchor in general. Thanks!

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7yr ago

Hopscotch

@mignano Hey Mike! This looks really cool. I'm wondering if you will roll out a premium podcast feature, where listeners have to pay to access the podcast from the start. Cheers!

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7yr ago

@mignano Hey Mike. This is really cool. I must say Anchor enabled me to start my own Podcast and I'm really happy that with this step Anchor is reaching new heights with Podcasting. Only sad part for me is that "Listener Support" is only for US but not for India. Please do make it available for many other countries which will be of great help. Cheers and All the best.

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7yr ago

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Maker

@w Hey Riley, thanks! Great question. We're considering all of the ways we can help creators generate revenue from their podcast, and the one you mentioned is definitely one of them. We felt it were best to start by making it as easy as possible for creators and by not introducing additional work for them (e.g. making exclusive content to put behind a paywall). Our learnings from Listener Support will absolutely inform our monetization decisions in the future!

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7yr ago

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Maker

@pratiptalks Thanks! I'm very happy to hear that Anchor made it easy for yor to make a podcast, and appreciate all of your kind words. We're absolutely doing our best to bring Listener Support to creators all over the world. I don't have a concrete timeline for this year but I assure you it that we'd love to bring the feature to India as soon as possible. Thanks again!

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7yr ago

@mignano Thank you very much. That's so kind of you.

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7yr ago

I didn’t see any mention of when this would roll out to creators outside of the US. I’m sure many people will be asking about this...

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7yr ago

ah so it's only US right now -- what if one of us in the UK and one in the US, can we get the account upgraded seeing as she is stateside? :) -- hmmm, i was so excited about this, surely STRIPE is a global worldwide product no?

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7yr ago

@philcampbell i'm wondering the same and am a bit surprised at how unclear this announcement was regarding creators outside of the US.

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7yr ago

@madebyildi i would'nt be surprised. it's normal for a US startup to push to a US audience first of all because of financial assets and time scale for roll out, also you don't want to roll out to the world first that's inviting a ton of work for customer support etc, you do a soft roll out first :)

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7yr ago

@philcampbell I was mostly referring to the ambiguity and lack of clarity in informing creators outside of the US when this feature would be available for their regions. The description of this announcement reads "Starting today, any podcaster..." which is kind of misleading imo. Even their medium post fails to provide any insight about availability of Listener Support in regions outside of the US.

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7yr ago

@madebyildi @philcampbell OHHH!!! hey there!!!

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7yr ago

talk about perfect timing, absolutely love this! nice work guys. could not find the activate button in my anchor account. when will it go live? -- this is awesome.

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7yr ago

i dm'd the team and it was if you had the account in the US, i'll wait for global rollout, i'm sure once they have onboarded the US they will roll it out because STRIPE is global so i think it's purely a timescale, staggered roll out!

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7yr ago

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Maker

@philcampbell Thank you, Phil! Sorry that we don't yet have the feature available outside of the US, but we're doing everything we can to launch it in more countries as soon as possible!

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7yr ago

100DaysOfAI Challenge

This is quite interesting considering what competitors have been up to. Any plans to allow sponsors to easily buy ad spots as well? It would likely require an approval process but I have a feeling many would prefer to charge sponsors instead of their listeners. They just seem to struggle to find the right sponsors. Obviously that doesn't apply to everyone but I think marketers would find it interesting too.

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7yr ago

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Maker

@guillaumebardet Hey Guillaume, thanks! We're definitely considering all of the different ways we might be able to bring monetization to our large, global network of creators. Ads have certainly been a successful options for many podcasters, however, they often only work for creators with very large audiences. We're working on finding ways to introduce revenue generating tools that any podcaster can leverage. Stay tuned as we learn from this release and ship more monetization features in the near future!

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7yr ago

Hey Mike, After also just recently seeing Breaker Upstream (https://www.producthunt.com/post...), what would you say makes Anchor's product different/"better"?

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7yr ago

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Maker

@_ryebell Hey Ryan! I haven't had a chance to take a close look at Breaker's Upstream feature yet, but I'd say that any new, innovative monetization feature from any company in the space sounds like a good thing to me! We want to see creators getting paid for their hard work, and if this helps them do that, I'm all for it. What I can tell you about Listener Support is that it works in any listening experience. So no matter where your listeners get their podcasts, they can support you directly from the show notes and pay with a single tap using Apple Pay or Google Pay (depending on their device). We also wanted to make Listener Support as easy to use for creators as possible, so there's no notion of creating extra episodes or any form of exclusive content. It's simple: if your listeners love your podcast, they can choose to support you to help you keep it going! This is a model that has proven successful in public radio for many, many years, and we're excited to now introduce it to podcasting.

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7yr ago

@mignano right on, thanks! awesome to see this space developing!

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7yr ago

Visavis

That's awesome. I love the innovation Anchor is bringing to podcasts. Is there a potential for something like automatically skipping ads if you're a supporter of a podcast? That's something I've been very excited about for way too long

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7yr ago

I love everything about this, but as a podcaster, the hard part is going to be to get my listeners to switch from Apple/Stitcher/Google/Overcast/Laughable/Pocket Casts/etc/etc/etc to instead use Anchor as their listening device. For smaller shows (I'd say 1k listeners and below) it's hard enough to get people to listen at all, let alone on a new audio player. However, that's still an easier ask than getting them to go to Patreon and fund a show that way. And as you've mentioned, they can still listen on their favorite player, and just pay me via my website. It's a great step forward.

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7yr ago

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Maker

@dan_fields Hey Dan - actually, your listeners can support from your podcast's show notes in *any* app. That's actually one of the main benefits - they don't need to leave where they already listen, and they don't need an account to support you! So it's actually quicker and has less friction than paying through a non-integrated payment system. Sorry if that wasn't clear! Here are some screenshots: https://twitter.com/mignano/stat...

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7yr ago

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