🥳 Never Post is Joining Radiotopia

Friends – Mike here to share some incredible news. As of today, Never Post is distributed by Radiotopia!

We made this explainer so you can get a sense of what that means for us (a lot!), for you (probably not too much!) and to go over how this changes how the show is made, and what kind of show we are (it changes these things not at all!). You can listen in your feed, and on the website (members, an identical upload is waiting for you in your private feeds.)

At the risk of repeating myself across multiple media, I also just want to say thank you, to you – our listeners, our members – for all your support. For listening, for writing in, for sharing the show with your pals and for joining us generally as we build Never Post, figure out what it is, and work really, really hard to make it something we can maybe do long term, if we're lucky.

We could not have gotten here without you, and we're so excited to be with you for whatever comes next.

<3

Friends, hello. Mike here with a very important announcement. As of today, Wednesday, March 19, Never Post is joining the Radiotopia Network of Shows. And I wanna explain what that means for us, hopefully a lot. What it means for you, hopefully not much at all, and whether it fundamentally changes anything about Neverpost, how it works, and what kind of show it is.

The short answer there is, it does not. If you don't know Radiotopia, you probably know its shows. Hyperfixed, Normal Gossip, Song Exploder, Articles of Interest, The Memory Palace, Wait For It, and a bunch more, including now this one. Does this mean Never Post is no longer an independent podcast? No.

Absolutely not. It does not mean that. We remain independent and employee owned. Radiotopia is a network of individually produced shows who team up to share resources and to fundraise together. And we're gonna talk more about what fundraising means in a few minutes.

But the long and short is Radiotopia has not purchased, does not own, and is not paying us to make Never Post. It remains ours and no money has changed hands as a direct result of this deal. So why would we do it? First, the folks who run Radiotopia and the other folks who have shows on it are great. They're an amazing, smart, thoughtful group of people.

I mean, you heard that list of shows up at the top of this announcement. It's just I mean, what better company could we be in? And many of them are already pals. So this solidifies and expands our relationship with that crew in a way that's it's just nice. You know, we're all in a slack together.

It's cozy. It's good. Second, Radiotopia organizes network wide cross promotional placements for their shows, which can result in hundreds of thousands of impressions. That means if you listen to some of those other Radiotopia shows, you may now start to hear ads for Never Post. And you're also gonna start to hear ads for other Radiotopia shows on Never Post.

This is great for us. It means getting in front of new listeners, and probably the largest single marketing push that we've ever had. And third, Radiotopia is gonna help us broker and place ads. Right now, every ad that you have heard has been arranged and placed by us, the team. And it's a lot of work, and we're really thankful to have some folks on our side whose job it is to think about that stuff, and I really cannot overstate how much that rules.

It's probably also worth here, being explicit that Radiotopia's ad ecosystem is huge and complex. We are plugging into a really big machine, and there's a way that they do things. This probably represents the biggest change for you, our listeners, if you are not members listening on the ad free feed. You're gonna start to hear more stereotypically podcast y ads. We are able to approve every ad, so that's really exciting, and we're gonna try to be thoughtful about what we allow to run on Neverpost.

But of course, if you hear something that is just truly heinous that you don't think we should be running ads for, please let us know. It probably slipped through the cracks, and we're gonna do everything in our power to make sure that we're like, you know, that you're listening to things that are actually useful to you. But broadly speaking, I hope that this context helps you stomach them, and it helps you know that like, in general, the ads are very good for us, and they're gonna help us pay to continue making the show. Which now, maybe is causing you to wonder if membership is gonna change at all. The answer to this is very simple.

No. Membership is not gonna change in any way. If you're a member, you're gonna get the same things in the same places. You don't have to move anywhere. If you become a member, you're gonna join all the other great folks already supporting the show, and you're gonna get the same things that they're currently getting.

A % of that membership money goes right to us to never post. We do not split it with Radiotopia. We do not give them any of your information. Nothing like that. Our members are our members.

The end. So why then would Radiotopia do this? NeverPost gets a community of great shows, cross promotional placements, and ad infrastructure. What do they get out of it? Well, they get us and I don't know.

I think we're pretty great. We know a lot about the Internet and, audio and all kinds of stuff, and we're excited to be a resource for other shows in the same way that they're a resource for us. Radiotopia also gets our show, which they like, and they're excited about having us associated with their organization as much as we're excited about being associated with them. Radiotopia get a cut of our ad sales, and also they get the ears of the audience on our public feed to tell about Hyperfixed and Ear Hustle and the recipe with Kenji and Deb. And they also get our help fundraising.

I told you we'd be back to this. Radiotopia is a project of the public media organization PRX, the public radio exchange, and so its funding model depends in part on donations. Every year, as you'd expect from a public media based org, there's a fundraiser, and we'll ask you as will all the other shows on the network to contribute to the fundraiser. The money that gets donated by listeners to Radiotopia gets split between the shows and Radiotopia. Cash is doled out to shows based on their audience size, and I feel pretty comfortable saying that if we are not the smallest show on the Radiotopia network, we are very close.

Now, this is important. Joining Radiotopia isn't a panacea. We're still gonna have to work really really hard to continue making the show. Joining this network of independent shows is amazing, and it's great for us, but it does not mean by any stretch that we've made it, and we can sit pretty knowing that the show can continue indefinitely, that it will become our jobs, anything like that. I wanna tell you this because we owe it to you as the folks who ultimately have the greatest impact on making it possible for us to make this show now and going forward.

And also, of course, so that you understand it, and so you understand that this doesn't change what Never Post is. We remain an independent show. We remain employee owned, and we are now in partnership with a bunch of other independent employee owned shows. Membership remains far and away the best way to support us. We may make a few more ad dollars here and there, but it is vanishingly likely that ad income ever gets close to equaling member support in both amount and impact.

Regardless of how small or big Neverpost is or becomes, membership is always more sustainable, more reliable, and mutually beneficial than any other economic arrangement for the sustainability of the show. I also wanna tell you, because you've listened to this far, so you must be a real freak for the podcast details, what I think about this, honestly. We've been working on this and negotiating with the folks at Radiotopia since last summer. So this took a long time. All the really fine details, like stuff that's not really worth going into here, like how do we factor in derivative works of Neverpost, who can cancel this arrangement, for what reasons, and with how much notice.

My ability to be making this announcement explaining these very details to you in explicit terms right now, both the Neverpost team and the Radiotopia team came away feeling like we got a really good deal. We really liked where we landed. We're working with really rad people, and I it's I'm really excited, for the next chapter of the show. If you have any questions about any of this, please send them our way. You can call us, leave a voice memo in the air table, email us, comment on the website.

We're gonna answer those questions in our next mailbag. We are happy to talk about any and all of this. And finally, at the end of this long, probably over long explanation, I I also just wanna say thank you. As if it isn't already clear, this is a big deal for us, and we could not have done it without our listeners and especially our members, showing us that this is a show that people like, they appreciate, they want more of it, and it's worth continuing to invest all of this time and energy into. So I just wanna say thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, right. And one other change.

At the end of every episode, you'll also start to hear a sound which, for as long as I've been listening to podcasts, has meant that the show you've just heard has been lovingly created completely independently, and now and in the future will absolutely be worth your time and your energy and your thoughtfulness. To say that we are proud and excited to end our shows this way now would be an understatement. Radio Tokian from PRX. Okay. We'll see you in the main feed next week.

Stay safe out there.