The New York Times is planning to use paywalls to limit free listening to its podcasts. The Times will not make all podcast listening exclusive to subscribers. Rather, the paywall will be deployed in different ways for different podcasts. For “The Daily,” a popular morning news podcast, the three most recent episodes will be available to non-subscribers. Back catalog of that show will be firewalled for subscribers. In the case of Serial, a leading True Crime podcast, new episodes will be exclusively available to subscribers for an initial period.
The guiding principle seems to be that a historical documentary podcast (Serial) can reasonably be subscription-only for any episode, while an important news program (The Daily) should for the public good be freely available, at least for a few days. These changes, it seems, are the start of a larger strategy of driving subscription revenue through the Times’ entire podcast effort. The Times is expected to gradually move more shows behind the paywall with the goal of eventually tying most to a subscription service. Distribution outlets are apparently unaffected with subscribers expected to be able to listen to shows across podcast platforms such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts.”
