RadioPublic announced that their Paid Listens program ended on November 30, 2019. RadioPublic posted a blog about this change the day before the program was ending, so this may have taken some podcasters by surprise. RadioPublic wrote:

Ultimately, we have decided to focus our attention and resources on the set of tools that are helping podcasters grow and engage audiences on and beyond RadioPublic – like our marketing landing pages, the embed player, Podsites and other features available to RadioPublic Basic and Pro podcasters.

Here’s what you should know if your podcast was a Paid Listens participant:

•  According to RadioPublic, podcasters who have a balance of $15 or more will receive a payout. (Previously, the payout threshold was $25). To revive your final Paid Listens payout, you must complete the Stripe setup from your RadioPublic dashboard in the paid Listens section by December 15, 2019.
• For podcasters who are pending approval for Paid Listens or with a balance of less than $15, there is no action needed.
• All podcasters who have a balance above $5 will be able to use promo code “PAIDLISTENS” to get one free month of RadioPublic PRO.

RadioPublic introduced Paid Listens in March of 2018. It was intended to help jumpstart a new marketplace for in-app promotion. The idea was to make it super easy for any podcaster to get paid for listens on RadioPublic and help grow listenership in the app. The eventual plan was to sustain Paid Listens by selling in-app pre-roll spots to podcasters and advertisers, and also give listeners the ability to pay podcasters directly to skip them.

According to RadioPublic, over 3,500 podcasters signed up for Paid Listens, resulting in thousands of hours of listening, and tens of thousands of dollars in per-listen payments going back into podcasters’ pockets.

Is your podcast too small to be considered attractive to advertisers? Does your podcast focus on a niche group that advertisers don’t know what to do with? RadioPublic might have a monetizing solution for you. RadioPublic has introduced Paid Listens.

Jake Shapiro is the Co-Founder of RadioPublic. He explained why RadioPublic was introducing Paid Listens in a post on Medium. In short, RadioPublic believes creators should be paid for their efforts. They are building a marketplace and committing themselves to bringing on brands, advertisers, and sponsors that were previously inaccessible to the majority of podcasters.

With Paid Listens, we are changing the equation by guaranteeing payments to podcasters on RadioPublic, whether you have ten listeners or ten thousand.

Here’s how it works: podcasters make ad-free episodes available in their feeds, we place ads on our platform that bookend each episode and we pay participating podcasters for every listen on the RadioPublic apps for iOS and Android at a $20 CPM.

This might be a good opportunity for smaller podcasters who want to make money from their podcast, and who are willing to have RadioPublic place ads at the start and at the end their episodes. RadioPublic says it is fine for podcasters to keep “shout-outs, and obligatory grant-funding or crowdfunding messages” in your podcast. But if there are ads you have sold in a given episode, Radio Public may not count that towards your Paid Listens.

To start, RadioPublic is offering a $20 Paid Listen rate per thousand listens, or an equivalent of a $20 CPM. They acknowledge that the Paid Listens rate could go down or up, and make it clear that it is their goal for it to go up.

When you reach $25 worth of Paid Listens you are eligible for a payout. That amount equals 1,250+ listens on RadioPublic. There is a helpful slider tool at the bottom of the RadioPublic page that you can use to discover how much earnings per year your podcast could make from Paid Listens. If that sounds good to you, it is possible to sign up for Paid Listens on the RadioPublic website.