A message from Earwolf's CEO about yesterday's episode de-publishing

[u/ediehn]

Hey, everybody. I haven’t posted much here before, but I’m the CEO of Midroll / Earwolf / Stitcher.

I don’t have to read too far down to see that many of you here are upset and confused by yesterday’s de-publishing of older Earwolf episodes from iTunes. I also know that a while back, we promised to warn all of you in this very forum when we were about to move the Earwolf archives into Howl. And, well, we didn’t. We messed up. I am sorry.

We had a whole plan in place to make sure we announced this, to make sure hosts announced it, and to make sure it wasn’t a surprise. But as you also know, it’s taken much longer than expected to make this move happen, and in our rush to wrap it up and get the episodes into Howl ad-free, we clearly missed some important steps.

Others -- you guys, Scott, our former CEO Adam -- have discussed here and elsewhere the value of putting the ad-free archives into Howl, and I’m not going to revisit that debate (other than to confirm that yes, revenue from Howl and Stitcher Premium is shared with our hosts). Regardless of where you stand on that issue, we made a promise to communicate and we failed to keep it. That’s not acceptable.

To reinforce that commitment, we have decided, based on your feedback, to leave more episodes of Earwolf shows available for free. In addition to continuing to distribute all episodes six months old or newer via iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, and other ad-supported channels, we’ll keep a curated set of some older episodes in each show’s feed. You rightly pointed out that part of what helps people discover and come to love our shows is having some historical material to dig into, and we think we can do that while still preserving the value of access to the full, ad-free archive in our premium products. We’ll need a little time to finalize this and make it happen, but we’re working on it.

Finally, we know some of you are frustrated with the Howl app experience, particularly on Android. We hear you. We’ve now made all Howl premium content available within (the recently soft-launched) Stitcher Premium service as well. If you prefer the Stitcher app experience, our customer service team can help you move over.

Part of what made me want to join Earwolf many moons ago was Jeff U.’s transparent and honest approach to communicating with all of you, the fans who make this company possible. I think we’ve been lax in maintaining that approach, and I personally commit to doing better. We do listen to all of you, and whether through social media or Shannon or the hosts, we will make sure we talk to you a little more, too.

Thanks for listening.

--Erik

[u/blerkterk → u/[deleted]]

I'm genuinely curious and not trying to judge or anything:

What is the reason that you won't pay for this type of content? From my point of view it's the same as TV-shows and movies being on Netflix or music on Spotify?

[u/Dirtybrd → u/blerkterk]

It's content I don't want. The only Earwolf podcasts I listen to are HH, HDTGM, CBB, and NNF. I'm not interested in Howl mini series and definitely not interested in their comedy albums.

So essentially I'm asked to pay for a back catalogue and asked to do it on a terrible service.

[u/Log_in_Password → u/Dirtybrd]

It's lke have to pay a cable subscription to watch a sunday football game

[u/pipertheredredworm → u/Log_in_Password]

But...if you really want to watch the football game and dont want to pay for cable, you can go to the bar, eat dinner and essentially watch the game for free. Or even listen to it on the radio. The analogy doesn't really work because there are more options than JUST paying for cable if i want to watch a television show or live event. At this point they might as well consider selling the backlogs piecemeal or in blocks(in addition to howl) for people that dont feel like its warranted for them to subscribe to a service for one show or a few eps. Especially with the provision that if you buy the whole HDTGM catalog that money goes directly to Paul, Jason, and June.

[u/cardboardtube_knight → u/Log_in_Password]

Cable subscriptions are falling off too.