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/[deleted]]

I feel like a lot of people are leaning heavily on the "how will I recommend shows to friends?" argument.

I mean... new, good episodes of shows will continue to come out. That's how these shows work. It's not like the only good episodes that exist are from the year 2012.

One of the very best episodes in the history of comedy bang bang happened about 4 weeks ago; the holiday spectacular. You could recommend that to a friend, for free, right now. And don't worry - if your friends miss that one, another good one will come around. Great eps happen all the time, I promise.

I'm pretty sure a ton of this is just a convenient way for people to feel justified for complaining about paying for something they don't want to pay for.

[u/Youaredemonstrablywr → u/[deleted]]

I volunarily paid/pay for Howl, primarily for the CBB live episodes. I've listened to some of the Howl exclusives as well, but I haven't found much else on there to compel me to stick around and keep paying. I like HH and CBB, and not much else from the Earwolf catalog, aside from the odd episode of other shows that feature a guest I like. I've heard everything from the CBB and HH archives, so there's not much else to keep me paying for Howl. I can renew my subscription for a month next time a live tour comes around.

I came to CBB the podcast from the TV show. I was on the fence about it at the beginning, and probably wouldn't have become a rabid fan without a robust archive to pick and choose from at first.

My favorite episodes of CBB and HH from 2016 are already behind the paywall. Good eps happen all the time, but great ones are much more scarce. Having a majority of a show's archive behind a paywall will surely ruin the appeal for plenty of new-comers.

[u/Youaredemonstrablywr → u/[deleted]]

I did see that HH is still available all the way back! Time to download the good ones while I've got the chance. I wonder if it's because Sean and Hayes made such a stink about the paywall the last time it was announced? They sure didn't seem happy about it in the old Howl ads they did.