Audio that’s valuable as a professional or educational resource, which encourages users to get their employer to pay for it, or consider an educational expense.

Audio that feels more like books, TV series, or movies.

None on a Netflix scale, or even a Netflix-in-2005 scale.

But the Calm meditation app was supposed to pass $100 million in revenue last year. I’m intrigued by Knowable, a sort of audio MasterClass. The co-hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast currently generate around $166,000 in revenue per month from their Patreon. And just today, Stratechery founder and analyst Ben Thompson launched a new podcast produ... See more

Audio that’s interactive or transformative.

Important context: With $100 million supposedly raised pre-launch, Luminary wasn’t just launching as a bootstrapped project, or a new business from an established player. It needed real traction from a cold start, quickly — and needs sustained adoption on a mass level — to justify its costly experiment.

But podcasts remain relatively inexpensive to produce and unencumbered to distribute — and for almost everyone who listens, something they’ve only known as a free form of media.

I’m more optimistic about paid audio content that’s differentiated from typical podcast concepts — and that can be successful on a smaller scale.

And I still don’t think the “HBO for podcasts” or “Netflix for podcasts” is structurally something that most people urgently need or want, at least in the way it’s being presented today.