Tangle - A special announcement about our podcasts

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

The short and sweet: We are now (finally) offering ad-free podcasts if you subscribe to our premium podcast channel. You can sign up at tanglemedia.supercast.com to start enjoying an ad-free listening experience.The longer story: For the last few years, our daily podcast has been ad-supported. In that time, we’ve gotten complaints from our listeners saying they find these ads annoying and would happily pay a subscription to get ad-free podcasts.Today, we are finally making that happen.Before today's daily podcast comes out, Isaac wanted to tell you about a few of the reasons we are doing this, why we need your help, and how your subscription will make this podcast and future productions possible.To celebrate this launch, for this week only, you can subscribe to our premium ad-free podcast channel for up to 20% off. Once you subscribe, you’ll get instructions on how to add the premium version of the podcast to your feed, and then every time we publish a podcast you'll have an ad-free version in your feed (plus, you'll get premium, paywalled podcast content).A few other notes:In the near future, we are going to start paywalling our Sunday podcast (where I chop it up with Ari Weitzman, our managing editor, about all the news we missed) and interviews, to make sure we are offering ample premium content to podcast subscribers.We are going to produce additional listener mailbag editions as part of the subscribers-only offering.We are going to start recording podcast versions of the Friday newsletters as well, which is another thing people have been asking for.Most of all: Thank you. For years, our podcast was able to exist because so many of people subscribed to our newsletter to support our work. Now, our podcast audience has turned into its own separate entity. You've asked for this and we are thrilled to bring you this offering. Now, lets all take it to the next level.Again, go to tanglemedia.supercast.com to sign up for our premium ad-free podcasts.We are, as always, immensely grateful.Happy listening.Best,Isaac & the Tangle team Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey everybody, Isaac here, and I have a very special announcement today. I'm just going to give the quick and dirty right now so you have it if you want, and then I'm going to explain what's going on. The short and sweet of the story is we have launched ad-free premium podcasts, which means if you want right now, you can go to our episode description and click a link in order to get ad-free podcasts and subscribe. And if you do that in the next week, then you will get 17 to 20% off your subscription, depending on whether you subscribe for the month or the year. And that is an offer that is good for a week.

You can also go to tanglemedia.supercast.com. That's tanglemedia.supercast, S-U-P-E-R, cast, C-A-S-T, dot com. And you'll see options to subscribe there as well. That's the short and sweet. If you don't need to hear any more, just go subscribe, support our work, and thank you so much for helping keep this project going.

The longer version is that those of you who have been listening for a while, you know that this has not been easy. I feel like we have just scaled Mount Everest. This has been a six-month endeavor. I won't bore you with all the details, but we ran into numerous technical snags. And then when we were finally on the one-yard line,

we migrated our entire podcast over to a new platform where we thought we were going to be able to publish ad-free premium subscriber support podcast. And then this is a real story. Days after we did that, the platform we migrated our podcast to stopped offering ad-free premium podcasts. So we went back to ground zero. We ripped our hair out. Huge shout out to our producer, John Law. He's been dealing with all this, jumping through so many hoops, dealing with lost emails and passwords and authentication codes and all the crazy, terrible stuff you have to deal with any time you want to log into an old Apple account or connect Spotify to a

website or Stripe or your banking account. And he's just been doing it for months trying to make this happen. He's done way, way, way more work than I have. And we're finally here. We've finally done it. And there are a few reasons we're doing it. The first and the most important reason is that you guys asked for it. We've gotten so many emails. I laugh because it's just, it's every week, there's a dozen new emails from people saying, Hey, I would pay if you had ad free podcasts, please set up ad free podcasts and I'll subscribe to get them. And I appreciate everybody for saying that because it gave us the motivation to do this. And when the days were dark and the nights were

long, we stuck with it because we know there's a lot of people out there who just want that. So that's one. The second reason we did it is because we have to prove that the podcast is a sustainable media business, that it's something that can actually work. Many of you know this, that we have a daily newsletter. What some of you might not know is that the newsletter and the subscribers to that newsletter account for over 90% of all of the revenue that comes into Tangle Media LLC. So this podcast does not make money. It is subsidized effectively by the newsletter and the newsletter subscribers and a lot of people who don't listen to the podcast. And so in order to keep doing this now, and we've been doing this

podcast for over three years, we have gotten to a point where there's a team working on it. You know, we have John, we have part-time editors helping him out. We have Ari, our managing editor, putting time into it with me. We have to prove that we can make this work separate from the newsletter, that it can stand on its own two feet. And when a podcast is three or four years old, it's time to do that. So we're there. Judgment Day is here. And if you love and support this podcast and the work that we're doing, or even if you just like it, you don't even have to love us. You can just like it. And you want to keep this going. And you want to keep listening to this. Subscribing is an awesome way to support us. In fact, it's the best way to support us.

Ad revenue is great. We make a little bit of money off ads. But as you can tell, there are a lot of them. And I don't love ads, because it's not predictable revenue. It forces you to work with ad partners. It gets complicated. And then, you know, inevitably you have advertisements in your podcasts or in your work that are somehow related to the news of the day, which is always a weird feeling and just icky. And I don't like it. I like subscribers. I like people. I like the people supporting us. So I'm asking you to support us to prove that there's enough people out there who love this podcast and want to see it survive and keep going. And we're banking on you a bit here. That's the second reason we're doing it. Business-wise, we have to prove that we can

stand it up. The third reason, which is just as good as the first two, in my opinion, is that we have an opportunity to build something really cool. Working with John has been an absolute joy. He's one of my favorite people to work with that I have ever worked with. And I'm going to give him the awkward pleasure of having to edit me saying this on a podcast that he's about to publish. But it's been a tremendous joy and pleasure to have him on this team. I'm just like, it's so fun to have somebody in the trenches with you that you just enjoy working with on a day to day basis. John is that guy he has put so much time into making

this podcast a reality while also working on our YouTube channel, which he also edits and produces. He does 10 people's jobs by himself, basically. And I don't want to stop with him. I want create his own team to continue to produce incredible content like our Undecided series, like the Sunday episodes, like originally produced limited series Tangle LLC content. We want to do all that stuff. We have so much ambition on this team and so many cool ideas that I'd love to execute. We're never going to stop doing this, the main Tangle newsletter and covering politics, but there's a lot of really cool stuff we can do outside of that. And the subscribers make it happen. That support makes it happen. So if we can get a few hundred or a few thousand people to jump on this offer out of the gate, it'd be really, really helpful.

The last thing I'll just say is that we are offering a discount for people who jump on this in the first week. So like I said in the very beginning, if you go to the episode description and you grab that link and you go to subscribe, you'll see that there's a discount code. I think you get 17% off if you subscribe for the month and maybe a little more if you're subscribing for the year. It should be pretty simple to do. Once you subscribe, it's really, really easy. I did it myself yesterday. You just get an email or you stay on the page where you subscribe and you'll see a little plus sign and

you hit that plus sign and it adds the podcast to your feed. It's really, really cool. It's super seamless. And then it's just in your feed and you'll get it like you get the Tangle podcast normally on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen every day. And it'll be the little premium logo and it'll be the premium ad free podcast. I also want to give you guys a heads up, since I know it's important to some people, that we are going to start paywalling some of our podcasts down the road. So if you subscribe, you'll also get the benefit of that. The Sunday podcast will soon be behind the paywall. That's the one with me and Ari every Sunday where we cover all the news we miss, where we interview people, we chop it up. That's going to be the kind of premium offering that we're putting out.

we chop it up. That's going to be the kind of premium offering that we're putting out. We're also going to start turning the Friday edition newsletters into podcasts. So you'll get some Friday edition podcasts that are effectively the content we publish in the newsletter, but in podcast form, which a lot of people have also asked for it. Since those newsletters are behind a paywall, people want to access them in the podcast. But up until now, we've had to say no, because if we have a free podcast for something that's behind a paywall in the newsletter, people will just listen to the podcast. They won't pay to subscribe and unlock the content in written form. And now we can do both. I'm very excited about this. We have put so much time into making this happen.

And all I can say is thank you guys so much for your patience, for sticking with us. Thank you all for supporting us. All of you are the reason that this project goes on and we've kept this podcast going. And if you are still listening and you haven't subscribed yet, you can stop now. Go subscribe. Click the link in the episode description or alternatively, you can go to tanglemedia.supercast.com. That's tanglemedia.supercast.com. And that'll take you to a page to subscribe. We'll be back here around 12 p.m.

And if you subscribe between now and 12 p.m. Eastern, guess what? That 12 p.m. podcast will hit your feed with zero ads, baby. And I know that's how I like to listen. And I hope many of you do too. I'm really, really excited for this next chapter. And I just want to say thank you one more time to everybody for supporting us. And thank you, John, for putting in so much work to make this happen.

He did way more than I did. We finally did it. Ad-free podcasts are here. Check out the link in the episode description. And I will see you guys in a few hours. Peace. you