The Program 2025 annual review: How much money does an audio drama podcast make?

61 points by I-M-S 3 days ago

Hi, I'm the author of The Program audio series, a fairly successful fiction podcast that launched on HackerNews in 2018. Seven years later, this little sci-fi anthology is still ongoing, having released 37 (soon 38) episodes and surpasaing 1 million downloads.

I chronicle the ups and downs of creating a niche artistic product such as this in annual reports, the latest of which I just released last week. It offers a transparent view into what goes into making a creative project such as this, and also what you get out of it, because I share all the financial data down to specific revenue streams.

As such, I hope it can be of use to others who are undertaking a similar endeavour. Feel free to ask questions should you have any!

Cheers

pclark - 8 hours ago

> The Program audio series is a sci-fi anthology podcast set in a future in which Money, State, and God became fused into a single entity called the Program. Each episode is a standalone story focusing on ordinary people inhabiting this extraordinary world. And for them, it is not this future that is terrifying - it is our present.

WoodenChair - 8 hours ago

Thanks for posting this detailed history and breakdown. And congratulations on your success. As someone with a podcast in the same ballpark of downloads, I will say it's a real testament to how much people must like The Program that you have managed to monetize to the tune of ~$30K CAD in a single year with just 140,000 downloads in the same year. That's really good! People must love what you're doing and that must be very gratifying. Cheers!

I-M-S - 7 hours ago

A very astute observation - The Program's audience is indeed loyal if not large. I mentioned in some previous reports that I might have painted myself into too big of a niche with a sci-fi audio drama at the intersection of IT and humanities, but people who like it seem to really love it. 1000 true fans, and all that I guess.

fallinditch - 7 hours ago

Sounds like a great show, will give it a listen.

To the author: do you use AI at all in the creative aspects of the production? I assume that AI assistance in creative writing is now mainstream, and an accepted tool for most writers. I am interested to know your thoughts on this subject and if you use AI then what sort of methods do you use?

Note: Google Gemini reports that "the most successful writers in 2025 use me as a "distillation machine." They write 1,000 words of raw emotion, then ask me to help them find the "300 words that actually matter"

didgeoridoo - 7 hours ago

Google Gemini has literally no idea how it is being used. It made that up.
- fallinditch - 7 hours ago
  
  Yes it sounds like a bold statement. I called Gemini out on that and it admitted that it over-egged its confidence on that assertion.
  But presumably the LLMs do have some knowledge about how they are used?
  On further probing Gemini did give a plausible justification - in summary:
  "Creation is easy. Selection is hard. In an era of infinite content, the "most successful" writer isn't the one who can produce the most; it's the one with the best taste. Using an LLM as a distillation machine allows a writer to iterate through their own ideas at 10x speed, discarding the "average" and keeping only the "potent."
  - didgeoridoo - 6 hours ago
    
    LLMs have no knowledge (really “knowledge-like weights and biases”) outside their training set and system prompt. That plausible justification is just that — a bunch of words that make sense when strung together. Whether you’d like to give that any epistemic weight is up to you.
  - nemomarx - 6 hours ago
    
    Why would Gemini (the text model part) have that info? I'm sure that Google has some kinda analytics, or so on, but it wouldn't necessarily be part of training, the system prompt, or distillation directly.
    
    shigawire - 3 hours ago
    
    The only plausible avenue I see is Gemini ingesting Google press releases about how cool their AI is.
    Leave it to the reader to decide how informative that would be.
I-M-S - 7 hours ago

I haven't really found a way to incorporate AI into my creative process.
I do sometimes use it as thesaurus on steroids when I can't think of the right word or if I need to check grammar / sentence structure (I'm not a native speaker). I would never use AI in the way Gemini self-reports (and I doubt that's really a thing anyway).
I might be tempted to use it for episode art if I didn't have access to a professional illustrator.
I am experimenting with some AI-generated music at the moment, but that's for background cues that I'd use canned royalty-free music for anyway (emotionally important scenes have tailored-made music done by a professional composer).
One way I'm eyeing to use AI in the future is as a way to translate what are currently audio stories into video. But I feel we're still not there.
empressplay - 7 hours ago

> I assume that AI assistance in creative writing is now mainstream, and an accepted tool for most writers.
It absolutely is not. In fact the Nebula awards just banned entries from having _any_ AI use involved with them whatsoever. You can't even use them for grammar correction.
- ghaff - 2 hours ago
  
  I'm not sure quite how that works. Google Docs will suggest various changes which I take into account or don't. And they certainly correct misspellings. You can choose to decide that's not AI but it's a grey line.
  For writing I've sometimes used LLMs to speed up some essentially boilerplate. Never used for something that's not pretty much routine that I could easily do but would probably spend some time doing so.
  For anything that might be a Nebula submission, it's hard to imagine LLMs doing anything beyond the copyediting level (which may not be well-defined but seems a reasonable threshold).
- fallinditch - 6 hours ago
  
  The irony!
  - mikestorrent - 4 hours ago
    
    I get it; not very sci-fi.
    Well, they want to preserve a role for the editor; because the editor is not just checking the grammar but also the content, and weighing in with their relative objectivity on the current state of the story, what should be improved, what was good and what didn't work, etc. and if we have AI glazing us continuously we will just produce slop; it may look like good fiction but it will not read like it, and people can tell the difference!
- riskable - 4 hours ago
  
  Not even grammar correction? That's lame and kinda evil.
  When you submit your manuscript to a big publisher I guarantee they're using AI to check it (now). At the very least, AI is the only tool that can detect a great number of issues that even the best editors miss. To NOT take advantage of that is a huge waste.
  It sounds to me like they're just trying to push out independents and small publishers. Because you know they're not going to ask big publishers if they use AI (who will likely deny it anyway... Liars).
  FYI: AI is both the best grammar checker ever as well as the best consistency checker. It'll be able to generate intelligent lexical density report that will know that you used "evasive", "evaded", and "evading" too much (because it knows they're all the same base word). They're also fantastic at noticing ambiguities that humans often miss because they're like-minded and "know what you mean." (Our brains are wired like that to improve the efficiency of our repetitive tasks like reading words).
  AI tools can help you improve as a writer and enhance your craft in a lot of ways. To not take advantage of that—to me—feels like burying your head in the sand and screaming, "LA LA LA LA! I don't want to think about AI because it can be used for bad things!"
  I've chatted with many writers about AI and nearly all of them don't understand the technology and assume it's literally just taking chunks of other writers works and spewing them out one sentence at a time.
  I literally had a conversation with a writer that thought you could take ten sentences written by AI and trace them back to ten books.

yujzgzc - 7 hours ago

This is informative for an indie audio podcast. I wonder how the economics and scale change for podcasts published by studios like Audible or even smaller ones like Pushkin

- 3 days ago

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