Ricky Gervais Podcast Goes Paid

Audible announced today that they have signed a deal with Ricky Gervais (and his buddies Steve and Karl I suppose) to distribute his podcasts going forward.

I love these podcasts and have blogged about them. They are my alltime favorite podcasts.  Karl Pilkington is the first great comedian of the podcast era.

But I am disappointed that Ricky and his friends feel the need to DRM their content and make it available in a proprietary format that makes it less available and less user friendly.

I don't want to go anywhere near the iTunes fairplay DRM and I certainly don't want to use Audible's proprietary format.

I like getting the show in mp3 format. I'd be happy to listen to ads. That's the way talk radio works.  Why can't podcasts work that way too?

Or let me send them the $6.95 via Paypal for a RSS feed URL that allows me to continue to subscribe the way I want.

It's not just the content that matters to me. It's how I get it and what I can do with it.

So count me out Ricky on your next couple seasons of podcasts. I am sure you'll get a ton of listeners.  But I won't be one of them.

Comments

Completley agree. I started listening after reading about the podcast here on your blog and am utterly hooked now. But it was truly shocking to hear them say that they are going to start charging "a small fee," which apparently is just small enough to make it a complete nightmare to get the show. I tried downloading the free sample from Audible and ran into all kinds of problems. I understand your moral issue with the Apple DRM, but the iTunes store is dumb-easy and it works. I'll lock myself into a format if I know it's going to work, ESPECIALLY if I'm supposed to pay for it. I guess now I'll just have to wait for my younger brother to BitTorrent and send the episodes my way. Moral of the story: when your legal acquisitoin system is a headache, watch your listeners/users flee for the simpler/cheaper/more "illegal" ones. (Although Karl's diary alone is enough to get me to spend another hour trying to get the thing to work...)

Completely agree. I've read the next season will be a 4 episode season with pricing at $1.95 per episode or $6.95 for all 4.

I am an addicted fan, but Ricky Gervais and Co. just lost another listener.

I feel the exact same way too. I also don't mind paying a dollar or so per episode (baring it comes to me in good old fashion mp3), but if I remember correctly it was like based on a monthly fee, which although it probably isn’t much more in the long run, I like to have the ability to micropay for each specific episode.

I am going to miss Karl's diary.

I am shocked, depressed and bordering on angry that ricky would do this. Not because I wont pay (I might…im an addict) but because he’s torpedoing his own career and earning potential. he has gotten some really really bad advice.

i always liked ricky, but the podcast hooked me on him, drove me to his website where i think i devoured all the free video there which then drove me to buy the DVD of extras, then of his stand up act. i sent the podcast links around to friends, family and office mates, many of whom professed to have the same experience of then buying waaay more than $6.95 worth of stuff.

What i think folks don’t get about the free and easy sharing of audio or video content like a podcast or a jon stewart or snl skit on youtube is that it does more than introduce people to new content, eventually upsells people to paid content and drives them to watch the tv show with ads, it also creates a kind of instant community that is more analogous to the broadcast tv experience than anything that has yet to exist on the internet.

when i send a skit via youtube or an mp3 or a podcast out to my office, 5-10 people watch it right away, come over to my desk, talk about it in the kitchen, etc. we share the experience which makes us enjoy it even more. then others in the office hear us talking about, and check it out themselves so they aren’t missing out either. just like folks talk about last nites episode of the sopranos etc. its the community aspect of making something free that ricky will miss out on the most.

finally - long post - i am willing to pay for some media content. we live in the uk so we bought the season of desperate housewives through itunes and will likely by a season of law and order since we cant get it here - or when we get it on tv it will be a year old and on at weird times of night (and dvr services are still hard to get). i also like buying music from new bands to support them, etc. so i'm not religious about all media needing to be free and ad supported. but ricky, dont kill the karl pilkington phenomenon before he gets started. keep it free and you and him and steve will - contrary to what audible says in its press release - make far more in the long run.


Fred, now that you say you are willing to pay or listen to ads, do you think advertisers would be willing to pony up the same $ that we're coughing up for that same podcast? i.e. would nokia pay $2 per download to have people listen to this podcast? (I understand that if its free they will get TONS more listeners so that $2 ad figure is unrealistic, but work w/me here).

Right on Fred. I love the RG podcast as well and was very upset by the news that they were going to a proprietary format model. The paid thing doesn't bother me so much but I do think that advertising is the way to go for podcasts. As you pointed out, listeners and radio stations have already validated this model. In the end of the day I think Ricky could make more advertising on the show than charging for it and he would retain his fan base in the process rather then pushing a lot of them away. I echo your question: why are podcasts different than radio (from a revenue creation perspective)? Why are podcast creators so afraid to advertise but are OK with DRM style solutions (which probably alienate more of the audience than ads will)? I don't get it...

Wow. All great comments. I'm with Cyanbane in that I think Ricky and Co. have gotten some bad advice from someone. We need to really get this conversation going in order to hopefully get it on their radar. DRM is SO not the way to go for this beautiful gem of a podcast that has so much potential to shape the format.

I can live without having to do work to be entertained. I was already a Ricky Gervais fan before listening to the podcast and now I am even a bigger one. I thought he really understood the power of podcasting. It will be interesting to see how this test run goes.

Episode 13 didn't have the structure of the other 12, odd discontinuity between each section. The sound quality of the top quality file is worse than on the free sessions, and the script seems to have dissolved into putting stupid comments into Karls lines, and Gervais pissing his pants at how clever he feels. I don't think I'll be paying for any more beyond this. Also agree with the comments about the clunky distrubution route, why not sell it through iTunes and save us all the hassle.

Theres a ton of old Ricky Gervais stuff archived on the Xfm website when he used to do his radio show there with Karl and Stephen

http://www.xfm.co.uk//Sectional.asp?id=1409

http://www.xfm.co.uk//Sectional.asp?id=966

Audible is an absolute nightmare!!! They appear to have deleted my account/subscription, and I can't send an e-mail cos I can't sign in! It's driving me crazy. I don't mind paying but why put it on such a daft website that doesn't even do mp3?!? Grr

The podcast can be downloaded in both mp3 and mp4 can't they?

And lets be honest...you can play it on your PC (regardless of whether you use itunes or not) and you can put it on a mobile device (again...regardless of whether it's an iPod or not).

So what's the problem?

I have the original (free) Ricky Gervais Show Podcasts (5-12) Does anyone have 1-4 I can download? I can't find them anywhere!

Thanks

Bob

I got it through audible and I CANNOT put it onto my sony HD3 player.... they dont support it apparently. now I've got to either burn each episode to a cd and then rip it off there into an mp3, or get it off bittorrent, and I know which of those is the easier option.

stupid stupid audible, can't be that hard for them to get right!

you can get all of series 2 free from here
http://mp33pm.blogspot.com/
anyone know where to get the video podcasts??

sorry forgot to mention they have the complete series 1 and sries 2 and are in mp3 format

Paying for the Ricky Gervais Show files is fair enough I guess, but why the f**k don't they then just allow us to download the mp3 files without all the Audible / iTunes DRM copy protection bollo**s? People like me will only hack the protection out and then pass the files onto friends anyway so it's relatively pointlesss.
I hate the whole pay-per-listen / view approach, especially when you're limited with what you can do with the product once you've bought it.
RICKY - Ditch Audible and iTunes and just let us pay and download the files normally from the RickyGervais.com website!!!

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