We are in a war on podcasting.

Podcasts are one of the last survivors of Web1.0, the era that gave us cool things like Wikipedia and the Blogosphere, back when “information wanted to be free”.

Today information wants to generate clickthrough ad revenue.

The Science Fiction podcast is hosted on damiengwalter.com on an RSS feed. That means I just upload an audio file to a post, and you subscribers listen in your chosen podcast app.

But the powers that be – Google / YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Spotify etc have long wanted to either own podcasts or kill them. And in the last year they have largely succeeded in the latter.

Most podcasts have moved to video first formats on YouTube, and now Spotify and Apple are also going video first. Most of the podcast apps have been bought out and shutdown, or are forcing their own ads on podcasters.

So this note for listeners explains what this all means for the Science Fiction podcast. The TLDR is :

The podcast will continue ad-free with audio tracks of the main video essays.
Video essays will be free but ad-supported on YouTube and Spotify
Members can watch all the video essays ad-free on Patreon, Substack and damiengwalter.com
The Great Content Audit : over the next two to three months I am adding all the content to every platform. This means some old content will be republished. Sorry for any confusion.

To subscribe to the podcast feed search “Science Fiction with Damien Walter” in the app of your choice.

Listen to the podcast audio