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2 hours ago, Badfinger said:

It'll live on in our minds as a cherished alternate reality forever.

 

I should also be clear that I <3 those boys and the podcast and I finished my thoughts with telling them as such. In between episodes of this arc, to fill podcast space, I have been relistening to the whole series and I got to the Flophouse guestcast, so I listened to both of those back to back, and the difference in construction is stark. Those episodes are mostly figuring things out by talking.

 

Should I just give up on S1 of Friends and start S2? I like a lot of what's going on but the audio made me not like the paladin because he was loud and crackly, and I can't (6-7 episodes in? They've split up) hear the fighter even now. I can always go back, right? It feels crazy to skip 30 episodes of a sequential podcast, but...

 

I'm lucky enough that I either listen to enough amateur podcasts or just have a tin ear, and I never noticed the sound quality problems. The quality of role-playing increases dramatically after the split, but I don't remember when the audio quality improves. My advice would be season 2, skip the faction game sections. While the system they're using has some bumps, everyone involved is a lot more comfortable on microphone and also has pretty good sound quality. It's self contained, really touching at parts, and funny at others. Then, if you like that, continue on to the Marielda miniseries that Twig was talking about. If you dig that world, go back to season one and suffer through I guess? I can't imagine going through season 3 without season 1 to back it up.

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AHHHH I gushed about this in slack already but they read my question on this week's podcast and I made them laugh this is great.

 

 

 

 

e: saving the triple post and I'll take Friends talk out of the McElboy thread, I took the plunge and went right to Counter/Weight and Austin described it as "anime as fuck". Austin you're killing me do you want me to listen to your podcast? I'm not going to say "And so I turned it off right then and there" but fucking hell I'm deflated right off the bat.

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Well, it finally happened. After being a MBMBAM listener since literally episode 1, I unsubscribed today. For the last several years the actual comedy/shilling ratio has been on a troubling slope and I finally got sick of it. I'm really upset about it, because when they're actually doing stuff I still find it hilarious. Realizing that, if I listen to MBMBAM on my half hour commute, I'm as likely as not to spend half of my drive listening to them promoting either something else that they're doing or something else on MaxFun was what finally put me over the edge though. The whole MaxFun network is starting to feel to me like they're more interested in getting you to listen to their other shows than actually making the one that you're listening to at that moment worthwhile. Bummer.

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Next month is the Max Fun Drive so now is a great time to try out other shows on the network and see if you like them, so that if you become a donor, or upgrade your donation, you can split your contribution among the shows you like best!

Might I recommend trying: Judge John Hodgman, Rose Buddies, Sawbones & Still Buffering. Shows like The Adventure Zone only exist because MaxFun can help pay their creators. It also gave us The The Adventure Zone Zone, which I find pretty illuminating, so I hope they do that again this year, and will give us some more bonus eps!

Rose Buddies, Sawbones & Still Buffering are McElroy products or McElroy brother adjacent. I love RB very much and is one of my favorite shows. Griffin's banter with Rachel is so charming, and even if you don't watch The Bachelor(ette) you will likely be entertained by the podcast if you like Griffin.

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I forward skip through the money zone and the ending in 30 second increments when I'm listening to the MBMBaM. I know I might be missing some goofs, but the ads can be a bit repetitive. It is not a huge issue for me, though. The content to ad ratio is still much much better than with 99% Invisible.

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2 hours ago, Nappi said:

I forward skip through the money zone and the ending in 30 second increments when I'm listening to the MBMBaM. I know I might be missing some goofs, but the ads can be a bit repetitive. It is not a huge issue for me, though. The content to ad ratio is still much much better than with 99% Invisible.

 

Yeah, Max Fun podcasts have more ad time in them than I like, particularly in terms of content-free network cross-promotion, but I can handle it and it's not remotely close to the worst among those that I listen to. I like My Favorite Murder still, but jeez if their podcast isn't now five minutes of ad read, twenty minutes of "housekeeping" and self-promotion, another hundred and fifty seconds of ad read, thirty minutes of the actual thing their podcast is about, and then another five minutes of ad read. I think about dropping it every time I listen. They also pre-record their ads and splice them into the conversation, which makes it much much worse.

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I'm so thankful that I don't listen to podcasts while I drive, or while doing anything that would prevent me from skipping through ad segments. Since I don't mind spending the extra attention required to hit the skip button a few times (or a lot of times, as is increasingly the case), ad reads are pretty much a non-issue for me.

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3 hours ago, Nappi said:

The content to ad ratio is still much much better than with 99% Invisible.

 

Seriously fuck 99% Invisible.

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Doesn't 99pi put all its ads at the end? I actually think of it as one of the less intrusive examples of ads in podcasts.

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It used to have like five minutes of ads upfront, ten minutes of content, and five minutes of ads at the end. On a good day.

I quit a while ago. Might be better now!

 

EDIT: Ads for me, in this case, includes self-promotional junk, which is maybe unfair, but in a podcast that short that I listen to weekly, I don't need to hear about your coin for the thousandth time. I dunno.

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1 minute ago, Twig said:

It used to have like five minutes of ads upfront, ten minutes of content, and five minutes of ads at the end. On a good day.

I quit a while ago. Might be better now!

 

Were you listening to episodes from the archive, or episodes that were current at the time? Because I'm pretty sure they don't put any ads at the beginning on newly-released shows; they wait until an episode has aged a bit before putting ads at the beginning.

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37 minutes ago, Twig said:

I was listening to newly-released episodes.

 

Weird! Maybe that was a really old practice. It definitely hasn't been that way in the time I've been listening to it.

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Yeah I stopped listening a couple years ago. Glad it's not that bad anymore!

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7 hours ago, Chris said:

 

Were you listening to episodes from the archive, or episodes that were current at the time? Because I'm pretty sure they don't put any ads at the beginning on newly-released shows; they wait until an episode has aged a bit before putting ads at the beginning.

 

Hmm.. interesting. I used to queue up a few episodes of 99% Invisible when I went for a jog, but it was basically impossible to manage because I had to skip forward the beginning, then go back a bit because I skipped too much ahead, then after 10 minutes skip the rest of the episode, and repeat. I was listening to the older episodes, because I had just subscribed to the podcast.

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On 10/02/2017 at 6:15 PM, Nappi said:

I forward skip through the money zone and the ending in 30 second increments when I'm listening to the MBMBaM. I know I might be missing some goofs, but the ads can be a bit repetitive. It is not a huge issue for me, though. The content to ad ratio is still much much better than with 99% Invisible.

Me too. The sheer number of thirty second skips it takes is pretty ridiculous. 

 

I have weird feelings about monetization of podcasts in general, to be honest. Ad reads feel like such a weird resurrection of those 1950s TV presenter product endorsements we all laugh at now. Sure, we're all media savvy and all know what an advert is, but it all seems a bit demeaning. I mean, podcasts have to pay for themselves somehow, and there's no way I'd individually financially back every podcast I listen to (though I do support a couple), but I kind of wish more did something along the lines of what NPR does, where they have a separate person do the ad reads. Maybe it's a petty distinction to make, but to me it's classier. I wonder if it took any negotiation with the advertisers to not have the presenters do the read. 

 

I've been cutting podcasts out of my cycle quite a lot recently. A lot of the time it's over something silly; the fact that it bothered me so much probably means I'm listening to too many podcasts, but happily that's a problem I can fix by stroppily unsubscribing from them. 

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I listened to the first ~10 episodes of 90% Invisible a few weeks ago and I don't recall any particularly intrusive ads, although maybe my brain simply blanked out the memories. So maybe things have changed since the dark days.

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99% seems fine to me, always at the end so i just stop :P I mainly listen to podcasts at work so wherever any one puts the ads its easy enough to skip. They're free so i get it, doesn't really bother me.

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The financial situation for podcasts really is ridiculous and dumb. On the one hand, podcasting is one of the cheapest forms of mass broadcasting that's ever existed, but on the other the percentage of podcasts that are able to fully pay off their equipment/hosting costs (let alone compensate the podcasters for their time and work) is ridiculously low. Part of the problem is that most ads don't pay a flat rate, the money you get is based number of listeners who use your promo code and since it's the same 10 services on every podcast the chances that your listeners haven't already gotten their free Audible.com audiobook is low.

 

I haven't really listened to a Max Fun podcast in years so maybe it's been addressed but I wish they were more transparent about what percentage of their operating budget is donations, how exactly podcasters are compensated, etc. 

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MaxFun donations are split equally among the list of shows you tell them that you listen to. Then a small portion of every donation goes to the network as a whole so they can develop new shows and pay for the staff that runs the network & pay for drive rewards. They also have jumbotrons & whatever ad revenue they get.

 

Travis has made podcasting his full time job, whereas Justin & Griffin have other jobs still, which I think is a good indicator of hoe much you have to podcast to make it a full time gig.

 

 

 

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On 2/10/2017 at 1:15 PM, Nappi said:

I forward skip through the money zone and the ending in 30 second increments when I'm listening to the MBMBaM. I know I might be missing some goofs, but the ads can be a bit repetitive. It is not a huge issue for me, though. The content to ad ratio is still much much better than with 99% Invisible.

 

I'm so glad that when I brought this up whenever it was in Slack people backed me up. I like the mission of 99 PI but it's the A#1 most unlistenable podcast because of the shilling.

 

I don't mind the stuff pods like MBMBAM do, because 1)  some of their ad reads are personal messages and 2) they still bring the goofs in that segment. The only thing I'll really ever skip is if there is more than 1 or 2 MaxFun ads at the end of the show. The same goes for Idle Thumbs and the Giant Bomb stuff. Especially when Vinny was still in San Francisco, the ad breaks were their own little mini-dramas inside a podcast. Thumbs have the continuing saga of Nick Breckon's Back, and while the ads are very clearly delineated, the break/not break sections meander through a more broad stream of consciousness. I'm also a massive McElroy fan. We're subscribing to Seeso specifically to watch the show, and we drove 9 hours on like a week's notice to watch them live. My GF watches weird video game shit because the McElroys do it. Shill all of your shit you want.

 

I'll admit, I didn't even know skipping sections of podcast was a thing people did for years of podcast listening. Whenever I catch myself doing that, I'm probably just over that cast.

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It's that TV show they made. It's pretty funny, in exactly the same kind of way they're always pretty funny.

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it's a shame that the rest of the show is going to be on seeso which is (short of proxy trickery I guess) unavailable in Canada

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