After a two-week delay, Apple today officially launched its podcast subscriptions, which it announced at its last spring event. With them, podcasters who want to can offer advantages in their audio content in exchange for a fee that can be monthly or yearly.
These subscriptions are integrated into the new design of Apple’s Podcasts application on all the company’s devices, which from now on will differentiate between “following” a podcast for free or “subscribing” to it by paying to obtain these advantages.
For the creators of these podcasts, taking advantage of this new feature will involve paying the $19.99 annual fee to join the Apple Podcasters Program and accepting a 30% fee for each subscription for the first year (from the second year onwards the fee is reduced to 15%).
It remains to be seen whether these creators accept the conditions to enter one of the most used platforms for listening to podcasts, in the face of initiatives from rivals such as Spotify that propose similar services but eliminating some of the fees.
The novelty still seems to be spreading through the servers, but as you can see in the header image we are already starting to see mentions of these premium services. Presumably, over the next few hours and days, we will see more of it.
