Smodcast Annoying Yor Audience to Pay

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I was listening to Dan Klass talk about Spotify, and I was listening to Mohr Stories on Kevin Smith’s Smodcast network. They have a completely different monetization strategy. Both of these companies have advertisements that play either at the beginning or during the programming. Here is the twist.

The advertising apparently is meant to annoy you. Spotify is a music streaming service that allows you to listen to just about any song you want to hear. They run advertising during the listening experience that (according to Dan) is the direct opposite of what you are listening to. So if you enter in that you want to listen to Metallica (and Metallica comes on and plays) when an advertisement comes on its going to be for Katy Perry or Fleetwood Mac.

Jay Mohr does a great podcast on Kevin Smith’s “Smodcast” Podcasting network. They start the podcast with four to five minutes of advertising. The interesting thing is there are times when they run what is basically the same advertising. The only thing that changes is the city name. You hear “Jay and silent Bob are coming to Cleveland.’ Then you hear “Jay and Silent Bob are coming to Toronto.” These commercials are back to back to back, and (for me) have me reaching for the fast forward button.

In these examples, instead of trying to find an advertisement that matches your audience, these two networks are (apparently) playing advertisements that annoy the audience in hopes that they will pay the $5 (smodcast) or $10 (spotify) to turn off the advertisements.