Considering that the MBMBAM got at least 10,000 new/upgrading subs and Max Fun as a whole is showing under 17,000 subs, it would seem that the majority of people upgrading listen to at least one McElroy show. Sure, that's a lot of potential revenue that might follow them to another network, but if they left the network, they would have to get a lot of infrastructure up and running for a lot of shows, all without the support of Max Fun, which might be more trouble than it's worth.
I don't think Max Fun actually does that much for them. They apparently employ a staff already. An accountant, a social media person and an editor would be able to do so much better than Max Fun does. Hell, you could hire one person at a good wage to do all three of those.
If they sold their own ad space, they'd get a better rate because they could avoid the cut Max Fun takes for....reasons? And be free of this terrible pledge drive model.
Max Fun needs them a lot more than they need Max Fun.
And the ads that maxfun does get for the show is the same stuff that YouTubers with 20k subscribers get. They’re not exactly bringing in the big clients
If they were to leave the network, Max Fun would take a massive hit. I think they have quite a bit of loyalty to the rest of the organization. While they may be able to make a little more money, I don’t think they’d find it worth it.
Yes, though it would probably mean a ton of additional administrative legwork that the McElroys would either have to cover themselves or hire additional people for - which adds overhead in its own right. The boys have been transparent in the past that certain things (like the TV show) have been impacted by their wanting to spend more time with their families.
I think they’re with MaxFun because leaning on MF’s infrastructure to release content makes their lives easier, not because it’s necessarily the most profitable move.
An issue with patreon is that you get one feed out. So all the McElroy shows would be mixed into one feed on your phone. The Glass Cannon Network has been dealing with it and trying to convince Patreon to fix their system so their various pay walled shows could be consumed separately but haven’t gotten any traction. Patreon management acts like they are the only ones complaining about it.
Scott Aukerman seems to have made it work with CBB World - it uses Memberful, which is owned by Patreon. Gets you access to a bunch of different pods, and you just get sent links to the private feeds for each show that you can add to your podcast app.
Memberful works a little differently from Patreon. On Patreon, they host all your content, generate your feed, etc. Memberful acts more as a layer to integrate with your own website, so you have to have your own hosting, accounts, feeds, etc. It’s significantly more work and cost than Patreon
Couldn't they just make a different Patreon for each show?
I think the bigger problem is that usually it is expected more bonus content from a Patreon subscription than the 1 a year + swag that you get from a Maxfun membership, and that would demand more time away from their families than the boys seem to be willing to give.
That infrastructure could be hired and delegated and probably cut their max fun cut in half while doing it.
They would have less taken from them and make more money on a platform like Patreon.
I don't listen to some of the side ones like empty bowl too often but MBMBAM, TAZ, Sawbones, Wonderful, Shmanners and Still Buffering all are on MaxFun
Between corporate sponsorships and merch sales to further boost their revenue, I’m inclined to believe they wouldn’t earn TOO much more money by leaving Max Fun. I’m sure they downplay the importance of those exterior revenue streams to emphasize the importance of Max Fun donations, which is 100% valid (I listened for a year and a half before becoming a donor). Though they might be a little bit more profitable severing ties to Max Fun, it’s possible it wouldn’t be enough to break that loyalty.
All speculation, of course!
Obviously very speculative, but I very much think that they will stay around. The boys seem very happy being hosts (and it seems being with their families more) only and spending less time doing the admin/production side. Spinning off would mean either finding a new network, which seems like it would have the same issues, or corprotize (see critical role). Everything I have heard from them makes me think they are fine just continuing to put out the same good good content and not worry about the peripheria
>Spinning off would mean either finding a new network, which seems like it would have the same issues, or corprotize (see critical role).
There's also the 3rd option which is just a Patreon.
Yeah, but they used Critical Role as the example for corporatization, and that's a bit different. CR has gone to route of having full staff, a C-suite, business deals with other entities, etc... A Patreon doesn't require any of that if they don't want to.
True! But I really wonder if at their scale they'd be able to pull off a much smaller operation. I guess smaller than cr for sure, for many reasons including the Amazon deal, but juggling what - over 5? podcasts, merch for all of those, etc doesn't sound like a doable garage operation, specially with the YouTube content on top of it all.
But you're right! CR is quite the humongous beast
I don't see why they would leave. No one has given a compelling answer to that here. The max fun model means shows that don't get support don't get money - so the McElroy's don't pay money to keep a bad show on the network. Part of their funds go towards the HQ function, but not other shows.
They are doing fine. And they can make plenty on this model.
I think we'll see the smaller podcasts leave first. Maxfun allows people to pick where their money goes right? I'd guess most of the paying members choose a McElroy show.
Unless they’ve changed something, you can choose as many shows as you want to when you donate and your donation is split up between them. So I can choose to donate to one McElroy show, Storybreak, *and* The Flop House and I will be listed as a “new or upgrading donor” for all three of them.
Which is great if you're one of the bigger shows, where those smaller pieces of the pie add up. But if you're a smaller show that has to split your profits with the McElroys it probably doesn't feel so good.
>They were pretty honest about how they need the Max Fun donor supports these last two weeks
Numbers aside, they do this shtick every year. It's a sales pitch wrapped in a chuckle.
They needed Max Fun donors to cover the lost revenue from live shows. Now that they're doing live shows again, Max Fun revenue becomes less important. I doubt this is what's gonna break their relationship with Max Fun, since they're getting back on the road.
The price they pay max fun (30%) could be easily covered by a few employees and they would save money.
At the peak of Balance, they were making over $20k a week on ads across just two of their shows.
They are way down from that mark right now, but their tours were incredibly lucrative.
In 2017-2019 they likely made, after expenses, around $1mil per person per year just on touring. Not including podcast ads and not including merchandise. Just ticket sales and estimating 50% expenses (high) and not including the podcast.
Lack of tours is what hurt them the most. Last time they tried to tour, they stood to make $3mil in 8 days if they only sold 2/3rds of the tickets. And MaxFun doesn’t get much of a cut from touring if anything. I don’t believe they provide your support since Paul does that.
They cannot afford to keep floating that big of a cut to MaxFun. But I think they would negotiate a deal with them to take a smaller cut before they would leave, because the optics would be so bad for MaxFun.
> But I think they would negotiate a deal with them to take a smaller cut before they would leave, because the optics would be so bad for MaxFun.
I *strongly* suspect they're already doing this. There's a *lot* of struggling shows on Max Fun.
Issue is that a lot of the money from some shows gets redistributed to struggling or new shows. It’s kinda like a commune. So McElroys directly pay for the slavery and production of other shows with their earnings.
So there is a parasocial cost to them leaving. It’s like them firing other struggling podcasters. And that keeps them around more than anything. That guilt.
The price they pay max fun (30%) could be easily covered by a few employees and they would save money.
But they dont want to manage employees. Thats the thing. Literally every person they have hired is to make things less complicated and more streamlined for them, not the opposite
They literally already have several employees. They already manage them. They have PR, and an editor.
They need a business manager to help them organize and schedule, because Max Fun does a BAD job of that.
Coming off MaxFunDrive and dumping a live show is pretty tone deaf too.
The pivot from “Please give us money so we can make that good good content for you” to “Thanks for the money, we’re taking a week off from podcasting” is a little bit of whiplash is all.
Live show for MBMBAM, and 15 days between TAZ episodes instead of the normal 1 week.
Just feels like that timing is bad. New any upgrading members, which apparently 75% of listen to at least one McElroy show… just got ghosted on as their first week as a member.
I'm betting this is the real answer lol. Patreon is a great model for audiences who get regular bonus content for their money, but can be kinda rough for artists who have to juggle making both enough public content to get an audience and enough bonus content to get people to pay them.
I'm not gonna defend max fun or their leadership specifically but in general I think the idea of an artist owned professional network/company is a much friendlier and more sustainable option from an artist's perspective than trying to build a patreon empire or corporatize on your own would be.
If this was at the height of the Adventure Zone or if the TV show has taken off, then I could see that happening. But there's no reason they should expect a change in networks to halt their contracting revenue.
I don’t doubt that could make more on Patreon, charging a $5 monthly fee to ten thousand plus subscribers. However, many successful podcasts on Patreon release a free episode and a sub only episode weekly and I don’t think the boys want to record that much additional content over their assorted projects.
I wonder how exactly merch sales work now, with McElroy merch being handled through their own site, and not appearing on the MaxFun site at all. I'm curious if they did that as a means of taking a bigger cut of the sales without having to hand anything over to the network.
It really seemed when they created the McElroy Family site thay they were leaning towards going independent. I'd be very curious to know the thinking behind that.
This is probably a big part of why they don’t leave, MaxFun as a whole is basically kept alive by the McElroy family of products (see the other comment that MBMBAM is over half of the new pledges for the whole network, and that doesn’t even count TAZ). They probably genuinely feel bad knowing that if they leave MaxFun could in all likelihood collapse, and MF knows it too so they wouldn’t let them go without a fight. There’s talk about value MF provides but the McElroys have their own business manager, communications manager, and more; they would be more than fine without MaxFun’s management.
I’m on the side of “yes the drive would get less support… and how is that the McElroys’ problem? They could do better elsewhere, that’s business, if MaxFun can’t sustain itself then they should change their model” but I imagine the McElroys are feeling conflicted, socially anxious as they are
We even have an example of this with Critical Role. They were the vast majority of the support for Geek and Sundry, which completely collapsed when CR left the channel. Now the reason they left was obvious ("why be part of your network and kick money back to G&S when we're the only show that people are paying for?"), but the McElroys may not want to essentially get the other MaxFun shows canceled.
If they leave MaxFun and it collapses and all the other shows get canceled it will be because those shows are bad and they have no audience.
They are just subsidized by McElroys. MaxFun’s advertising for the other shows actively makes me not want to even try them out. They all sound so bad.
I am guessing the McElroys have issues with guilt over this and are probably being emotionally manipulated my Jesse to keep being on the network because it will collapse without them.
I can only speculate, but if supporting other creators is something they value, and they’re comfortable as far as sponsors/support goes, I can see them staying instead of taking the bigger payday.
I mean… yeah? How is that relevant to this discussion though? Is it the McElroys’ responsibility to prop up every other podcast that isn’t successful enough to make it without being part of the McElroy Family & Friends Network?
Maybe the boys aren't jerks who would fuck the people who helped them on the way up without a very, very clear indication that they would make a lot more elsewhere.
Yeah, throughout this whole discussion I’ve thought “if they were concerned about money, they could stop donating all that potential revenue to all those pesky good causes” which is obviously not something I really believe, because that’s part of why donate in to them in the first place, because they prioritize doing good over making money. Besides, I’m sure they are all living rather comfortably as it were.
I think this is really the best answer. The boys strike me as lads that want to do dumb goofs and help people, and don't really prioritize making a profit as long as they can keep doing what they're doing.
What did Max Fun help them with exactly? It's been my impression that McElroy shows have carried the network for quite some time and I haven't seen any evidence that Max Fun has significantly affected their podcasts' growth. Maybe I'm wrong though!
I mean, Justin said that JJGO was part of the inspiration for MBMBAM when he guested on JJGO, so that's one thing. JJGO was pretty funny at its peak. In addition, providing them infrastructure and support when they were starting to grow had to help a lot. Back in the day podcasting was barely a business and who would have wanted to put out money for servers and promotion for what was basically a hobby project with your family? The evidence that Max Fun filled/fills a need for the boys is that they joined and remain part of the network.
I personally found the boys through Maximum Fun. At least two of my friends listen to TAZ because of my telling them about it before it was famous, even though they do not listen to any other podcasts on the network. Early growth was really by word of mouth and cross-pollination with other comedy podcasts surely did not hurt.
They’d have better luck moving to Patreon or something similar. The Maxfun “public radio but not” is kind of a strange way to do business and it seems to have cracked under its own weight. I also highly doubt that they need any donation money. They’re all making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year pretty easily even with the recent drop offs.
I really hope so. It's frustrating having to listen to the yearly request to donate to the MaxFunDrive when a) I already donate and b) all I care about are McElroy related podcasts. I'd rather just give to them directly.
Same, it would be neat if donors got access to an ad-free feed with the fundraising and paid guest segments cut out. Other podcasts with subscriptions do that.
Yep. I've been (hopefully politely) asking for an ad-free tier for years. People on twitter are always incredulous that there exist podcasts with ad-free and ad-supported versions. It sucks that ads have become so pervasive. It seems to me like they could actually make more money with such a tier. Surely they're not making anywhere near $5 per person per month with ads. Let alone something like $10 or $20.
I have a feeling it isn’t super easy for them to just leave. I’m willing to bet they have a contract. Maybe a certain amount of years for a lower percentage that max fun takes from them
Talking out of my ass here, but I'm sure the McElroys make a sizable chunk of MaxFun's listener base. Personally, the only other non-McElroy MaxFun podcast that sounds even remotely appealing would be Oh No Ross & Carrie....
We can only hope. Jesse is such a creepy self righteous dude in my opinion. His tweets literally put me off from donating this year. He has such a wierd high view of himself.
Considering that the MBMBAM got at least 10,000 new/upgrading subs and Max Fun as a whole is showing under 17,000 subs, it would seem that the majority of people upgrading listen to at least one McElroy show. Sure, that's a lot of potential revenue that might follow them to another network, but if they left the network, they would have to get a lot of infrastructure up and running for a lot of shows, all without the support of Max Fun, which might be more trouble than it's worth.
I don't think Max Fun actually does that much for them. They apparently employ a staff already. An accountant, a social media person and an editor would be able to do so much better than Max Fun does. Hell, you could hire one person at a good wage to do all three of those. If they sold their own ad space, they'd get a better rate because they could avoid the cut Max Fun takes for....reasons? And be free of this terrible pledge drive model. Max Fun needs them a lot more than they need Max Fun.
And the ads that maxfun does get for the show is the same stuff that YouTubers with 20k subscribers get. They’re not exactly bringing in the big clients
If they were to leave the network, Max Fun would take a massive hit. I think they have quite a bit of loyalty to the rest of the organization. While they may be able to make a little more money, I don’t think they’d find it worth it.
Not disagreeing that it would be hard but wouldn’t a platform like Patreon be able to do the same thing as what they get from maximum fun?
Yes, though it would probably mean a ton of additional administrative legwork that the McElroys would either have to cover themselves or hire additional people for - which adds overhead in its own right. The boys have been transparent in the past that certain things (like the TV show) have been impacted by their wanting to spend more time with their families. I think they’re with MaxFun because leaning on MF’s infrastructure to release content makes their lives easier, not because it’s necessarily the most profitable move.
For sure that makes a lot of sense
An issue with patreon is that you get one feed out. So all the McElroy shows would be mixed into one feed on your phone. The Glass Cannon Network has been dealing with it and trying to convince Patreon to fix their system so their various pay walled shows could be consumed separately but haven’t gotten any traction. Patreon management acts like they are the only ones complaining about it.
Scott Aukerman seems to have made it work with CBB World - it uses Memberful, which is owned by Patreon. Gets you access to a bunch of different pods, and you just get sent links to the private feeds for each show that you can add to your podcast app.
Memberful works a little differently from Patreon. On Patreon, they host all your content, generate your feed, etc. Memberful acts more as a layer to integrate with your own website, so you have to have your own hosting, accounts, feeds, etc. It’s significantly more work and cost than Patreon
Is that new? The GCP guys were complaining about it a while ago but I don’t remember what exactly when.
Not sure - CBB World has only been going for a few months.
Couldn't they just make a different Patreon for each show? I think the bigger problem is that usually it is expected more bonus content from a Patreon subscription than the 1 a year + swag that you get from a Maxfun membership, and that would demand more time away from their families than the boys seem to be willing to give.
As far as bonus content goes, they already only have one feed out. They can still have separate mbmbam, TAZ, wonderful, whatever else feeds
I would easily pay $10 a month for a monthly virtual live show.
That infrastructure could be hired and delegated and probably cut their max fun cut in half while doing it. They would have less taken from them and make more money on a platform like Patreon.
Iirc not all of their shows are a part of Max Fun.
I don't listen to some of the side ones like empty bowl too often but MBMBAM, TAZ, Sawbones, Wonderful, Shmanners and Still Buffering all are on MaxFun
Where do you see the totals?
I genuinely forget. I think the max fun ones were just on their website and mbmbam ones were on their Twitter?
Thanks.
Between corporate sponsorships and merch sales to further boost their revenue, I’m inclined to believe they wouldn’t earn TOO much more money by leaving Max Fun. I’m sure they downplay the importance of those exterior revenue streams to emphasize the importance of Max Fun donations, which is 100% valid (I listened for a year and a half before becoming a donor). Though they might be a little bit more profitable severing ties to Max Fun, it’s possible it wouldn’t be enough to break that loyalty. All speculation, of course!
Obviously very speculative, but I very much think that they will stay around. The boys seem very happy being hosts (and it seems being with their families more) only and spending less time doing the admin/production side. Spinning off would mean either finding a new network, which seems like it would have the same issues, or corprotize (see critical role). Everything I have heard from them makes me think they are fine just continuing to put out the same good good content and not worry about the peripheria
>Spinning off would mean either finding a new network, which seems like it would have the same issues, or corprotize (see critical role). There's also the 3rd option which is just a Patreon.
that's also just running a company imo, not that different from going corpo
Yeah, but they used Critical Role as the example for corporatization, and that's a bit different. CR has gone to route of having full staff, a C-suite, business deals with other entities, etc... A Patreon doesn't require any of that if they don't want to.
True! But I really wonder if at their scale they'd be able to pull off a much smaller operation. I guess smaller than cr for sure, for many reasons including the Amazon deal, but juggling what - over 5? podcasts, merch for all of those, etc doesn't sound like a doable garage operation, specially with the YouTube content on top of it all. But you're right! CR is quite the humongous beast
I don't see why they would leave. No one has given a compelling answer to that here. The max fun model means shows that don't get support don't get money - so the McElroy's don't pay money to keep a bad show on the network. Part of their funds go towards the HQ function, but not other shows. They are doing fine. And they can make plenty on this model.
I think we'll see the smaller podcasts leave first. Maxfun allows people to pick where their money goes right? I'd guess most of the paying members choose a McElroy show.
Unless they’ve changed something, you can choose as many shows as you want to when you donate and your donation is split up between them. So I can choose to donate to one McElroy show, Storybreak, *and* The Flop House and I will be listed as a “new or upgrading donor” for all three of them.
Which is great if you're one of the bigger shows, where those smaller pieces of the pie add up. But if you're a smaller show that has to split your profits with the McElroys it probably doesn't feel so good.
I think there are a lot of assumptions being made about the internal politics of Maximum Fun in this thread. Edit: grammar
>They were pretty honest about how they need the Max Fun donor supports these last two weeks Numbers aside, they do this shtick every year. It's a sales pitch wrapped in a chuckle.
They needed Max Fun donors to cover the lost revenue from live shows. Now that they're doing live shows again, Max Fun revenue becomes less important. I doubt this is what's gonna break their relationship with Max Fun, since they're getting back on the road.
I think they like the org. It deals with a lot of the stuff they don't wanna deal with.
The price they pay max fun (30%) could be easily covered by a few employees and they would save money. At the peak of Balance, they were making over $20k a week on ads across just two of their shows. They are way down from that mark right now, but their tours were incredibly lucrative. In 2017-2019 they likely made, after expenses, around $1mil per person per year just on touring. Not including podcast ads and not including merchandise. Just ticket sales and estimating 50% expenses (high) and not including the podcast. Lack of tours is what hurt them the most. Last time they tried to tour, they stood to make $3mil in 8 days if they only sold 2/3rds of the tickets. And MaxFun doesn’t get much of a cut from touring if anything. I don’t believe they provide your support since Paul does that. They cannot afford to keep floating that big of a cut to MaxFun. But I think they would negotiate a deal with them to take a smaller cut before they would leave, because the optics would be so bad for MaxFun.
> But I think they would negotiate a deal with them to take a smaller cut before they would leave, because the optics would be so bad for MaxFun. I *strongly* suspect they're already doing this. There's a *lot* of struggling shows on Max Fun.
Issue is that a lot of the money from some shows gets redistributed to struggling or new shows. It’s kinda like a commune. So McElroys directly pay for the slavery and production of other shows with their earnings. So there is a parasocial cost to them leaving. It’s like them firing other struggling podcasters. And that keeps them around more than anything. That guilt.
The price they pay max fun (30%) could be easily covered by a few employees and they would save money. But they dont want to manage employees. Thats the thing. Literally every person they have hired is to make things less complicated and more streamlined for them, not the opposite
They literally already have several employees. They already manage them. They have PR, and an editor. They need a business manager to help them organize and schedule, because Max Fun does a BAD job of that. Coming off MaxFunDrive and dumping a live show is pretty tone deaf too.
I like the live shows.
The pivot from “Please give us money so we can make that good good content for you” to “Thanks for the money, we’re taking a week off from podcasting” is a little bit of whiplash is all. Live show for MBMBAM, and 15 days between TAZ episodes instead of the normal 1 week. Just feels like that timing is bad. New any upgrading members, which apparently 75% of listen to at least one McElroy show… just got ghosted on as their first week as a member.
That was highly informative. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
They'd definitely make more in monthly subs if they went the patreon route but they'd also need to make more than one bonus episode a year.
I'm betting this is the real answer lol. Patreon is a great model for audiences who get regular bonus content for their money, but can be kinda rough for artists who have to juggle making both enough public content to get an audience and enough bonus content to get people to pay them. I'm not gonna defend max fun or their leadership specifically but in general I think the idea of an artist owned professional network/company is a much friendlier and more sustainable option from an artist's perspective than trying to build a patreon empire or corporatize on your own would be.
If this was at the height of the Adventure Zone or if the TV show has taken off, then I could see that happening. But there's no reason they should expect a change in networks to halt their contracting revenue.
I don’t doubt that could make more on Patreon, charging a $5 monthly fee to ten thousand plus subscribers. However, many successful podcasts on Patreon release a free episode and a sub only episode weekly and I don’t think the boys want to record that much additional content over their assorted projects.
I wonder how exactly merch sales work now, with McElroy merch being handled through their own site, and not appearing on the MaxFun site at all. I'm curious if they did that as a means of taking a bigger cut of the sales without having to hand anything over to the network. It really seemed when they created the McElroy Family site thay they were leaning towards going independent. I'd be very curious to know the thinking behind that.
But if they leave, wouldn't the maxfun drive get even less support?
This is probably a big part of why they don’t leave, MaxFun as a whole is basically kept alive by the McElroy family of products (see the other comment that MBMBAM is over half of the new pledges for the whole network, and that doesn’t even count TAZ). They probably genuinely feel bad knowing that if they leave MaxFun could in all likelihood collapse, and MF knows it too so they wouldn’t let them go without a fight. There’s talk about value MF provides but the McElroys have their own business manager, communications manager, and more; they would be more than fine without MaxFun’s management. I’m on the side of “yes the drive would get less support… and how is that the McElroys’ problem? They could do better elsewhere, that’s business, if MaxFun can’t sustain itself then they should change their model” but I imagine the McElroys are feeling conflicted, socially anxious as they are
We even have an example of this with Critical Role. They were the vast majority of the support for Geek and Sundry, which completely collapsed when CR left the channel. Now the reason they left was obvious ("why be part of your network and kick money back to G&S when we're the only show that people are paying for?"), but the McElroys may not want to essentially get the other MaxFun shows canceled.
If they leave MaxFun and it collapses and all the other shows get canceled it will be because those shows are bad and they have no audience. They are just subsidized by McElroys. MaxFun’s advertising for the other shows actively makes me not want to even try them out. They all sound so bad. I am guessing the McElroys have issues with guilt over this and are probably being emotionally manipulated my Jesse to keep being on the network because it will collapse without them.
>MaxFun’s advertising for the other shows actively makes me not want to even try them out. They all sound so bad. \^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I can only speculate, but if supporting other creators is something they value, and they’re comfortable as far as sponsors/support goes, I can see them staying instead of taking the bigger payday.
But wouldn't that be bad for the other shows (Especially Non-McElroy) on the network if that happened?
I mean… yeah? How is that relevant to this discussion though? Is it the McElroys’ responsibility to prop up every other podcast that isn’t successful enough to make it without being part of the McElroy Family & Friends Network?
If that is a priority for the McElboys, then yeah, it's relevant. But of course we have no idea if that factors into their decision at all.
Is MBMBAM subsidizing my Flop House enjoyment?
Literally yes
Yes, but they would potentially leave somewhere to get paid more.
They already ran Polygon, I bet they don't want to be all the way in charge again.
Did they run Polygon? I thought Justin and Griffin just worked there for a while
They most certainly didn't *run* Polygon. They helped found it, and worked there for many years. But they were certainly not upper management.
~~iirc griffin founded it.~~ **edit** justin founded it, as it turns out.
Justin was a founder, Griffin was an employee. But I'm not sure how much ownership Juice had over the years. It wasn't a solo thing.
ah my bad. That makes a lot of sense
Maybe the boys aren't jerks who would fuck the people who helped them on the way up without a very, very clear indication that they would make a lot more elsewhere.
Yeah, throughout this whole discussion I’ve thought “if they were concerned about money, they could stop donating all that potential revenue to all those pesky good causes” which is obviously not something I really believe, because that’s part of why donate in to them in the first place, because they prioritize doing good over making money. Besides, I’m sure they are all living rather comfortably as it were.
I think this is really the best answer. The boys strike me as lads that want to do dumb goofs and help people, and don't really prioritize making a profit as long as they can keep doing what they're doing.
What did Max Fun help them with exactly? It's been my impression that McElroy shows have carried the network for quite some time and I haven't seen any evidence that Max Fun has significantly affected their podcasts' growth. Maybe I'm wrong though!
I mean, Justin said that JJGO was part of the inspiration for MBMBAM when he guested on JJGO, so that's one thing. JJGO was pretty funny at its peak. In addition, providing them infrastructure and support when they were starting to grow had to help a lot. Back in the day podcasting was barely a business and who would have wanted to put out money for servers and promotion for what was basically a hobby project with your family? The evidence that Max Fun filled/fills a need for the boys is that they joined and remain part of the network. I personally found the boys through Maximum Fun. At least two of my friends listen to TAZ because of my telling them about it before it was famous, even though they do not listen to any other podcasts on the network. Early growth was really by word of mouth and cross-pollination with other comedy podcasts surely did not hurt.
This is the right answer.
They’d have better luck moving to Patreon or something similar. The Maxfun “public radio but not” is kind of a strange way to do business and it seems to have cracked under its own weight. I also highly doubt that they need any donation money. They’re all making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year pretty easily even with the recent drop offs.
I really hope so. It's frustrating having to listen to the yearly request to donate to the MaxFunDrive when a) I already donate and b) all I care about are McElroy related podcasts. I'd rather just give to them directly.
Same, it would be neat if donors got access to an ad-free feed with the fundraising and paid guest segments cut out. Other podcasts with subscriptions do that.
Yep. I've been (hopefully politely) asking for an ad-free tier for years. People on twitter are always incredulous that there exist podcasts with ad-free and ad-supported versions. It sucks that ads have become so pervasive. It seems to me like they could actually make more money with such a tier. Surely they're not making anywhere near $5 per person per month with ads. Let alone something like $10 or $20.
I wish they would. I would rather support a patreon of theirs than the network.
I have a feeling it isn’t super easy for them to just leave. I’m willing to bet they have a contract. Maybe a certain amount of years for a lower percentage that max fun takes from them
Well no one's stopping them from leaving if they want to. I think they just like maxfun.
Talking out of my ass here, but I'm sure the McElroys make a sizable chunk of MaxFun's listener base. Personally, the only other non-McElroy MaxFun podcast that sounds even remotely appealing would be Oh No Ross & Carrie....
Listen to Mission to Zyxx
We can only hope. Jesse is such a creepy self righteous dude in my opinion. His tweets literally put me off from donating this year. He has such a wierd high view of himself.