How the world has changed since my father Martin Butler (M1MRB) and I launched the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast thirteen years ago. Back then, podcasting was the next great extension to the self-publishing revolution.

People with an idea and passion could communicate in a new medium, thankfully in those early days, our friends and fellow hobbyist were generous to accept the failings and mistakes we made.

Early on, it became very apparent that there were two ways to fund projects like the ICQPodcast. The first was a traditional advertising model the second was to ask the downloaders to support showing value for value for the content they enjoyed.

We made the decision to work with our listeners to allow them to support an independent product, without the influence of the advertising dollar. Taking this option, we were left alone for a while to produce our show every fortnight without exception.

Now, podcasts that rely on the donation model are at risk! The bigger media companies are seeing further erosion of the adverting spend hitting their bank balance. With this in mind, large enterprises are releasing shows at a furious pace.

Whilst this doesn’t directly affect our model at the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast, the main risk is the walled garden being produced by distribution companies like Spotify, Amazon and Facebook.

Each of these companies is hovering up content for their applications, claiming to provide discoverability. What they are not telling you is that they are hoarding content to sell their adverts alongside, without any compensation to the content creator.

Before the project was launched, the ICQPodcast was committed to the essence of the Podcasting 2.0 project, the availability of the show on as many platforms as possible, educating the listener that the only way to keep the show funded was to directly support was our mantra. Because of this, we don’t need to know about advertising safe downloads or the amount of time a listener listens to the show – the main ingredients of an advertising-supported show. All that is important to us is your support, your feedback and your enjoyment.

Hence, under our creative commons licence, we will continue to make the ICQPodcast available to everybody everywhere and hope you all continue to enjoy the show and directly support our work.

If you haven’t done so already, you can set-up a supporting donation to the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast by visiting https://www.icqpodcast.com/donate