alt Hacker NewsThe Program 2025 annual review: How much money does an audio drama podcast make?
Hi, I'm the author of The Program audio series, a fairly successful fiction podcast that launched on HackerNews in 2018. Seven years later, this little sci-fi anthology is still ongoing, having released 37 (soon 38) episodes and surpasaing 1 million downloads.
I chronicle the ups and downs of creating a niche artistic product such as this in annual reports, the latest of which I just released last week. It offers a transparent view into what goes into making a creative project such as this, and also what you get out of it, because I share all the financial data down to specific revenue streams.
As such, I hope it can be of use to others who are undertaking a similar endeavour. Feel free to ask questions should you have any!
Cheers
Comments
Thanks for posting this detailed history and breakdown. And congratulations on your success. As someone with a podcast in the same ballpark of downloads, I will say it's a real testament to how much people must like The Program that you have managed to monetize to the tune of ~$30K CAD in a single year with just 140,000 downloads in the same year. That's really good! People must love what you're doing and that must be very gratifying. Cheers!
Sounds like a great show, will give it a listen.
To the author: do you use AI at all in the creative aspects of the production? I assume that AI assistance in creative writing is now mainstream, and an accepted tool for most writers. I am interested to know your thoughts on this subject and if you use AI then what sort of methods do you use?
Note: Google Gemini reports that "the most successful writers in 2025 use me as a "distillation machine." They write 1,000 words of raw emotion, then ask me to help them find the "300 words that actually matter"
This is informative for an indie audio podcast. I wonder how the economics and scale change for podcasts published by studios like Audible or even smaller ones like Pushkin
> The Program audio series is a sci-fi anthology podcast set in a future in which Money, State, and God became fused into a single entity called the Program. Each episode is a standalone story focusing on ordinary people inhabiting this extraordinary world. And for them, it is not this future that is terrifying - it is our present.