Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 227, dated September 24, 2019.
Money for nothing [by Caroline Crampton]. Podcoin, an app that promised to “pay you to listen to podcasts,” shuts down today. It began operation in December 2018 and claimed to hit 10,000 active daily users in April before being added to The Meet Group’s network of mobile apps. (Albeit seemingly without money changing hands — perhaps not surprising since the CEO of Podcoin and the CEO of The Meet Group are brothers.) Now, because it “just failed to sustain momentum,” it is going offline less than a year later.
The mechanism behind Podcoin was questioned by users right from the get-go (as in this Reddit thread, for instance), but here’s how it was supposed to work: For every 10 minutes of podcasts that you listened to via the app, you earned one “podcoin,” which could then be redeemed against rewards such as Bose headphones and Amazon gift cards. In its FAQs, the…
