Podcasting keeps changing, but what members want to pay for never changes

It is a professional hazard of mine that I cannot look at Patreon tiers without judging them. After getting obsessed with Serial and StartUp while driving to my job as a high school English teacher, I threw myself into making it my full-time job: working at SiriusXM in 2016, starting my first show, Join the Party, in 2017 (which ended only a few weeks ago!), and co-founding and running Multitude, as the Head of Development starting in 2018. And for nearly a decade, I have tried, errored, hacked, and sunsetted so many podcast membership programs. I have seen how the audio creator economy sausage gets made.

The backbones of your favorite shows’ memberships are the same two perks every single time: more content and high-status treatment. If your membership perks are not in those buckets, it’s not servicing what paying community members really want. They want more of you, and they want to feel important within your community.

In recent years, podcasters doubled down on the value of membership and Patreon, the Kleenex of online creator memberships, responded in kind. In August 2024, the platform celebrated the high water mark of more than $350 million earnings in 2023 in an official press release. Podcasts are “about building communities with their own language and inside jokes — those are the types of things that stick with people,” Patreon declared. “When creators can truly connect with their fans and positively impact their lives, they’re able to turn their work into successful, sustainable businesses.” 

The data on Patreon in 2026 continues to support this trend. On Graphreon, a database that collates and charts all public data from Patreons, 25 of the 50 largest Patreons are podcasts. What do these shows have in common for their memberships?