🆕 Never Post! State of the Pod: 2026

Friends! It's 🎂 our show's birthday 🎂, and to celebrate, we bring you...the State of the Pod for 2026.

Mike, Jason, Hans, and Georgia gather to talk about how this past year went for the show; and to break down how many people listened, how much money changed hands, and changes coming in 2026.

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post's state of the podcast 2026. This is an episode for and about Never Post itself and in which we celebrate our two year birthday.

Hell, yeah. We

did it. Cakes and candles.

Kicks and

candles. Nevertheless, the pod persisted.

Now I feel bad.

Oh, man.

We did one of these last year, and we're gonna do another one this year in which we're gonna let you know the chances that we will be around to make a third one next year.

And what you

are about to hear is a chat between the principal producers of the show about how we are doing as a show. We're gonna talk about how many people listen to Neverpost, how many members we have, how much money we make, and what we spend that money on. We're gonna talk about the challenges of making a podcast. We're gonna talk about what we need to keep doing the show. We're gonna talk about all the things that we're looking forward to in our third year, including some changes to the show's format, which I think secretly all of you that listen to the show, you're all a bunch of freaks or things that you want anyways.

So I don't think any of it's gonna be a really big deal. Before we get too far, we're gonna do introductions. In order of how large I assumed their cup of coffee was this morning, descending. So biggest cup first.

Single cup. Biggest single cup.

Single cup. Jason Oberholzer, Never Post executive producer.

It's me, your biggest boy with the biggest cup. A

gallon. He's got one of

those gallon.

The things that truckers have.

I have not successfully gotten any coffee in my hands today. I am the worst for wear because of it.

Oh, no. But

you could not be more incorrect.

Could not be more incorrect.

This is the host we're here to trust.

Yeah. This is also an episode in which I announce my retirement. Like to apologize to the audience. I've said some things that I regret.

I'm listening. I'm learning.

No. I'd like to make it clear. I'm not learning. I'm just I'm just leaning. Hans Buto, never post senior producer.

This is I'm holding it up. The mug that I drank coffee out of. So

10:12. Ten head. Okay. Georgia Hampton, never post producer. Not applicable tea.

Oh. You could not be more wrong. You could not be more wrong. Not only do I drink coffee, I only drink black coffee.

Okay.

I'd say a safe, like, eight ounces. But, oh, I drink coffee.

Oh, that's right, folks.

Oh, that's yeah. I don't mean to brag.

And finally, Mike Rickenetta, host of the podcast who apparently knows nothing about any of us.

Yes. It's been now We're in the third year.

Years. I pretty much always drink iced coffee in the morning, and I think that I probably had about 16 ounces of iced coffee this morning.

I think you're the winner.

So yeah. And I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. The four of us here make up the secret cabal that own and run the show. We build this pod with our bare hands from shiny trinkets that we find on the sidewalk. And you may be saying at this point, hold on.

Wait a second.

Eagle eared listeners may know this.

Who the hell was that?

You did one of these last year, and only three

of you were here.

And now there's four of you.

And we hate change.

So prepare for an episode full of change. Yes.

Everybody strap in. Get get your favorite stuffy and Yeah. Hunk it down under that blanket.

Get your own mug.

The big update that we have to share right up top is that Producer Georgia has been made a full partner of the show. So welcome, Producer Georgia.

Woo hoo.

Speech. Speech. Speech. The haters tried to sabotage me.

They did.

They said a girl like me could never be a partner of a podcast.

Name them.

I unveil a long scroll. And now I'm in. And I'm changing all the passwords.

Actually, what what Georgia says is is relatively true. There is an amount of truth to that. Some of you may wonder, wait. Wasn't Georgia already a partner? What is the difference between then and now and so on and so forth?

To which our most humble reply is, this upload is already going to be boring enough. Yeah. The most honest answer that we can give is that this means Georgia will be able to log in to slightly more That's so true.

As a little girl, I was dreaming of logging in to more websites.

Of pushing the transcribe button Yes. And then waiting a few seconds.

Alright. That's enough celebrating. Happy birthday to us. Let's be jolly. We made another year.

We made in this year. Let's appreciate ourselves for a moment. It's just the four of us. Jason's gonna have the hardest time with this. Let's let's account for what we did this past year.

In 2025, we made forty one and a half hours of livestream content. Wow. We published 27 newsletters. We published 26 full episodes. We published nine sideshow episodes of three different shows, eight bonus and mailbag episodes, three collaborations with other shows, two T shirts, one distribution deal with Radiotopia, and zero, count them, zero social media posts.

Yeah.

There are I go and I check the never post blue sky every once in

a while. Once in a while. And our most recent reply is from someone being like, I love that you've committed to this bit, and you

haven't posted it. You haven't posted anything since before the show technically existed.

And that's real dedication. Yeah. It's in the name. It's in

the name. So how does it feel, everybody? How let's talk our feelings about this. How does that you know, like, broad sense, how do you feel about what we did in 2025?

Good. I mean, the show is an incredible amount of work. So like, I look at '26 episodes and I'm like, really? Only 26? And then I'm like, if I made if I made more than that, I would have died.

Yes. Yeah. When you really string it out, I guess we made a lot of things.

Did we do

we do folks feel like we were able to tell the kinds of stories that we wanted to and cover this type of stuff that we were looking to and that we had goals to do?

Can I give like the my most earnest answer to this?

We're talking about our feelings, Mike.

Yeah. Yeah.

No. But, like, that's okay. Yeah. You know, like, I think I I just I feel like I can imagine all of the things that I wanted to do, and I got to maybe a small percentage of them. Yeah.

Yeah. I can imagine, like, you know, even things that we did release, like, what more we could have done with some of those things and what what else sort of like we had to leave on the table just because of how much time we have to make the show, the resources that we have. And, like, the stuff that we put out is great, but I just can't not also think about, like,

oh, if only we could've if only we could've Yeah.

Which is just like the nature of making something, but it's it's good because it's motivating. Right?

Totally.

Like, we know I know we can do it. You just take that lesson forward to the next thing and hopefully hit all of those marks for future stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah. I totally agree.

But did we have fun?

Oh, god. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. Unquestionable. Yes.

I would never allow us.

Georgia's putting on the clown makeup. Oh, she's putting on the clown makeup right now.

Clown makeup has been on.

This is fun. I

love fun as we all know. We had fun.

There are segments in the pile for each of us that have been on the pile for the entire year that I wish we had been able to do that we still will do at some point, but that is also the nature of it. Like prioritization becomes such a task. There are so many good things that I know how they're going to be made when they are able to be made, and I look forward to them.

I had a lot of fun making content and making stories and hanging out with you as a crew. I think the thing that was the biggest addition this year was developing and getting closer to the audience. I felt so good getting to do our streams, getting to know the chat a little bit more, getting to field more questions in mailbags. It's one of the reasons that I was excited to do this show is to be a little bit closer to you all, and that feels like it's happening more and more, and that to me is a lot of fun. So that's been really gratifying, and I

hope to do more of that.

This raises a a question that we did not discuss before beforehand. So I'm sorry if this is ambushing everybody. Do we think we're gonna do another survey?

Let's do a survey of the audience. Do you want us to know more about you and do a survey?

Do you do

you want us to want to know more about you? Fill out fill out this survey to determine if we'll do a survey.

It'll be in the newsletter. Don't worry about it.

Well, I think it's a good teaser forward, Mike, to what we're gonna announce because there are some changes coming that we're gonna talk about later in the in the episode, and I think I would like some feedback. I would like to know more about what people think of them. And, yeah, I think it's appropriate for us maybe sometime this year to do another survey to get feedback from folks in a more specific way. Yeah. So one of our goals in 2025 was definitely to do more of the show, as we call it, on purpose.

Doing the show on purpose. It's a thing we talked about at this episode last year was how we sometimes were successful at doing it on purpose, but not as often as we think we should be or want to be. And so my question for you is, you three, is did we do the show more on purpose in 2025, which was our goal?

Yes. I think so. Indeed. I think that we could still do it even more on purpose. Mhmm.

But I think we did a better job this year than we did last year. Yeah. Yeah. So just for the audience, like, let's talk a little bit about maybe what that feels like. Like, when we're not doing the show on purpose, what that means is that we're, like, just trying to get things in as quickly as possible so that they're in so that we can publish a show.

And that's not to say that those things don't have we don't have standards for those things or that we don't want them to be good. It just means that we get to be slightly less intentional about those things because we don't have the time or resources. And doing the show on purpose means, like, we are able to work with intention, and we are able to put something out and be like, this might not have everything we wanted in it, but it's got everything in it that we knew we could fit in the time frame we had to work on it. Yeah. And so when it's when it's when you were when we're not working on purpose, things go out and we may really like those things, but we might like them kind of like in spite of how they came together.

Mhmm. Or we might sort of be relying on luck a little bit more than we would like to.

Big time.

Yeah. And so the idea is that we are we are always, even when we are strapped for time or resources, trying to work with as much intention as we can.

And I think we did a good job of that this year. I think there's always room for improvement, but I definitely think it was an improvement.

Yeah.

Yeah. I do honestly think a part of that is that the show was put into an existential crisis because of the loss of our client work, but the loss of our client work does allow us to work with more intention because we are not saddled with tons of client work.

Mhmm. I

think that's a really good transition for us, Mike, because let's talk a little bit about the details of what all this means. Feelings are great, but what's the what's the brass tacks here? So let's talk those dirty details and what those details mean for the future of the show. And spoiler on this, There's changes that come in.

Mhmm. But first, there's ads that come in.

Welcome back. Thank you for participating in the very numbers I'm about to talk about. We don't

wanna say that our audience is nothing but a number to us, but you are definitely at least part, in part, a number We, to

by the numbers, I think had a good year last year, and I can prove it because that's what you use numbers to do. First off, how many people listen to this show? Great question. We believe that we had 226,000 total listens last year. Now why do I say we believe?

Because this is podcast metrics and literally anything is possible. You have to know this about podcasting. Every number is a lie. Yep. And yet, this is the number we're going with.

There's also the added caveat this year that because we switched to Radiotopia in March, we had to switch platforms that we publish on, which means our numbers metrics change because everybody measures just slightly differently, and we're not sure, like, during that period of transition, how many are duplicated or not duplicated. So we did some really what we think is the best math to get this, but, you know, it's it's always a question mark for us. We take it roughly. Know that this is about 226,000 listens in 2025.

So how does 226,000 listeners stack up to our first year, 2,024? Well, that is 9,000 more listeners than the preceding year.

So like nine nine thousand more individual downloads.

Yes. Yes. And I think that that number is a lot better than it initially looks and I will tell you why later.

Okay. Alright. Yeah.

So tell me why.

But for now, know that we had more listens this year. We grew a little bit.

Yeah. I wanna have grown more but I'm excited to hear why I should shut my mouth. Yeah.

Shut your mouth and get me that coffee. One other thing that people who listened to this state of the podcast last year might recall is that we have an incredibly large amount of international listeners. And this year, that only became more true. 35% of the IP addresses we can track as listeners are international, which is 5% more than last year.

Yeah. That's okay,

that seems crazy.

Right? Been wild to me.

I love this especially because one of our initial concerns going into this is that we'd not be too American centric when we talk about the Internet and try to acknowledge that it is a global service. And I think this hopefully points to some success in that regard.

Yeah. And we have some cool episodes coming up that are from international spaces talking about the Internet in a couple of different places that are really exciting. So Yeah. You know, we hope that this makes everybody, that 35% of you who are not in The United States, feel very included. I mean, apparently you are because you're listening, and we really appreciate that.

It's very exciting.

We really do. Hans, do you have the list of countries that listen to us the most handy?

One imagines it's the it's the top four, like, English speaking. So it's gonna be Us, Canada, The UK, and Australia followed, I would guess, maybe a Brazil or a Germany.

You're you're very, very close. But there's a couple of those that are out of order. So, of course, United States is first by 65%.

Yeah. Fair margin. Yeah.

Yes. Then Canada, yes, our dear neighbors to the north. United Kingdom, nailed it, then Germany. That's right.

So that was the thing that we discussed most recently.

Yep. More Germans by almost double from Australians who were the next one after that.

Who are

then double again from The Netherlands. And you know who beat Brazil?

Xi Jinping.

Jinping specifically. Just himself listened to our

show Okay.

Thousands and thousands of times. Huge fan. No.

Jason's favorite fan country. What? Wait. France.

No way.

Beat Brazil? Beat Brazil.

I've been wrong this whole time, France. Soccer blue. My favorite country in the world, France. You did it. You're back.

I just had to give you a little bit of tough love for the whole calendar year because last year you weren't listening and this is what this is what they like. They like a little bit of the harshness.

Through reverse psychology, by next year, we will be the number one podcast in France.

Yes. That's right. Should double down. Words. France, I'm still disappointed.

Well, that's all very exciting. Now let's break this number down a little bit more. So by our best estimates, what our listenership number means is that per episode, we get about four to 8,000 listeners on any given normal drop, averaging out to, like, 6,600 listeners per episode, which is a bit more than we were averaging out to last year, certainly.

I would say that the if my memory serves, the increase in that number seems to outpace the overall total listens, which seems strange.

Yeah. I think we did more bonus episodes this year.

Oh. Yeah. Okay. And this is still not why I think that that 9,000 listener gain we got over last year is a better number than you think it is. Okay.

And I still refuse to tell you. Okay.

Exciting. Exciting.

Next up. Suspense is increasing.

Our biggest episodes for the year. In March, we released an episode called the hardest thing to do is nothing, which was our biggest downloaded episode because that is the first one we released after announcing that we were partnering with Radiotopia.

Hardest thing to do is nothing was an episode where Georgia did the no buy challenge.

I sure did.

And I talked to Mike Masnik about section two thirty.

Yeah. Which is a very always worth returning to.

Yeah. Our second most listened to episode was Any Rigid Idea About Yourself Is A Prison featuring friend of the show, host of the unraveling podcast from the Brattleboro Retreat, Kurt White.

And we had a segment from a contributing producer that episode as well, Young Naparc, about why LinkedIn is that way. Yeah. So yeah. Sorry. Listen, we're trying to turn it off.

We're trying to turn it off.

Our most recent episode to have done bigger numbers than usually expected is AI and new American fascism. Mhmm. So those are sort of the bigger numbers about how our audience has grown over the last year. I feel pretty great about all of this, honestly. Here are some of the reasons that I feel extra good about last year.

The growth in our membership, the people directly supporting us both as free members who are getting our newsletters and staying abreast of all the things we do and as paid members who are the reason we can make a show at all, those numbers have gone up a lot this year. We have an increase of a 135% year over year in membership and we now have 889 members.

Yeah. Unbelievable. Oh my goodness.

Now if you think about this, like, big number that we started with, like, four to 8,000 listeners per episode about, and do the math on what percentage of that 889 people is, it's a big.

It's big. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it is so big that we have been told we are over indexing on loyalty, which is a cool business way to say that you guys fucking rule. Yeah.

We're in meetings where people are like, people really like your show?

And to that end, our membership increased by a 135, but our paying members increased by 303%.

Yeah. They

have 613

paying members. Thank you. Incredible.

Thank you.

Literally, the the reason the show exists. Yeah.

It's true.

Yeah. So what did that all amount to financially? This is where take out your calculators here. This is where we get down to hard maths. Last year, we made $40,000 from members.

To be exact, $40,111.52 from our members. In addition, we made almost $4,000 from making t shirts. Yay. And let me tell you, this is just gross revenue. So when I say we made that much money on t shirts, we made $0 on t Yeah.

If we also, like,

if we include Jason's time in fulfillment, I think we probably lost money. Yeah. Yeah.

Well as paying two designers to make the t shirts, paying an amazing printer to print them out.

We look so good.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I mean, they are the best. They are some of the best shirts that I own. They're so Yeah.

They're amazing. And it's worth it. It's it was fun as hell and now we get to wear these t shirts. So are we gonna do more t shirts in the future even though they amounts to $0 at the end?

Absolutely. Yeah. Definitely. For sure.

Can I just sidebar that my mom bought the punk design and she, like, wears it out when she goes to, like, her pottery studio?

Yes.

I love it.

Does your mom need a shirt for the pottery studio? Come to never post.

And one last note on the t shirts. International t shirt desirers, they're on their way. We had to figure it out.

I think yeah. We basically just don't want them to show up and then to also have them show up with someone requesting lots of money from you.

Yes. So are on their way. I promise. And then the final piece of the pie here, $7,500 in ad revenue. So altogether, that means that we made for this year, gross revenue, $51,594.79.

Oh.

That's pretty good. That's not nothing.

That's not nothing. It's a big improvement. Big improvement on 2024.

Right. It is a big improvement over 2024 because in 2024, the only money we made was from our dear founding members who showed up for the first year for us. And across the whole membership base, made $14,000 and some change there. So we have added

Go ahead and just do that in your head right now.

37 ish thousand dollars.

Thought we're gonna have to turn you off and on again.

Hans, you're gonna cut the, like, twenty minutes that that took for Jason to do the math. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I'll I'll drastically re breathe the entire time.

It was really intense. He was crying. It was pretty rough. Wow.

We're all doing our best. So where did that money go to? That money went to contributing producers like it always does. We had some great contributing producers this year. Tori Dominguez Peak, of course, delivering more amazing segments.

Yagna Park in the aforementioned, why is LinkedIn like that segment? Melissa Locker who talked about Oasis fan clubs with us and friend of the show, Meagal Jenardin talking about her own struggles with attention. So we had brilliant contributor pieces, we made t shirts,

and

we maintained all of the softwares as a service that we know and love so much. All of our hosting and production tools, everything we have to subscribe to.

We need to make sure we have lots of logins for Georgia.

Yes. It's

true. I need to be able to log in.

And then finally what we did is we basically refilled the coffers off of the ad dollars we had spent in 2024.

Yeah. That's what I was gonna ask, Jason. My impression is that also a fair amount of this went towards recouping charts and leisure's costs over the first year, which were, let's say, not insignificant.

Yeah.

So the first year, we spent, I think, around $20,000 on ads. And we spent probably as much on PR and other functions to launch the show. Now think about this. This is where I reveal the prestige. Oh.

If in 2024, we spent, let's call it $40,000 of marketing budget to get 217,000 listens. And in 2025, we spent $0 to get 226,000 listens. Does that 9,000 listener increase feel like a $40,000 worth of investment increase?

The prestige.

I see what you're saying.

This is really good because this is the year we did not market. We established a relationship with Radiotopia.

They have

helped us immeasurably on this. We have engaged our own listeners and fans and supporters to help us get the word out. We have sent out newsletters. We have collaborated with other programs, but we have not spent any of this money in direct marketing like we did last year on Pocket Cast and Overcast and all the other casts that you could do this on, and yet we have more listeners than last year. Entirely owned by the things we made, not the money we sent out.

So I think that is actually incredible.

That's organic growth as you call it in the business. Yeah. Mhmm.

And that's like a huge part of the runway of this show is can it persist organically without that marketing budget engine pushing on it? And this was the year we wanted to find out, and this is the year I believe we found out that, yes, that this is where we are.

So Jason, to summarize, 300% growth in members

Yes.

Two big membership drives, distribution deal. We didn't spend money on the things on the marketing. We, you know, brought in more gross, all that sort of stuff. Did we do it? Did we hit our big goal?

Our financial goals that we had set for 2025, which is to become self sustaining.

Everyone all at once. One, two, three. No.

I I will be the outside voice. But hold on. You we made $50,000.

Fantastic.

Yeah. Another way to think about this is I think we have organically grown to a size that is a fairly standard hobby podcast size for a person or two. And for if you were making a podcast as a person or two and you got to this size, in two years, you would be thrilled and you would probably be able to devote around half of your time to this and feel sufficiently remunerated for that time. But our aspiration is to be something larger and to be that we need to be the size of team that we are. And we need to use the budget that we have to have contributors come in and work with other producers and maintain the relationships that we have.

And so there's more we need to do with this. Yeah. And so we need to figure out ways that our listener base can also grow alongside us and support the rest of the growth that we need to do. And yet, I think we should acknowledge this is like a pretty incredible achievement for a show no matter how many people go into the making of it, that we have achieved a sense of stability at a reasonable size for a audio program in a couple of the weirdest years to be an independent audio program Yeah. There have ever been.

So I think the upshot in a lot of this is that while the show is growing and we're feeling good about its growth, we're still not making something that, like, barring various circumstances, we'll definitely continue to be around for, you know, the next two to five years. Like, we are constantly I mean, we have these meetings. Like, we've had them as recently as a couple weeks ago where it's like, are we going to keep making the show? And we all continually agree, like, yes. It's hard, but we will continue to make the show.

And so, you know, in looking forward to the next year, we're looking at 2026 to 2027. Like, what do we need? And, like, in one sense, the answer is really simple. We just need more money, more supporters, more members, more listeners, like, more of everything. And, like, if we don't get those things, like, does the show still exist?

And that's just as much a question now as it has been for all of the show's existence. There's nothing in our rate of growth or our circumstances at the moment that let us say, like, yeah, we're definitely like, we're crushing it. We're not going anywhere. This is easy to do. And, like, we are definitely gonna be able to keep doing it indefinitely.

You know? I think in a lot of ways, that puts us in a similar boat to probably a lot of things online that you like and listen to and watch and enjoy. It's a time that's really, especially in media, defined by precarity.

Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. It is wild how net how many of the imprimatures of success we have walked through and then the the material returns on them.

I have friends I have friends who are like, oh my god. How's the show going? It seems like it's doing really well. And and I get to be like, well, we've won a bunch of awards.

We have a good time.

Yeah. Which,

like, I don't wanna seem ingrateful

Yeah.

For the awards. I love the awards. Love the recognition.

Yeah. Yeah. This is the environment right now where, like, you can win a lot of awards. You can have a wonderful dedicated audience. You can make a show that you love and that people respond to, and it is still not enough.

And A Webby doesn't pay your rent.

As a matter of fact, a Webby costs you money. Yeah.

It actually super does.

Yeah. And so we we should, and I am grateful for all of the the luck and the good breaks and everything else that we have had so far. And, like, if anything at Omi furthers my sense of, like, solidarity and despair at how difficult it is to be making anything right now for everybody. For real. Yeah.

If we had done all of these things ten years ago, we would not be worried. And I'm sorry everyone's worried out there, but I am too. So

speaking of, like, the people who listen to their show and their habits and what they're interested in, you two, Jason and Hans, were in a really interesting meeting with the, like, audience and analytics people at Radiotopia where they talked they, like, really did some divining of the analytics and the numbers and said some really interesting things. So I would like can you guys share some of that with the audience?

Yeah. They

with our need to grow, helped us understand that we are not really growing at a rate that we're talking about. And they said, like Jason said earlier, we over index on loyal. So we have super duper consistent numbers. You freaks love to download an episode when it comes out.

And we download downloads. Oh, they would love to download those shit

goes for downloading.

The show

is called never post, not never download.

Always download. And we love you for like, it

is it's the reason that we can have the membership numbers that we do is because there's no No. Guild team in

It's the best.

But we need that, plus we need a bunch of other stuff that they told us we don't have. One of the things that they said that we don't really get, which really, really surprised them was any meaningful back catalog listening. Mhmm. Which means no one is going back and listening to stuff we have already done. They're really just consuming the the right now of things, the most recent episodes, despite us doing mostly evergreen content that could be consumed kind of at any time.

People are not going back to it.

My impression after you guys left that meeting and you described it to us was that as weird as it is, the the degree to which it is weird that people will seemingly the bulk of our audience will download every episode when it's dropped. It is weird how little movement there is in older episodes once they've dropped.

Yeah.

I have a theory about this behavior that I've been calling the New Yorker theory of content consumption.

TM. TM.

Picture this. A fresh New Yorker comes in the mail. Oh, boy.

Could you squeal with glee?

I'm gonna open that bad boy up, and I sure do. And I sit down at my couch, and I open up my coffee table, and I start reading to that New Yorker.

Open up coffee table.

Jason. This

is why you

have trouble.

Where I keep my readers, and I take my reading glasses out of the coffee table, put them on my face, and then I open up New Yorker the magazine. And I start reading and boy, I'm having a good time. And then I get up there, oh, the first big story is about to start. I get a couple pages in and then, oh, someone's calling me on my phone. I gotta talk to somebody.

It's Mike and he wants to talk about esoteric noise music. Well, there it goes the day. And the New Yorker sits there on my coffee table, which I haven't even shut.

You've got the best of intentions, you wanna return.

I want you so badly. But then it's almost dinner time, I gotta make dinner. So next thing I

know I'm calling again to talk

about s

It's always something. The music is only getting noisier and less diatonic. More esoteric. S Chasing missed call list is just me. It's just Mike every day.

Next thing you know, a whole dang week has passed, and I'm finally getting ready to sit down and finish that beautiful New Yorker article and what's this? A knock at the door? It's my mailman. He says, Jason, great news. And I say, yes, Paul.

And he said, you're new New Yorker. The magazine is here. And I said, goddamn it. I'm so excited. And I rested out of his grubby little hands and slammed the door on him.

And I go back to my coffee table, which I have to reopen. Put my readers on, and start digging into my new New Yorker sitting right on top of the old one, which I never even had the time to finish.

So that was the analogy that Jason came up with in this meeting, which I think is actually pretty apt, but it was a really eye opening meeting for us. They put a thank you, Radiotopia, for putting that much work into really helping us understand the numbers that are happening. But it got it start it kicked off this months long conversation for us about we need to grow the show. We need more folks. We need more money.

We're having these specific behaviors. How can we add to those specific behaviors with the growth that we need?

And actually, I don't know that we mentioned it, but this is a very important part of the puzzle. Audience, we love you. Yeah. We really, really love you. We love that you listen to every episode.

We love that you write in, that you call us. You send us emails. You send us voicemails. Not a one of you is finishing an episode.

Did you how

many of you know that there's a poem at the end of every episode?

And there yeah. There has been every time.

So and we say that that is not again, like, that's not a judgment. That's a note for us. Yep. Right? And I'd say this sort of half joking, like, yes, there are a bunch of you that actually do listen to a 100% of every episode.

But percentage wise, of the number of people who start an episode, who download it, which is huge, the number of people who are listening through to the end of, let's say, the second segment, if we do a set if we do two segments, is relatively low. And so that's a problem that we need to solve. That is a problem with, as far as we see it, the design of the format of the show.

So we made some decisions.

Mhmm.

We are gonna change things.

We're buying the New Yorker.

Is that New Yorker the magazine, Jason?

I just need 40,000 more dollars, and I think they're gonna say yes.

How much could New Yorker cost the entire company? So when we come back,

let's talk about it. Our plan for 2026, the stuff that you can expect to shift, the stuff you can expect to stay the same, and how it all relates.

Alright. We're back. So I think the headline here is that I think we're just gonna be doing more of what the show already has been doing over the last couple months. More. More.

More. The Like, we're not we're not actually going to change too much. We are just going to acknowledge in a more official capacity what it seems like has been working over the last quarter of a year. And that means essentially uploading more things that are just a segment and sometimes even just a segment with no news. And so we're just gonna do more of that because based upon our analytics and based upon the feedback that we've been getting, it feels like that's what people want.

People get excited when there's a new Neverpost upload that shows up in their feed. They we we get, like, all kinds of emails and notes from people being like, I love the show. If a new Neverpost shows up, I will stop a podcast that I'm currently listening to in order to listen to it, which is just like I mean, that's a massive compliment. And so we just are gonna increase the frequency with which that's done. That means overall that uploads will be shorter, but there's gonna be more of them.

Does that mean news is going away? No. News I mean, we'll see. We're gonna be testing this out over the next couple months to see, like, what works, but the plan right now is that there will be one news episode per month at least, possibly two, and that between those, you're gonna get other uploads that are just classic segments.

And I think this is gonna be really good for folks because it addresses another problem that we had, which we actually demonstrated earlier in this episode. When Jason was listing off the most popular episodes of the year, all four of us had to go to the feed to figure out what was on each of those episodes because we can't even remember what we've published in any individual episode, which means the discoverability is not high. We think this is gonna make it much easier for you to find, share, and remember where your favorite episodes are so that you can get back to them more easily, and they become more useful in the back catalog. But but Hans

Yes. Yes, Mike. That's only true for episodes going forward. Right? What about what about episodes from the back catalog that our audience may have missed?

What a good question.

Wait a second. What's that? Is there a knock at my door? Let me go get it.

Paul's gotta

go. Paul's demanding to know what you're gonna say next.

Boy, Jason, if only we had an answer to that question. What do think?

Paul, calm down. I'm I'm I'm getting right to it. He's waving the gun around.

Baby, please listen to me, Paul. So what we're gonna do, Paul, calm down, is we are going to release old segments from the past two years that have heretofore lived in the middle of a full never post episode behind a bunch of minutes of news between interstitials next to another segment, between that poem no one bothers to stick around and listen to. Paul, calm down. We're gonna bring them back in a timely fashion as they make sense to the events of the day and as they feel good to bring back. But we're gonna bring them back on their own, so they are discoverable and shareable and you can actually instead of saying like, oh, yeah.

I heard that in this great Never Post episode a couple months ago, that is some oblique title, and I'm not sure exactly where it is in that. You can just say, oh, yeah. It's about this, and it's called this, and

Here's a link.

A link.

Yep.

Right. There is no reason for any of you to remember that Yungna Park's segment about Yep. LinkedIn is in the episode that is titled Any Rigid Idea About Yourself Is A Prison. Yep. Titled so for Kurt's segment.

Yep. I and since we've been thinking about making this change, I've talked to a number of friends who make podcasts that are in segments. Like, there's a sort of thing that they do, and they do multiple of that thing per show. And I'm like, how do you solve the titling and the metadata problem of, like, you know, you've got something buried in the middle of an episode. You can only do one title.

How do you make it clear to people who are looking for it later where it is? And every single one of them was like, I don't we don't know. We have no we have

no clue. Yeah.

So it turns out it turns out the right answer is maybe the simplest answer, which is everything should just be uploaded by itself. Yeah. Yeah. However so we all really love the Neverpost format of, like, the magazine show. Mhmm.

You've got the intro, the news, a segment, the interstitials, like, this sort of, like, packaged up thing.

And clearly, the people who listen also love it. Also love So,

Jason, is that going to go away completely?

No. It is not gonna go away completely. Here's another thing we learned from the analytics. You love the news. You get falloffs every time we transition to a new segment because that's just natural listening behavior.

We give you an opportunity

to put your phone down and take

a break and you do. But everyone likes the news. Everyone listens to it and you download and listen to the show within moments of it coming out. So there's something about the timeliness and the newsiness of it is helpful. And we wanna preserve that and still give you news episodes, not just disembodied segments all the time.

And those are the moments where I think we are going to push into exploring more of the classic Never format and some so if you think about, like, an episode coming out at the end of a month that's going to dive into what has happened to that month, I think that's largely going to feel like Neverpost has always felt. We are going to try to stretch and explore and figure out the most interesting way to provide something that is newsy and relevant and encapsulates the feeling of what a month has felt like for all of us, and it's going to give you all of the magazine feel that we also love about this format and we don't want to give up just because we're releasing segments on their own so you can also find them. We're gonna try to have our cake and eat it too. Oh, Paul is losing his mind. He's so happy about this.

Paul, stop crying. I know, buddy. We had a plan the whole time.

So some

of that original never post flavor will persist. And I think that this is, like I think if you think about what we've been doing over the last few months, like Hans's Minneapolis episode, Meigle's attention episode, which, like, really was just like a double wide single Yeah. Exploring a single thought. Yeah. Like, we've been uploading more things that are just themselves.

Mhmm.

Uploads have a single identity as opposed to being this kind of multivalent, multipart thing where where a theme might be oblique or not clear or even nonexistent. And the response has been either positive or nonexistent, which is another way to say positive. Right? Like, when you change something and no one in the audience is like, wait. What the fuck are you doing?

Stop it. That's good. Right? That means that it seems like a natural evolution of the show. So think we're just gonna lean into what we've been doing so far.

Just try to do it as we talked about earlier, more on purpose.

Yeah. And I think another thing that's going to help with intentionality there is that in conversations, we're starting to treat the whole feed as if the whole feed were the magazine rather than every episode being the magazine we're releasing. Yep. In some ways, like, the flexibility of any given release in the format that we've created for this is, like, really freeing and allows us to do everything, but it's also constricting and that you need to pack all of your ideas into the same container every time we release. And the further we're stretching through that, the more I'm starting to see, like, a lot of open space in how we can fill the feed in new and surprising ways

Yep.

And continue to make the feed feel more like every single episode drop. And that's getting me really excited to figure out how to program next year.

Yeah. Surprise episodes, strangely sized episodes, oddly comprised episodes. Just prepare. It's gonna we're gonna have a fun time this year.

And speaking of which, Georgia, do you wanna talk to us a little bit about streaming?

Why, yes. So we did do, as we previously said, over what was it? Forty hours Yeah. Of livestreaming.

Which I think if if memory serves, we are gonna do a numb another stream week later this year.

That is

on the books. Okay.

Far as we know, that is happening again.

Yeah. Was more than half of that forty hours. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, big oh, I I'm sure it was.

But between now and then.

But between now and then, we're going to be doing quite a lot more streaming on our Twitch channel, twitch.tv/theneverpost. We are also going to lean a lot harder on making streaming content for you and make a lot more of

it,

which includes a monthly stream of our editorial meeting that we have every Monday, where we pitch ideas, we bring in ideas from other people, and we are going to do that live for you, where you can be in the audience and see how the Never Post Sausage is made and also contribute to how segments get put together in a lot of different ways. That was extremely instrumental when I was making that episode about witchcraft and anti witches.

Yeah. Like, we have already done this and it has ruled. Like, we get great sources and ideas from people and it validates the things we're trying to see if they're sticky or not. These are so fun and so valuable to do.

But aren't there four Mondays in a month? Maybe five?

Why, yes, there are, Hans. But I have wonderful news for you about the remaining Mondays where Wait, Paul's here now. Paul, how did he get to Minneapolis? Oh, god. He's on the way to me.

But, yes. So on other Mondays throughout the month, we will also be live streaming other things like teen chats, maybe some gaming. Definitely some gaming.

Georgia, certified professional gamer girl.

Yes. It's finally happening to me. Yeah. I got the call once in a generation.

So Mondays is gonna be the big day. 11:30 eastern on Mondays. That's when the editorial call will be once a month. And other Mondays, we will have other programming for you there. Sometimes the gaming will probably be in the evenings, but we'll let you know.

Just hang out. We'll figure it out together. And once again, that is twitch.tv/theneverpost. Hang out with us there. So one of the things I know we're gonna be doing on Mondays at 11:30 on some Monday on 11:30 is we are going to be having live recordings of the team chats, little monthly yap fests which we are going to release for the members.

As part of our membership benefits, we are gonna be doing a monthly team chat. And if you wanna watch us record that live, you can come to twitch.tv/ then ever post and watch us, or you can become a member and listen to the edited output of that coming out once a month and starring friend of the show and yapping extraordinaire, Meaghel Janardin.

Okay. This gets us, I think, into the last thing that we wanted to talk about, which is maybe one of the more important things, which is, is anything gonna change for members? And the answer is yes. I mean, you know, things are gonna change insofar as the show itself is changing. Your feed will change in ways that I think are will be easy to understand.

Like, you're gonna get the same parceled out uploads that everybody else gets. But you're also going to get, as Jason said, these members only Yapfests. There's essentially, like, an extra chat show now that's gonna come out every once in a while that's just for members. But Hans, do you wanna talk about the other member feed changes that are gonna occur?

Absolutely. Because what we're gonna do is condense things down into one feed. Right now, it says on every episode in the show notes, subscribe, become a member, and you get access to all of our different feeds. Well, those feeds are gonna become one feed, so it's easier for you. You don't have to remember which ones you're subscribed to, figure out, am I do I have never watched or not never watched, whatever?

Everything's just gonna go down one feed, and frankly, we're not gonna be feeding a whole lot more down that feed. We are gonna not be doing extended interviews anymore. We just don't get big numbers on them, and we struggle to be able to take the time to go produce them considering all of the other things for doing the regular show. So we're just gonna let those go. If this is a huge deal breaker for you, let us know.

I have a feeling it's not because the best versions of those interviews always just end up in the segment. The puzzle

is kind of like punishing the members. Like, here's the version that isn't as good.

Do you

wanna pay us to listen to

something that's, like, maybe, like, 10% worse?

If yes, and you'll cancel your membership because

of that, please let us And we

can we can we'll talk about that. But you're gonna get a bunch of stuff. It's gonna be much easier to access, and it's gonna all funnel through one feed. So you'll get more details about that if you're a member as we figure out exactly the mechanics of how that's gonna work.

One feed, a monthly Yapfest roundtable with the crew, assorted oddities when we make them, and ad free episodes of everything we put out. That's a pretty good feed. That's a pretty good feed.

Alright. Great.

So Can I can I put a what should be a survey question to our audience? Sure. I would love to know if there are podcasts out there that have member feeds that you love. I would love to know what they are.

Yes. Yeah. That would be so helpful.

Like, what podcasts have something that is forward facing where the member content is something that you think slaps and, like, is really great, and it's all in one feed? I would love to know.

So that's our plan. 2026. It's coming. It's here, and we're gonna lean into all the stuff that we learned from 2025 and continue to try to grow the audience. We wanna spend more time with you, our audience.

We wanna grow the revenue, obviously, because we need to make this sustainable for all of us to be able to spend the time, which we love, doing this for you, whom we love. We hope to work with more contributors. We hope to have more partnerships externally. And crucially, we hope to do even better this year at making Neverpost on purpose. Well said, Hans.

Well said.

So this is all gonna start in February. So February 2, which is a Monday. Tune yourselves in 11:30 eastern time and come to watch us stream our editorial meeting. And from that point on, you will start to notice differences in all of the feeds. We may have a couple of super secret fun tantalizing things coming at you between now and then, but that should be the next thing you should expect after this.

And I do wanna say again, thank you to everybody for making this a successful year, a year on the path to sustainable growth. We are still not there yet. I know we say this so many times. Like, every six months or so, we have to say it again, but we are still not there. This is a meaningful step.

We have, gained some support without having to spam marketing dollars out there so that you know we exist. Like, enough of you know we exist. We are a real show. And people can find us, and we're trying to help more people find us and help us grow more. We still need to grow a lot to be sustainable enough to make this the amount of our jobs that it is the amount of our lives.

We all spend about 50% of our work week on this show. And thus far, we have not made money for doing that. And this year, with your contributions, we will be able to split up some of that money after it goes to hosting and contributors and all the other budgets it goes to to pay ourselves a little to do this and that is incredible. Thank

you. That's really great.

Like, this huge step. It's not a lot for us, but it is something. And like coming from nothing to something is like an unbelievable step. So thank you so much for that. Yeah.

And please continue to tell people who you think would like what we do that we exist because we need to be at a new growth stage when we do this same report to you next year. We need to be bigger. We need to be able to take up more of our time with this show and, I think that we have a chance of getting there. We're certainly closer than we were last year. It's a long process.

I know we all kind of thought when we got into this, oh, shows take about four years to establish. It's one thing to know that. It's another thing to feel it and To live it. Do it every day. But if we're about halfway to getting this show to where it's maybe sustainable, that's amazing.

It feels possible, but there's a lot more work to do. But But it's been very satisfying work thus far, and I have to thank all of you for helping us make this a reality and making this a satisfying place to spend half of our work weeks.

I think that's really well said, Jason. And I think the other thing that we think about a lot when we do these kinds of updates is that, like, you know, Never Post is a show foreign about the Internet, and the show is is a part of the Internet. And so this is also us trying to take a look at what it's like to make something now and to try to do it in such a way that isn't unhealthy and doesn't drive the people who make it insane and isn't irresponsible to do. And that's a real balancing act. It's hard.

We, like, have to make sacrifices. We have to have, like, tough conversations about, like, what work we can shoulder and not shoulder and what we can do with the show over the next year as it relates to, like, all of our other work and, like, it feels good and necessary for us to share that with the audience. And so I guess, you know, just to echo what we've been saying over and over again in this, like, thank you everybody for listening. Thank you for your support. I know that these uploads are maybe a little like in the weeds and navel gazey, but like, it's also like this is what it's like.

Yeah. This is, you know, which I hope also is just interesting. I hope that you enjoy this for the reasons that you enjoy the other parts of the show because we think of these things as being very related. Definitely. Alright.

We'll see you with an episode, a much more normal Neverpost. Well, you know, a Neverpost that is like the Neverpost that you've come to expect. Yes. In a couple weeks. Okay.

Bye.

Bye. Tell

your friends about the show.