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Left-Wing Podcasters Are Charting a Future Without Bernie Sanders

Left-Wing Podcasters Are Charting A Future Without Bernie Sanders

(Bloomberg) -- Chapo Trap House—one of the most popular podcasts of the American far left—took a sharp turn after a devastating Super Tuesday for its preferred candidate, Bernie Sanders. Its hosts, who had spent months analyzing incremental developments in the presidential primary campaign and conducting lively interviews with top Sanders staffers, largely retreated from the daily horse race. Instead, they began giving minute-by-minute commentary on all three Star Wars prequels, and discussing the racial dynamics of the World of Warcraft videogames and movies.

On April 2, Will Menaker, one of the show’s hosts, summarized their analysis of the Phantom Menace. “We have, like, conclusively figured out that it is a movie about sort of Brexit, but mainly about boy slavery and race science.” The sudden end of the Sanders campaign, it seemed, didn’t just leave America’s far left without a leader; it left a budding constellation of small but thriving media businesses without their favorite thing to talk about.

Left-Wing Podcasters Are Charting a Future Without Bernie Sanders

Chapo Trap House and a handful of other tiny socialist media outlets—many of the most successful of which center on podcasts—had found a niche during Sanders’s two presidential runs. The collection of podcasts, sometimes called the “dirtbag left” ranges from serious Marxist analysis to crude comedy shows that are vaguely political at best. Chapo Trap House sits somewhere in the middle, combining some of the shock-jock aesthetic of right-wing talk radio with the emerging business model of the online micro-media company.

The six-person team generates about $2 million annually from podcast subscriptions through Patreon, a platform for artists and creators to get paid directly by supporters, in addition to revenue from book sales and in-person events.  The live shows, of course, are on hold due to the coronavirus, and subscribers have dropped 6% from their peak on March 16.

The pandemic has thrown doubt on every media company from Walt Disney Co. down as corporate advertising budgets have taken a hit. But smaller media outfits that rely predominantly on subscriptions may be uniquely positioned to weather the economic slump. Consumers have become increasingly willing to pay for online media subscriptions, and shoestring operations can use platforms like Patreon to attract and manage paying audiences. This makes outlets like Chapo Trap House, whose ability to pay their tiny team relies on the loyalty of small but passionate supporters, arguably more sustainable than those chasing the mass audiences needed for ad-supported media businesses.

“What they embody is the sense that you can build a business away from the so-called mainstream,” said Nick Quah, who writes a newsletter about podcasts. “It allows subcultures to form and to let subcultures make their way to some form of sustainability.” The pandemic won’t change that, Quah said, though it could make things harder for smaller podcasts on the fringes.

The podcast mini-moguls of the far left face another challenge in the end of the Sanders era. They now have to prove their businesses were doing more than riding the coattails of a uniquely popular political figure. “In the short term there's a little bit of disarray,” said Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone writer who co-hosts a leftist podcast called Useful Idiots, whose episodes regularly get tens of thousands of hits on YouTube. But Taibbi also thinks people who supported Sanders will still form the foundation for a much larger paying audience in the near future. “They’re younger and they grew up with a brand of politics that is going to shape their views for the rest of their whole lives,” he said.

The left has been pining for an answer to right-wing talk radio since before many of today’s socialist podcast hosts were born. Attempts by liberals to beat hosts like Rush Limbaugh at their own game—Al Franken and Rachel Maddow’s radio station Air America, for instance—have largely fizzled. Progressives are more likely to trust mainstream media than conservatives, and often get their political red meat from MSNBC or Comedy Central’s Daily Show and its various spinoffs.

Podcasting as a media format began to take hold in the Obama years. Like in the early days of blogging, podcasts were freewheeling passion projects from people who might one day graduate into respectable media jobs. There was little sense that these online radio shows held the potential to be standalone businesses, and no commercial infrastructure for them to build upon.

The current far-left podcast movement can be traced back to 2011, when two men from Columbus, Ohio, started Street Fight Radio. “We were pretty much focused on attacking liberals from the left and holding them accountable for the same stuff we were mad about George Bush doing,” says Brett Payne, one of the podcast’s co-creators.

In 2014, the hosts created a Patreon account to receive donations from their supporters. For years, Payne never made enough money to quit his day job as a mystery shopper, working for stores that hired him to buy things as a way to monitor employees’ customer service. His co-host worked for Lyft. But the podcast industry was gaining listeners and legitimacy. Then, every aspiring political commentator on the left got just what he or she needed most, the perfect foil.

Payne says podcasting exploded when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. In particular, Trump’s election ended up being good business for Pod Save America, which was founded by a group of Obama staffers and became among the most popular podcasts in the country during the campaign. The hosts expanded their roster after Hillary Clinton lost and cut off traditional Washingtonian career paths for ambitious young Democrats. The Pod Save America team hosted live shows but built a largely ad-based business.

Chapo’s style was less likely to appeal to advertisers than the mildly edgy Pod Save America. Menaker, Felix Biederman and Matt Christman knew the Street Fight guys from Twitter, and in 2016 made an appearance on the Street Fight Radio podcast to discuss 13 Hours, a movie about the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. The show was a success, inspiring Menaker, Biederman and Christman to form Chapo Trap House, whose name is intended to evoke a rap mixtape. The group’s political speech often straddles a similar unseriously serious tone.  

Chapo Trap House asks their followers to subscribe, for as little as $5 a month, on Patreon. The group now generates about $165,000 a month from more than 36,000 subscribers. If they split their earnings evenly—and surely they wouldn’t do it any other way—everyone involved in the enterprise would make about $330,000 a year from the podcasts, before expenses. Street Fight, which got enough of a boost from hosting Chapo Trap House to become a solid business, now has about 3,100 subscribers and generates almost $14,000 monthly. It’s not much, but is enough for the show’s two hosts to dedicate themselves to it full time. Both Chapo and Street Fight have seen their subscriber numbers fall over the past few months, coinciding with the end of the Sanders campaign and the spread of the coronavirus.

Chapo’s show has alternated between interviews with Sanders staffers, attacks on neoliberal columnists and Senator Elizabeth Warren, and drunken rambling election results live streamed on Twitch. “I grew up on talk radio that was mean and crude and ugly,” said Payne. “Chapo just hits in a very hard way. Either people are immediately into it or they are repulsed by it.”


Payne said he tried never to tie himself to Sanders. “That guy is temporary, and I already knew he was doomed because he was trying to run as the Democratic nominee,” he said. But he also felt like his audience wouldn’t tolerate him deviating from anything but full faith in his preferred candidate. “My pay check was on the line if I said anything about Sanders.”


If podcasts like Street Fight and Chapo can keep subscribers engaged, they don’t need large audiences to stay afloat. “Left leaning podcasts have been listener funded,” says Matt Bruenig who hosts a podcast with his wife, an opinion writer at the New York Times, and runs a crowdfunded socialist think tank called the People’s Policy Project. He says listener funded podcasts would be better insulated than advertising-based podcasts during the crisis.  The Bruenigs generates about $9,000 a month from Patreon subscriptions. “With the podcast there are no costs so it's up to basically $100,000 a year. That's pretty good money.”

This is all penny-ante stuff compared with the most successful right-wing media figures. Financial backers of conservative wunderkind Ben Shapiro have spent more than $1.3 million on ads driving people to his Facebook page, more than any mainstream media organization spent on ads on the social media site. The podcasting left also reaches far fewer people than their counterparts on the right, or more establishment-minded outfits like Crooked Media, which produces Pod Save AmericaThe Ben Shapiro Show is the 11th most popular podcast on Apple’s podcast app. Pod Save America is No. 22. Chapo doesn’t make the list.

The small numbers are unsurprising, given there are 60,000 registered members of the the Democratic Socialists of America. There are more than 44 million registered Democrats in the U.S, and almost 70 million Netflix subscribers. The end of the Sanders campaign, along with the coronavirus pandemic, could further reduce the size of paying audiences to below the level of sustainability.

Left-Wing Podcasters Are Charting a Future Without Bernie Sanders

Still, some socialists are becoming more ambitious. Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, who made a name for themselves in leftist media circles by creating a viral campaign ad for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that Inc. Magazine called “the DIY viral ad that will change politics forever,” launched a video streaming platform called Means TV at the end of February. “We are never optimistic because why on Earth would you ever be optimistic about electoral politics as a socialist in the U.S.,” Burton asks.

The platform raised about $200,000 in crowdfunding to get started. It had hoped to raise more than double that. So far, the site has about 5,000 subscribers, each of which pays $10 a month. Street Fight is planning to host a program on Means TV. Burton defines success in modest terms. “We don't have the ability to take out loans that aren't super predatory. We have to be so much more careful,” she said. “We’re trying to be too small to fail.”

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