2024 Budget Breakdown: The Fool & Scholar - New Trends (Patreon)

Hey Friends,

Another year has somehow come and gone. Many of you appreciated our budget report in 2023, so we felt it would be helpful to share our updated numbers from 2024. Fiction podcasting is a new "industry" (even though we've been doing this for close to 10 years now), and very few people are able to make podcasting a full-time career. Again, we are EXTREMELY thankful to everyone here: All our Patrons, fans, and supporters who helped us survive another year and tell these stories to the world. As an indie team, we have goals and personal ethics we try to hold ourselves accountable for. This post aligns with our goals to:

Show why your support is so important

Help folks in the audio fiction community learn from our mistakes

Give people who are interested in entering the audio fiction space a realistic look at the 'business' of fiction

As the largest scripted podcast team on Patreon, we are always creating, exploring, and learning something new. We do not have a guidebook, and we rely heavily on the data and charts that we create, paired with our own internal moral compasses. Despite our perceived successes, we never have the opportunity to sit back and be idle. The Patreon platform and funding-style demands either constant growth, or to at least to retain more supporters than you lose. In both sad and good news, 2024 was the year that we shifted from a growth strategy to a retention-based focus.

To this end:

We fully upgraded our RSS... twice. The first time was when our host, Acast, completely broke without warning and we were forced to activate our Patreon RSS. The next time was when we switched from a Patreon mega-feed to individual premium show feeds. We've been the alpha testers of this feature, and it will soon be available to other creators.

We started offering Patreon annual subscriptions to reduce monthly attrition, offer greater incentives (merch!), and to offer more payment options.

We shifted our focus to work on content that you, our supporters, find most valuable. We have doubled-down on our fiction productions and put new life into beloved and upcoming shows.

For complete transparency, in 2024 we also ran a Kickstarter for our first Dark Dice book, which raised over $70,000 USD! This is entirely separate from the below numbers, and Patreon funds were not used for the Kickstarter. The few shared resources under "extended admin team" and "art" were split between our day-to-day business (reflected below) and that campaign. We hope that once the book is printed (later this year) the sales revenue will be a new source of income for us as podcasters. But keeping in line with the above goal, we did not want to invest Patreon money into something that most of our Patrons may not value.

Income

*All numbers are shown as a percentage of total (gross) income for 2024. Bold numbers represent change in percentage of total (gross) income from 2023 percentage.

81.24% from Patreon (-0.26%)

15.1% from advertisements (+2.5%)

2.20% from merch sales (-0.08%)

0.67%  from freelance work and direct donations (-2.33%)

0.63% from YouTube (+0.23%)

0.22% from our bank (interest) (+0.02%)

0.04% from Spotify (music) & Twitch streams (-0.16)

We want to thank our advertising partner Realm for increasing our overall advertising income. In fact both of our primary forms of income increased overall in 2024, which we attribute to The White Vault Goshawk's growth and success.

Our overall number of Patrons (on Patreon) grew from January until March, showing the seasonal decline we've come to expect over the years. Even though we're actively working on The White Vault Goshawk, we see a significant loss of Patrons during the months when we're not actively releasing our most popular show. This is a common issue, as support even in the non-release months is what helps us create and produce the podcasts for the upcoming release months. We have yet to find a way to address this slump with the capacity of our small team. This drop in overall Patrons was not as significant as previous years, but it's a bit of a balancing act with our monthly budget. The problem for 2024 was that our yearly patch drive in September/October significantly underperformed. We attribute this to splitting our efforts in launching That Scares Me Too, and the reduced time we had to market the patch (which was a pretty neat design this year). We also attribute this to Goshawk's popularity growing only after the patch drive ended - as the larger story elements reached the public.

As of March 2025, we still have yet to reach the same number of overall patrons that we had at the end of March 2024. However, we're hopeful that our new spooky mystery Don't Mind Sealskin Rock will keep supporters with us through the summer months. It's one of our favorite stories we've worked on to date, and we know that The White Vault fans are really going to enjoy it.

It's also worth mentioning that the average number of Patrons each month was slightly higher in 2024 compared to 2023 if you sum all months together and divide equally. Our numbers from previous years were also skewed by Patreons from 2018 who were still signed up at our "legacy" $1 and $2/mo tiers. (These tiers are inactive and have been for years.) Last year, most of these individuals migrated to active tiers, so our true count of Patrons, though similar to 2023, skews in our favor overall. We attribute the higher retention overall to our new Guardian Tier, as well the generosity of those joining with the new "annual" Patron model.

We do not offer annual subscriptions discounts, despite prodding from Patreon, because we cannot afford to. We're indie podcasters after all, and we hope that other creators won't feel pressured into the discount program.

Overall: We'd also like to add that having a more stable budget has really helped our mental health. Thank you for seeing value in what we create. Thank you for letting us entertain you! A special thanks to everyone who has either remained a Patron during these rough months, or who switched to an Annual subscription. Please know we are trying our best to make content you enjoy, and we want to create shows to be proud of.

Costs

*All numbers are shown as a percentage of our total budget (paid expenses) for 2024

14.40% - Admin Team

12.54% - Office Costs (Office Furniture, Hardware, Gear, Soundproofing, etc.)

12.50% - Advertising

10.09% - Extended Admin Team (Marketing, Website Building, Translations)

9.34% - Audio Team (Sound Design, Editing, Mixing)

8.53% - Actors

6.27% - Travel Expenses (Live Events & Conventions)

5.81% - Artists (Visual)

5.14% - Physical Goods for Patrons (Mailing Pins, Patches, Prepping Artifacts)

3.84% - Misc. Freelancers (Production Assistance) 

3.44% - Healthcare 

2.84% - Studio Rental Fees

1.95% - Award Submission Fees (w/ Applicable Expenses)

1.74% - Software, Hosting, & Licenses

1.46% - Misc. Expenses 

0.11% - Music Fees & Freelancers

Audio Team - In 2024, we upgraded our US-based "freelance co-editor" to "full-time employee" status (a larger undertaking with US tax withholdings, retirement planning, unemployment insurance, benefits, etc.) but then immediately lost this employee in March due to circumstances beyond our collective control. We had planned for this budget to increase from 2023, but it dropped sharply to "just Travis, with periodic help on Dark Dice, plus a mixing engineer." While it might have been "an excellent money saving strategy" (quotes here indicate sarcasm) it significantly hurt our planned release schedule - which is our primary means of growth. Repeated for emphasis: Regular Quality Content (that is properly marketed) is the largest contributor to growth (in podcasting) that you can control.Because we planned to hire our Q1-Q2 intern after they finished college, we felt it would be unfair to hire a short-term editor from June-December. This is probably the biggest contributor as to why we had limited growth opportunities... And also why we worked most evenings and weekends until mid-December. (Work-life balance continues to elude us.)

Our admin team cost is a reflection of a single full time employee who helps with emails, physical merch, data management, transcriptions, outreach, uploads, and mailing pins. It's slightly lower than the previous year because we consolidated multiple freelancers into a single full-time employee. We're also happy to make real impact on someone's life!

We cut back our overall advertising budget by almost half, which we'd hoped would be offset by professional marketing. We invested in two professional marketing companies (under Extended Admin Team) to help "market" our shows and introduce us to new (outgoing) advertising opportunities. Having previously worked with a full time publicist, we've come to recognize that newspapers and magazines rarely focus on audio fiction outside of "(NAMED ACTOR) REINVENTS AUDIO DRAMA", but we'd still hoped this would lead to some good cross-promotional opportunities, or for our social media burden to be lighter. Ultimately we found few benefits from these efforts. With one company, we had to duplicate and fix most visual branding efforts, as well as edit, write, and re-write our own bios and releases. It felt more like we were paying for "the privilege to buy advertising or cross-promo opportunities using their contact list" as opposed to generating meaningful interaction, interviews, press, or finding new audiences. The other marketing company preformed better, but unfortunately still suffered from limited success in reaching new audiences or press in a significant capacity. Timing could also have been a contributor as well: between election seasons, Twitter imploding, and Tiktok "at risk" of being shut down for most of the year, it was a difficult time to reach new audiences. The second marketing company was able to convert money we would have spent on advertising into cross-promotional opportunities, but not enough to offset the marketing company’s costs.

Office Costs: This year we soundproofed Travis' Studio (dubbed "Studio Fristed"), which is finally fully operational! We also built a long-term in-studio server to backup our files, and purchased used office furniture for Kaitlin's office. She's never had her own office to work in before! The new server has allowed us to breathe easily. Though the up-front costs were high, it allows us to drop backup subscription services like Carbonite, Dropbox, and Google Drive plans, and to consolidate our numerous external drives into a single location. The purchase cost should break even over the next few years.

Under travel, we attended a few events in Europe, a dozen online festivals, and a very detailed audio drama workshop in Austria. Travis and Finnur also went on a few trips in search of very specific sounds for our shows. (Just wait until you hear the staircases and animals in Don't Mind Sealskin Rock!)Our travel budget was slightly inflated by our trip to Japan. We couldn't say this at the time, but we were invited to meet with two prominent companies to discuss "major multimedia opportunities" in person. Business is traditionally conducted in person (in Japan), and they seemed like cool opportunities that would interest our listeners. We invested time and money into these meetings, but unfortunately both fell through.

Our Actor expenses dropped in 2024, largely due to having fewer productions than in previous years, and also requiring fewer actors in the stories we produced. This cost decrease is despite paying fair rates, and we expect this budget to sharply increase in 2025. Similarly, we had fewer shows to submit for awards last year. We've stopped submitting to the Ambies and a few others festivals that seem to exclusively award major production companies or that require a big name actor to be attached. Still, Dark Dice got 4th place in the Audio Drama World Cup!

In full disclosure: 

We had talks with various TV folks looking to adapt our stories. This has not had a dollar cost, but that ate into our time throughout the year. We have no progress to share, as the TV world is slow-moving, and no deal is in the works to our knowledge.

An internal production that we started in 2024 was simply omitted from the above budget as it skews the data as an outlier. It is far from being announced and remains within the overall scope of what we do as fiction podcasters. We will tell you more when the project is closer to release.

Content

We created 19.01 hours of content this year with the above budget. That's just half an hour of less content than the previous year, working with only half the editing team. This is the length of 3 full-run viewings of the original Star Wars trilogy!

The White Vault: Goshawk - 324 minutes (2.5x from 2023)Dark Dice: The Long Road - 259 minutes (2.5x from 2023)That Scares Me Too - 213 minutesDark Dice: Shores of the Silver Thrum - 194 minutesLiberty: Tales from the Tower - 55 minutesSvalbard Adventures IRL - 53 minutesBehind the Scenes - 43 minutes

Big Picture

2024 was a year of fine-tuning our work, improving the value we can offer to our patrons, and laying the groundwork for future opportunities (like the Dark Dice Kickstarter and our discussions in Japan). We launched and ended our first non-fiction show, and have set our focus to exclusively fiction content. We invested time producing and recording multiple years of content in 2024 - like the upcoming Don't Mind Sealskin Rock and future seasons of Dark Dice. We started the year wrapping up our first season of The White Vault Goshawk, and ended the year continuing the same story. Though we also released quite a few behind the scenes episodes, a new Liberty story, That Scares Me Too, and about a season worth of Dark Dice, we always look to the future.

Ultimately our takeaways were:

We are large enough that each of us far exceeds 60 hours a week, even with two employees (who are capped at 40 hours/week), but we are still too small to hire additional resources. We were extremely fortunate to have the assistance of a paid intern for part of the year. A mix of good and bad here; love to see the growth, love what we do, but sad to see how many hours we've logged at our computers every day.

Given the popularity of our shows, and with the unstable nature of social media, we are still searching for ways to see our audience grow. Traditional methods are becoming obsolete faster than we can adapt, and many new platforms aren't yet a suitable replacement. SEO optimization, Apple Podcast optimization, YouTube optimization, and reaching out for features on Spotify/Apple are pet projects that have yet to yield meaningful long term results. Additionally, none of us are trained in these things and have to learn as we go.

Consolidating freelance hires into full time jobs still remains one of our biggest achievements. It's better for them, and saves money/time (fewer total hours worked, less training / brand education). We've been lucky to build our little team!

Losing fewer Patreon supporters each month has greatly reduced the urgent need for new supporters. Annual Patreon subscriptions, offering benefits like artifacts, and focusing on core content is our current vision for a sustainable future.

We're reaching our 10 year podcasting anniversary this year. 60 Million downloads later, we're still learning.

We hope that you'll enjoy the stories we have planned this year, and we look forward to sharing them with you soon! Even the small surprises we've yet to announce 😉.

From the Fool & the Scholar,

Travis & Kaitlin (& Eezo)