2025 Budget Breakdown: The Fool & Scholar - Industry Shifts (Patreon)

Hey Friends,It's that time of year again, and we're relieved to finally be sharing our budget for 2025, along with our commentary on the industry. You can find the 2024 and 2023 budget reviews by clicking the year link here.

Fiction podcasting is still an emerging industry with very few people able to make it a full-time career. We consider ourselves incredibly fortunate to be among them! The below numbers illustrate just how important YOU are, as Patreon support is the only possible reason we can make this work. You give us the means to create stories and entertain you, and we hope to keep at it for years to come!

As an indie team, we have goals and personal ethics we try to hold ourselves accountable to. 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 fiction podcast team on Patreon, we're 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 trials and errors, and our internal moral compasses. Despite our perceived successes, 2025 was a difficult year.

The Rise of Short Form Entertainment. With social media platforms imploding we invested significant time into Tiktok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts to fuel growth... Ultimately, while we were able to be successful on these platforms, they do not meaningfully contribute to our goal of being fiction podcasters. We grew from nothing on TikTok to 10k followers within a month, and we saw a path to reach 100k subscribers on TikTok and YouTube within a year, but this was all aligned with short form video content and led to minimal growth for our primary purpose (and joy), our podcasts. Since we are not looking to migrate to short form video content creation, these platforms were moot for our purposes. The videos we made were fun, but they were not what we wish to create full time. All in all, it was hard work, and we did not see fan growth because the platforms are built to be insular and actively dissuade 'viewers' from leaving the platform.

Japanese Podcasts. We invested a fair amount of effort into producing a Japanese language adaptation of Liberty: Tales from the Tower. We were able to produce and release a full season (partly in 2025, partly in 2026), which remained on the #1 Apple Podcast charts for Fiction in Japan during our release schedule. While we hoped to grow the fiction market in Japan, Spotify (who we planned to co-market with) and Japan's guidelines for publicly advertising horror content greatly hindered our aspirations. We still see our release as a success, but because we did not hit our other goals, regular releases will not be sustainable until the market grows, and Japan's podcasting industry adapts western advertising revenue models.

Books Expenses? In 2024 we also ran a Kickstarter for our first Dark Dice book, which raised over $70,000 USD. Patreon funds were not used for the Kickstarter, and the Kickstarter funds were used to finish book production, which are reflected in our budget for 2025. The book became available for purchase in 2026. So while this will seem like a strange addition for our budget in 2025, it will likely play an important role in our 2026 income.

Web Expenses. We migrated to Squarespace. There were a few reasons for this. We wanted more control over our websites, we wanted the ability to edit them ourselves with regular updates, and we consolidated all of our sites into a single super-site. This saved us a LOT of money on the web-builder we used for three of our websites, but also simplifies our branding. As a result our web-related expenses dropped sharply, but we have yet to increase our web sales.

Income

Streaming. Our biggest change by percentage (2024-2025) was an increase in Streaming Ad income (Spotify, Twitch, TikTok, YouTube), pushed by our work in making short-form content. However, even when combined, these streams are still less than 1% of our total income.

Advertising Income. This dropped in 2025 - matching an overall market trend for the folks we've spoken with in fiction podcasting. We deny quite a few potential sponsors on our shows (like fake medicines, companies with poor reputations, and betting apps) because we don't want to work with unethical companies. This directly harms our potential 'bottom line', but we're happy to say 'No' to maintain our personal ethics. We also don't offer true mid-roll ads on our shows, which further tanks our income in this space by an estimated 50%. Additionally, due to a billing practice switch (from N30 to N60 - meaning we get paid 30 days later) - we are missing a full month of income. Even adjusting for this, it doesn't make up the 43.09% drop from 2024.

Video Podcast Ad Sales. Much of our advertising revenue has begun to be supplemented by Spotify's "Video Podcast" revenue program, which began for us in October 2025. Because it's connected to our ad revenue, and we didn't see the first check until December, we did not separate it in this report. By January 2026, about half of our ad revenue is estimated to be from this program.

Patreon. Our supporters are the only reason we are a sustainable business. While our overall numbers on Patreon increased by 10.12% (year over year) we are still nervous about having the bulk of our income come from one source. With the end of The White Vault we were able to get some supporters to switch to Annual billing, which we hope will give them the opportunity to check out our other shows - including our upcoming story Don't Mind: Riku Cave. We also hope that they'll see the personal benefits to their subscription, as well as the value in supporting indie creators. Still, it's scary to know we have brought our largest story to an end, and we're doing everything we can to ensure that the next story is successful, entertaining, and fun.

We are extremely grateful to everyone who continues to support us. Thank you for seeing value in what we create! In the world of big company and podcast/radio empires, we're still here creating and fighting the good little fight! Thank you for letting us entertain you! Please know we are trying our best to make content you enjoy, and we want to create shows (and run a business) to be proud of.

Costs

*All numbers are shown as a percentage of our total budget (paid expenses) for 2025

19.58% - Book Expenses (paid for separately by our Kickstarter in 2024)

15.28% - Editor Team (Editors, Mixing & Mastering)

13.78% - Admin Team (Taxes, Transcriptions, Trademarks)

11.26% - “Us” (Travis & Kaitlin, combined)

8.63% - Actors (Director, Translators, Co-Producer, Casting Director, etc)

6.92% - Japanese Team

4.41% - Physical Goods for Patrons (Sealskin Rock Coin, White Vault Patch, and Guardian Artifacts)

3.40% - Travel Expenses (to Japan, London, and Vienna)

3.22% - Healthcare

2.57% - Office Costs (Shelving, Filters, a required fire-code compliant door)

2.12% - Advertising

1.88% - Award Submission Fees

1.61% - Studio Rental Fees

1.04% - Software, Hosting, & Licenses

0.93% - Tiktok Set Up (microphones, lights, etc)

0.59% - Music Fees & Freelancers

0.18% - Misc. Expenses (microphones, lights, etc)

0.17% - Artists (Visual - exclusively for the podcast covers & marketing)

"People" Expenses - The first thing you'll probably notice is that the majority of our expenses are human beings! 55.87% of our budget went to employ, collaborate with, and fairly compensate dozens of individuals. From our amazing voice actors around the world, to having Mike Lebeau record our live show in London (which we'll be uploading soon), to our transcriptionists for Dark Dice, people and artists are at the core of what we create. We are still run by the Fool & the Scholar, and we are still happily free of A.I. creation tools, happily paying people a real wage to help create our stories and bring adventures to life.

In January, 2025 we formally hired our former intern Finnur Nielsen as a full time employee! He's been a fantastic addition to our team, and we are insanely lucky to have not only worked with him during his internship, but to have been able to bring him onto the team after his graduation. He's helped us not only keep costs down (fewer freelancers) but he's standardized the quality of our content and allowed us to maintain our UNREAL release schedule (we had 1.5 releases per week for 6 months!). We also worked with a few other editors on smaller side-projects and bonus content, as well as a Japanese dialogue editor for Liberty.

In October we had to let go of our administrative assistant, due to a mix of things, but largely financial pressure. Notably, the line for "Us" is well under the rate of what we pay our collaborators. We each work over 50 hours a week and love creating audio fiction, but we do hope to increase our own personal payments in the next few years.

Travel Expenses. We flew to Japan to record Liberty, and also research Don't Mind Riku Cave. We flew to London for a live show, the payment for which offset that trip. We also presented a panel at an event in Vienna, but that was relatively inexpensive as we traveled by train.

Office Expenses. We go through tacks, pens, etc. Our primary expenses were some larger furniture: shelving, air filters, and a required fire-code compliant door for our studio. The door, which was required by the fire inspector, was the biggest expense.

Advertising Expenses. These were low this year as well, due to a lack of funds, and our time-investment in TikTok.

Art. This expense dropped significantly because we're not doing a lot of visual work, and also because Kaitlin spent a LOT of time doing it herself. She created every video you'll see of our podcasts on Spotify or YouTube (specifically Goshawk, Liberty, & Sealskin Rock).

Disclosure: We had talks with more TV folks looking to adapt our stories. We have no progress to share, as the TV world is slow-moving, and no deal is in the works to our knowledge. We spent very little time in talks in 2025.

Content

We created 23.2 hours of content this year with the above budget. That's more than any other year and does not include the huge amount of legwork we accomplished for Q1, 2026. This is the length of the original Jurassic Park (1993) film played nearly 11 times!

Dark Dice: The Long Road - 365 minutes (30% more than 2024)Don’t Mind: Sealskin Rock - 319 minutes (new show)The White Vault: Goshawk - 312 minutes (12 minutes less than 2024)Liberty: Tales from the Tower - 262 minutesLiberty JP (リバティ) - 107 minutesBehind the Scenes - 39 minutes170 Short-Form Videos - (not included in the time count, since they're not podcasts)

Big Picture

2025 was a year of nonstop production and productivity. We wrapped production on The White Vault and Dark Dice: Season 2, we created Don't Mind Sealskin Rock & the Japanese Liberty adaptation. We re-created an entire season of Liberty: Tales from the Tower (in English) from scratch, while juggling the creation of 170 TikTok/reels/shorts videos. We won big at the festivals and awards this year (visible on foolandscholar.com) - and we set ourselves up to tell new stories in 2026 and beyond!

Our ultimate takeaways:

Current Social Media is not an effective growth platform for us at this time. Short form entertainment is also not effective. SEO optimization hasn't made a huge impact, but Apple Podcast optimization, YouTube optimization, and Spotify (video podcasts) seems to have pushed some growth. We are constantly looking for new avenues of growth and exploring new platforms.

We are large enough to require more than 50 hours a week from us (each), even with an employee (capped at 40 hours/week). We are still too small to hire additional resources, but plan to release a maximum of one episode per two weeks to make our lives more sustainable.

Annual Patreon subscriptions, offering benefits like artifacts and focusing on core content, is our current vision for a sustainable future. This is how we were able to survive 2025. Patreon is also undergoing some changes, and we hope to spend more time interacting with supporters on the platform that means the most to us.

Even after our 10 year podcasting anniversary and over 60 million downloads, 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!

From the Fool & the Scholar,Travis & Kaitlin (& Eezo)