Bill O’Reilly has a new Podcast, but you have to pay to listen to it.

AS you may have heard Bill O’Reilly, former FOX News anchor, recently was fired from FOX News and has since gone to podcasting.

But the interesting thing about this show is that in order to get access to listen to it you have to have a paid membership.

This came as no surprise to me because O’Rielly isn’t the first person who has moved from a very successful show on TV or radio and moved to a paywall podcast.

Comedian radio host Anthony Cumia, from Opie and Anthony, did something like this years ago after he was fired from Sirius XM for racist comments on Twitter for being allegedly assaulted by an African-American female.

Both Cumia and O’Rielly have very similar backgrounds in how they got to where they are, they both got fired for something controversial, moved to doing their own audio program, all requiring a paid subscription.

A lot of people are saying that O’Rielly putting up a paywall is drastically cutting his audience potential. But you know what it is allowing? No ads, because his fans are paying him directly, and with a guy who had a show with millions of viewers watching regularly, even just getting 10% of those listeners to pay him $5 a month equates to millions a year.

Now, this will only work for people like Bill O’Rielly and Anthony Cumia because they had a very large established fan base. For most of us, having a paywall will absolutely lessen the amount of potential listeners we can have.

Sources/Links

• Bill O’Reilly Is Forced Out at Fox News - New York Times
• Bill O’Reilly Sets Podcast Return For Monday - Deadline
• The Anthony Cumia Show is Now The Anthony Cumia Network: First New Show Announced - The Interrobang