Hi. What is the current best practice for monetization? All the posts I’m seeing about monetization are several years old, and things have changed. I am working through glow.fm for the membership/fee part, but I am hosting the content on my own host. Currently my feed appears to be available to everyone, not just people who have signed up. How do I accomplish this using Podlove Podcast Publisher?
I am typing myself a reply to see if email notifications are coming to me. I sure wish someone would respond to my question even if you want to tell me to take my capitalist ways and pound sand or something. I’m just trying to figure out how to make it all work.
There is no built-in solution for paywalled feeds.
There’s a manual approach that a few people use that may be acceptable if you don’t have too many subscribers:
- Use any solution to handle membership/subscription management
- For every membership, create a feed in Podlove Publisher with a “secret” slug that you then send to the member so they can subscribe to the feed in their favorite podcast app.
- When a membership ends, delete the feed in Podlove Publisher
Of course if you know some programming this can also be automated. One of the reason there is no built-in solution is that every membership solution would need its own programming adapter and no one-size-fits-all solution is possible.
Eric, thank you so much! I guess I need to know how to create the feed with the secret slug. I don’t recall seeing the word “secret” in the dashboard, but I see things like “private” and “discoverable.”
Glow (my membership management provider) has said that If I can give them a secret/private/undiscoverable feed, they then do all the distribution and subscription management for me using unique cloned feeds for each subscriber - they turn off subscribers who have quit subscribing, etc.
So where do I go in my Podlove Publisher dashboard to create a “secret” slug?
I’m sorry I am such a newbie. Thank you for your indulgence.
When I say “secret” then I mean “long-cryptic-and-not-guessable”, not technically unreachable 
Since Glow can manage that distribution for you, you only need to create one feed with a long, cryptic slug (or generate one), then check the two checkboxes to make the feed undiscoverabe and not submittable to directories.