Also in some countries you got public radio stations producing podcasts (even podcast first formats not played on radio) - while that might Fall under subscription, while not being a subscription on anything specific.

(I use Sponsorblock on YouTube too since there are platform ads and then sponsors baked into the videos.)

also am not familiar but I think that a lemmy community can be created with podcasts where people can share their podcasts or a mastodon/pixelfed community too.

federated options exists but the people there just don't exist or try to use it in this way.

Maybe a federated instance about podcasting (and a domain name related to it) can be established to become a de-facto (maybe non profit/donation running service) too.

I think that it could scale really a lot on OVH dedicated servers or Hetzner auction boxes and run on quite a substantially few amount of dollars for the infra that the google/youtube monopolistic power can go away.

So even if you completely lost the top 5% or even 20% of incomes, what remains is plenty valuable to many companies.

I wish they'd at least use something other than ChatGPT. Its "voice" is absolutely grating.