Hey honeys and hustlers,

The host of the Cutting Room Floor Podcast advertised a job with a $55,000 annual salary in a TikTok video that she later had to rescind. This job would’ve been hybrid, based in NYC, where a $55K/year full-time role might not go very far. There was a lot of pushback on this video, but to be honest, this wasn’t truly what started it all. This started when she decided to put a podcast behind a paywall.

When Recho Omondi, the fashion designer behind The Cutting Room Floor podcast, moved her show behind a Patreon paywall, she ignited a conversation that goes far beyond one job posting. At the heart of this discussion is a fundamental tension in the creator economy: how do you build a sustainable business while maintaining the accessibility that helped you build an audience in the first place?

P.S. Stay until the end for some special announcements (and free opportunities)!

Let's start with what often gets lost in these conversations: offering a $55K salary as an indie creator is remarkable. Most independent podcast producers can't offer formal employment at all. They're juggling production, marketing, booking, editing, and business operations themselves—often while maintaining other income streams just to keep the lights on. Recho Omondi has built something rare: a show that's landed interviews with Law Roach, Cynthia Erivo, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Yasiin Bey (Mos Def). These are industry titans who typically command significant appearance fees or only appear on established media platforms. The fact that an indie creator secured this level of access speaks to the value and credibility of her work.

Her Patreon, at $6/month, is actually quite reasonable. It's less than most streaming services, and subscribers get full episode access plus the satisfaction of directly supporting a creator they love. For Recho Omondi, this paywall represents the difference between keeping the podcast as an expensive passion project versus building a sustainable media business that can employ others.

But here's where it gets complicated: 99% of podcasts are free. This isn't just a statistic—it's the foundational expectation of the medium. Podcasting emerged as an open, accessible format. RSS feeds were designed to distribute content freely. The entire ecosystem—from Apple Podcasts to Spotify to Pocket Casts—was built on the assumption that podcasts would be free at the point of consumption, supported by ads, sponsorships, business income as a result of the platform's/podcast’s notoriety, or simply creator passion.

When creators put content behind a paywall, they're swimming against a powerful current of audience expectation. Most successful podcast Patreons follow a specific formula:

This model works because it asks fans to pay for more, not for the core experience itself. It's the difference between asking someone to buy a ticket to your concert versus asking them to pay just to hear you play music at all.

Recho does leave clips on social media, YouTube, and the first three seasons are free on Spotify—a smart compromise that maintains some visibility. But in an attention economy where podcasts compete with countless free options, every barrier to entry matters. Someone who might have become a devoted fan after binging five free episodes might never make it past the paywall to discover what they're missing. But the paywall has been lucrative enough to allow her to become sustainable AND to offer employment to someone else, which brings us to the job posted that sparked backlash.

Hybrid work in NYC for $55K/year with an extensive scope became a lightning rod for broader frustrations about creator economy labor practices. I’ve seen job postings from ESTABLISHED companies offering a salary in the $45k-$85K/year range with outrageous scopes of work, but no one seems to give them the same energy. So let’s add a little more context:

The response she received might say more about broader economic anxiety and the unsustainable expectations placed on indie creators than it does about this specific opportunity. We want creators to pay fair wages and industry-standard rates, but we also want their content to be free. We want them to compete with established media companies on benefits and salaries, but we resist the business models that would make that possible.

The Cutting Room Floor controversy ultimately asks a question relevant to all creative workers: Who should bear the cost of creation? Should it be advertisers and brands, potentially shaping content to meet their needs? Should it be wealthy patrons and institutions, potentially influencing editorial direction? Should it be dedicated fans, creating a two-tiered system of access? Or should it be the creators themselves, subsidizing their work through other income sources like freelance work until (if ever) it becomes sustainable?

There's no perfect answer. Every model involves trade-offs between sustainability, accessibility, creative freedom, and growth. What's clear is that the "everything should be free" expectation of early internet culture has collided with the reality that creating quality content—especially at the level she has achieved—requires significant resources.

The job posting might have been imperfect. The paywall strategy might not be optimal for maximizing growth. But the underlying effort—to build a sustainable creative business that can support both the founder and employees—deserves more nuanced consideration than simple internet punk outrage.

As audiences and communities, we need to reckon with what we're actually willing to support. As creators, we need to be transparent about the economics of our work and innovative about finding models that balance sustainability with accessibility. And as an industry, we need to move beyond the false binary of "free content good, paid content bad" toward deeper discussions about how to build a creator economy that actually works for creators.

Because at the end of the day, if we want diverse, independent voices creating ambitious work outside of traditional media or soul-sucking corporate jobs, we need to support business models that make that possible—even when they challenge our expectations about how content should be distributed and consumed.

// Mychal Threets is the new host of Reading Rainbow. In February 2024, Mychal made a video announcing that he would be leaving his long-term role at a public library to focus on his mental health. As I stated in our staff picks article, the bad part of the internet found him and engaged in a gross form of cyberbullying that prompted this decision. I’m so glad he’s back and better in the best way possible. Reading Rainbow is returning after a 20-year break, and we need all the emphasis on literacy that we can get right now.

// Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is stepping aside. In his place will be two co-CEOs. On the same morning of the announcement, Durham-based Sylvan Esso announced they would be removing their music from the platform amid some ethical decisions that Daniel Ek made that many musicians disagree with, even more than they dislike the abysmal pay structure. I’m not sure what he hopes to obtain by abdicating his public-facing role as co-founding CEO, but here’s hoping that this is a wake-up call for the companies to support artists more equitably.

// Netflix is jumping into more in-person experiences. Theatres, their Tudum live event, and who knows what’s next. Drive-in movies?! Netflix is a huge company, but this still seems like the latest news article signaling pure chaos (or lack of focus) from this company. Getting into live sporting events, trying to acquire podcasters and late-night TV hosts, and now getting into the movie theatre game. In-person experiences are likely on the rise as people become increasingly fatigued by increasing streaming service pricing and consolidation. However, can Netflix afford to truly be this all over the place, even with its scale? They’ve barely mastered live-streaming sports events, but they’ve moved on to at least 3 other things, and these are just the things we know about. Is this sustainable? Your guess is as good as mine, friends.

// The Root is now under Black leadership. It’s always weird when you find out Black-led media is not actually Black-owned media. I’m happy for this beacon of light today, given the attempts at censorship of news and media outlets. I’m excited to see how the new owner will modernize and stabilize the platform.

// KevOnStage original media now available on FuseTV. KevOnStage previously made a video announcing that he quietly quit his app, KevOnStage Studios, because it was too expensive to maintain relative to the number of paying subscribers. In a new deal, all of those videos and films are now available on FuseTV. It’s awesome that his media, often featuring other comedians, has found a new home and hopefully compensated him for the effort and time put into the app. His new book is about failing his way to success, and my goodness, this is a prime example of that.

Keep going. I’m rooting for you.