We actually have a lot of expensives to cover, and we’d love to achieve our goal of paying our staff and contributors a fair wage.

The more members we have, the better we can pay our core operating expenses and reach our goal of paying all of our staff and contributors so they can afford to dedicate the time and energy to making the best content possible.

We love doing the podcast, newsletter, and website and want to give you all the best content possible, so let’s come together to do this!

Podcast Expenses:
Time: Producing one episode of the Seventh Row Podcast with two contributors takes 14-26 hours per episode. That’s 28-52 hours a month just for two free episodes. For our Abortion on Film season, it was closer to 56 hours per episode.
Breakdown per episode:
– 1.5-3 hours to watch the film (for each guest). For our Abortion on Film season, there are 2-5 films discussed per episode (~4-10 hrs)
– 1-2 hours researching, planning, and organizing the episode (for each guest)
– 1.5-2 hours recording the podcast (for each guest)
– 4-6 hours editing
– 2 hours publishing (uploading the podcast, writing the show notes)
– 2-4 hours promoting (creating images, writing emails, posting to social media, etc.)
We also spend a lot of time developing and researching episode and season concepts and shaping a series of episodes into a cohesive unit.
Monthly podcast fees: Publishing a podcast isn’t free. We have monthly hosting fees, editing software fees, and other incidental monthly costs, like our newsletter service for sending you updates about the show and the member newsletter. The tech for your premium podcast feed alone costs us $12/year/person.
Technology: We record our podcasts remotely and take our sound seriously. We have subscription fees for recording software and costs for our hardware (microphones, pop filters, etc.) so that we can produce episodes that don’t hurt your ears!
Access: Keeping on top of all the films (and streaming theatre) requires travel, tickets, and subscriptions to more services than we would ever recommend you subscribe to year-round.
More seasons: We’d love to be able to do more deep dive well-researched seasons like our Women at Cannes, Sundance 2023, Creative Nonfictions, and forthcoming Abortion on Film seasons. But it’s a huge time commitment, and we can’t keep doing it for free. (Unfortunately, we still have to pay rent and buy food and aren’t independently wealthy.) The more we can grow financially, the more time we can dedicate to researching and creating more content and the best content possible.
Keep growing: The podcast has grown greatly in ambition and scope (and quality, sound and otherwise) over 150+ episodes, and we’d love to keep pushing it forward. The more members we have, the more we can keep expanding what we do (including, e.g. helping our guests get access to recording equipment for good sound quality) and pay our staff so they can spend the time needed to make the best possible content.
Website: Seventh Row is more than just a podcast; we maintain an archive of our episodes with detailed show notes on the website. We pay monthly hosting fees and subscribe to several software services that allow us to make our episodes findable on Google, collect payments, deliver subscription benefits, and more.

Website expenses
Time: For every article we produce, it takes 9-15 hours to produce: 3-6 hours to watch the movie once or twice, 2-3 hours to write, 2-3 hours to edit, 1-2 hours to publish online, 1-2 hour to promote. EIC Alex Heeney also manages and designs the website herself, which takes an average of 4-6 hours/week.
Hosting: We pay significant monthly hosting fees to maintain a fast, clean, ad-free website. We also have several annual subscriptions for domain names to make finding our content more accessible.
Software: We have yearly subscriptions for software that helps us run the website, including our theme, our store, our tables for our context indexes, our SEO, our design, and more. We also pay for software for video conferencing and transcription for the website.
Accounting: As a small non-profit operating internationally, we spend about $1000/year just managing our finances and doing our taxes. It’s very complicated and time-consuming.

Operating expenses
Time: A lot of our time at Seventh Row is spent just staying informed about new releases and festivals, including attending festivals and watching films so that we can curate the best. We spend time thinking about how to best cover films, what films to cover, and planning the logistics of producing a podcast, hosting events, and publishing ebooks. We’d love to do more ebooks and festival coverage if we can afford to do so.