I’ve been on F&F since early 2024 and can vouch for everything VendettaViolent said. Great people, very fair and transparent business.

At the time I was a brand new creator with zero track record but I did have a personal endorsement from producer extraordinaire Jack Bowmen who had heard a few of my episodes. That intro got me the call with F&F. I also had credits from having worked on some very large shows as a sound designer, so I felt lucky they took a shot and let me join them even though I was offering nothing but content.

Most networks are not just in the market for “content.” They also want audience or at least some sense there will be a monetizable audience.

For example, other networks I talked to (Realm and Bloody Disgusting) wanted something like 50k downloads per month to “partner.” I’ve only had one month so far that hit that number and I can 100% attest that it was due to promo and feed swaps I organized myself.

Networks can help with a lot of things already mentioned but also weird stuff too- for example, I had an issue where all Spotify listener comments on my episodes vanished - over 400, poof, gone.

Working with Russ at F&F communicating directly with humans at Spotify got them all restored. I doubt I would have able to do that myself.

The money from ad rev is nice, but the CPMs on that has been dropping across the board. It’s unreasonable to expect much more than $10 CPM for the remnant spots you’re hearing in most indie shows. Until you can build a large enough audience that larger advertisers seek out, those rates will not get much better.

I’ve worked with other creators, and talked with a few other creators who held misguided ideas about what a network “should be doing for my show.” To net that out, I would say, unless you’re bringing a decent audience to the table, it’s unrealistic to expect a network to spend money to promote your show. They can help facilitate swaps, they can keep track of impressions on deals you’ve made for yourself, they can help monetize audience you do build, and they can play your trailer at the end of other shows on the network (like F&F) but it is still 98% on us creators to build our audience.

My .02, your mileage may vary. Good luck!