Please Donate to Support Our Free Podcast and Streaming

4/22 UPDATE: We have met our goal, covering the cost of podcast bandwidth for the year. Any additional donations will help us produce stories. Thank you to everyone who donated!

Ira Glass writes:

Hi everyone. If you listen to our podcast or stream shows here on the website, you are costing us a bit of money. So many people stream and download our program that it cost our home radio radio station WBEZ Chicago $170,000 dollars this past year for the Internet bandwidth to deliver the program. I know that number is insane. And that’s just bandwidth, not servers or personnel or any other costs.

If you donate just $5 or $10, it more than covers the cost of getting the show to you online. Plus we use these donations to fund especially expensive projects, like when we sent three reporters to Harper High School this Fall, on and off over five months. Expensive! Or when we sent reporters to Guatemala for that story last May about the guy who discovered that the man he thought was his father actually was one of the commanders of an army unit that killed most of his family and his entire village back in the 1980s.

Your donation does NOT cover the cost of having Fred Armisen come in and imitate me hosting our show. That cost like, nothing. When we needed to go through 1700 coincidence stories you sent in for the episode “No Coincidence, No Story” – also surprisingly cheap!

I used to go on the podcast and website several weeks each year and ask for donations. You might have noticed that we haven't done it since 2011, a year and a half ago. If this campaign goes well, it'll be just this week.

I hope you’ll consider donating. We’ll put the money to good use. And thanks.

— Ira