Somewhere right now, in a recording studio that costs less to rent than a one-bedroom apartment, a person — statistically, a white woman between the ages of 28 and 45 — is reading into a microphone the details of how a Black person was murdered. She is describing the crime scene. She is narrating the victim’s last known movements. She is speculating about motive, about suspects, about the failures of the police investigation. She is doing this in a tone calibrated to sound both horrified and fascinated, because the audience she is speaking to wants to feel both emotions simultaneously: the moral satisfaction of caring about a victim and the entertainment value of consuming the details of how that victim died. When the episode is published, it will be downloaded tens of thousands of times. Each thousand downloads will generate between $18 and $80 in advertising revenue. The victim’s family will receive nothing. The victim’s community will receive nothing. The advertising revenue will flow to the podcast producer, the hosting platform, and the brands whose products are advertised between descriptions of how someone’s child was killed.
The true crime industry in the United States is worth approximately $1.4 billion, encompassing podcasts, documentaries, books, streaming series, and the merchandise that has grown around them like fungus on a fallen tree. It is one of the fastest-growing content categories in American media. There are over 4,500 active true crime podcasts. The genre accounts for approximately 8% of all podcast listening hours, making it the third most popular podcast category after news and comedy. And it has a race problem that is so fundamental, so structurally embedded, and so profitable that the industry has very little incentive to address it: Black people die in disproportionate numbers in true crime content, and white people profit in disproportionate numbers from telling those stories.
The CPM Economics of Black Death
To understand the economics of true crime podcasting, you must understand CPM — cost per mille, or the price an advertiser pays per thousand downloads. The average CPM for podcasts across all categories ranges from $18 to $50 for a standard mid-roll advertisement. True crime commands a premium within that range, with established shows earning $50 to $80 CPM, because the audience is large, engaged, and demographically desirable to advertisers: predominantly female, college-educated, and with disposable income. A true crime podcast with 100,000 downloads per episode — a mid-tier show by industry standards — generates between $5,000 and $8,000 per episode in advertising revenue. A top-tier show with 500,000 to 1 million downloads per episode generates $25,000 to $80,000 per episode. My Favorite Murder, one of the most successful true crime podcasts, reportedly earned more than $15 million in revenue in its peak years.
These numbers represent the monetization of violent death. Each dollar of that revenue was generated by a listener’s decision to spend thirty to sixty minutes consuming the details of how someone was killed. The economic transaction is: attention for entertainment, entertainment for advertising, advertising for revenue. The raw material of this transaction — the input that makes the entire machine function — is the death of a real person. And the distribution of that death across true crime content is not proportional to the distribution of violent crime in America. It is shaped by the same forces that shape all American media: the perceived value of different lives to different audiences.
Missing White Woman Syndrome
In 2004, the journalist Gwen Ifill coined the term “Missing White Woman Syndrome” to describe the media’s disproportionate coverage of missing and murdered white women relative to missing and murdered women of color. Carol Liebler’s research, published in Communication, Culture & Critique, documented the phenomenon with precision: cases involving young, attractive, middle-class white women receive exponentially more coverage than cases involving women of color, older women, or women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The names Natalee Holloway, Laci Peterson, and Gabby Petito became household words. The names of the tens of thousands of missing Black women and girls remain, in the vast majority of cases, unknown to anyone outside their immediate families.
The numbers are staggering. According to the National Crime Information Center, approximately 64,000 Black women and girls are missing in the United States at any given time. Black Americans account for roughly 13% of the population but approximately 33% of all missing persons cases. The Black and Missing Foundation, founded by Derrica and Natalie Wilson in 2008, has documented that Black missing persons cases receive significantly less media coverage, less law enforcement attention, and less public urgency than comparable cases involving white victims. A study by the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism found that missing white women received coverage that was, on average, four times greater in volume and significantly more prominent in placement than coverage of missing Black women.
The true crime industry inherits and amplifies this disparity. When a podcast chooses which cases to cover, the decision is driven by audience interest, which is itself shaped by media coverage, which is itself shaped by racial bias. Cases that received significant media attention produce more downloads because listeners already know the names and want the details. Cases that were ignored by mainstream media do not produce downloads because no one outside the victim’s community has heard of them. The result is a feedback loop: media ignores Black victims, true crime covers the cases media made famous, Black victims are doubly erased — first by the news media that did not cover them, then by the entertainment industry that cannot monetize their obscurity.
“No one is expendable. No one’s story should be forgotten. But every day, thousands of Black families search for their missing loved ones in a silence that the media has chosen not to break.”
— Derrica Wilson, Co-Founder, Black and Missing Foundation
The Creator Gap
The demographics of true crime podcast creation mirror the demographics of the broader media industry: overwhelmingly white. Edison Research data shows that approximately 75% of podcast creators across all categories are white, and in true crime specifically, the percentage is higher. The ten highest-grossing true crime podcasts are all hosted by white creators. This matters not because white creators are incapable of telling stories about Black victims with respect and accuracy, though the track record suggests significant room for improvement, but because the economic value generated by those stories flows to white creators, white production companies, and white-owned podcast networks, while the communities from which the stories are extracted receive nothing.
Black-led true crime podcasts exist, and several have built significant audiences. Crime Junkie’s coverage of cases involving Black victims has drawn attention to overlooked stories. Black Girl Gone, hosted by Amara, focuses specifically on missing and murdered Black women and girls. Truth and Justice has investigated wrongful convictions that disproportionately affect Black defendants. But these shows operate at a fraction of the audience scale and advertising revenue of the dominant white-hosted shows, because the podcast advertising ecosystem, like the broader advertising ecosystem, systematically undervalues Black-created content and Black audiences.
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Take the Real World IQ Test →Entertainment vs. Journalism
The critical distinction that the true crime industry has deliberately blurred is the distinction between journalism and entertainment. Investigative journalism about criminal cases serves a public interest: it holds law enforcement accountable, it surfaces evidence that may have been overlooked, it provides information to communities about threats to their safety, and it gives voice to victims and their families. Entertainment true crime serves a consumer interest: it provides an emotional experience — suspense, horror, fascination, moral superiority — that audiences find pleasurable and that advertisers find profitable. These are fundamentally different activities, and conflating them allows entertainment content to borrow the moral credibility of journalism without accepting any of its obligations.
Journalism has standards: verification, attribution, right of reply, sensitivity toward victims and their families, consideration of the public interest, editorial oversight. Entertainment true crime has none of these standards, or rather, it has them to the extent that individual creators choose to adopt them, which is to say: inconsistently, optionally, and with no enforcement mechanism. A true crime podcast can broadcast the details of a murder without contacting the victim’s family, without verifying the accuracy of its account, without considering the impact of its content on the victim’s community, and without any accountability for errors, omissions, or harm. The absence of standards is not a failure of the industry. It is its competitive advantage. Standards slow production, increase costs, and constrain the storytelling choices that maximize engagement. The market rewards their absence.
What the Families Say
The voices most absent from the true crime industry are the voices of the people most affected by it: the families of victims. When a true crime podcast covers a case involving a Black victim, the family’s experience typically follows a pattern. First, they learn about the podcast from a friend or social media, often without having been contacted by the creator. Second, they listen and discover that details of their loved one’s death are being narrated by a stranger for the entertainment of other strangers, often with inaccuracies, sometimes with graphic descriptions that retraumatize them, always without their consent. Third, they discover that the podcast is generating revenue from the story of their loss, and that they have no legal mechanism to prevent this, because the details of criminal cases are public record and the First Amendment protects their use.
The legal framework is clear: there is no law that prevents a podcast from monetizing the details of a murder. There is no law that requires revenue sharing with the victim’s family. There is no law that mandates notification of the family before a case is covered. There is no law that requires accuracy. The entire industry operates in a legal vacuum that allows the unlimited extraction of commercial value from human tragedy with zero obligation to the people most affected. This is, structurally, the same legal vacuum that allowed the exploitation of Black labor for centuries: the absence of legal protection combined with the presence of economic incentive.
What Should Change
The reform agenda for the true crime industry is straightforward, and the industry will resist every element of it because each element reduces the profit margin that exploitation makes possible. First: victim family notification and consent protocols. Any podcast or media production that covers a criminal case should be required to notify the victim’s family before publication and to honor reasonable requests regarding the presentation of sensitive details. This is not a legal mandate in most jurisdictions. It should be an industry standard, enforced by podcast platforms and advertising networks that have the power to delist or de-monetize shows that violate it.
Second: revenue sharing. If a podcast generates advertising revenue from the story of a victim’s death, a meaningful percentage of that revenue should be directed to the victim’s family or to a fund supporting victims’ families. The entertainment industry has a long history of revenue-sharing arrangements — musicians receive royalties, actors receive residuals, authors receive advances — and the principle that the person whose story generates the revenue should share in the revenue is well-established. The true crime industry’s exemption from this principle is not a natural condition. It is a choice made by an industry that prefers to keep the money.
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Take the REL-IQ Test →Third: investment in Black-led true crime media. The Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and iHeart platforms that dominate podcast distribution have the resources and the incentive — if they chose to exercise it — to fund Black-led true crime podcasts that cover the cases mainstream true crime ignores: the missing Black women and girls, the unsolved homicides in Black communities, the wrongful convictions, the cases that were never investigated because the victim was Black and the police department did not care. These platforms have made significant investments in true crime content because it drives engagement and subscriptions. Directing a portion of that investment toward Black-led content would not require charity. It would require the recognition that the stories being ignored represent an untapped audience and an underserved market.
Fourth: journalism standards for the genre. Podcast platforms should develop and enforce minimum standards for true crime content: verification requirements, source attribution, family notification, accuracy corrections, and sensitivity guidelines for the depiction of violence. These standards exist in every other form of media that covers criminal cases. Their absence from podcasting is an artifact of the medium’s youth and the speed of its growth, not a principled commitment to creative freedom. An industry that generates $1.4 billion in annual revenue from the details of real people’s deaths has an obligation to adopt the basic ethical standards that govern every other form of media that covers real people’s deaths.
The true crime industry is not going to reform itself. It is too profitable as currently structured, and the people who profit from it have no incentive to change. Reform will come from the same place it always comes from: from the people who bear the cost of the current system — the families of victims, the communities that are stigmatized, the Black creators who are locked out of the revenue stream — organizing to demand something better. It will come from listeners who choose to support shows that meet ethical standards and abandon shows that do not. It will come from advertisers who recognize that their brands are attached to content that monetizes human suffering without consent. And it will come, eventually, from the simple recognition that a dead person is not content. A murder is not a narrative arc. A victim is not a character in someone else’s portfolio. The industry has forgotten this. The families never have.