To 'Buy Me' the award for best podcast of the year

Comprami, the investigative podcast on OnlyFans created by Daniele Vaschi and Andrea Franceschi and produced by Il Sole 24 Ore, won the The Pod prize as best podcast of the year awarded at the Italian Podcast Awards. To Comprami also the award for best podcast in the business category. The prize was awarded on Sunday 7 July at the event, now in its third edition, which this year was held in Piacenza in the spaces of the Laboratorio Aperto - Ex Chiesa del Carmine and the courtyard of Palazzo Farnese. It was presented by the winner of the 2023 edition, the journalist of Il Post Stefano Nazzi, author of Indagini .

The idea of a podcast recounting the social and economic phenomenon related to the platform's boom was born almost by chance. "I was outside a club in Milan,' says Daniele Vaschi, voice of Comprami, 'when, at a certain point, the person I was talking to came out with a shocking sentence: "My girlfriend is on OnlyFans". I was still thinking about what to say to that when someone else, behind us, exclaimed: 'My girlfriend is also on OnlyFans'. It was at that precise moment that the light bulb went on.

The boom of the OnlyFans platform is closely related to the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2020, the number of users will rise from 13 to 82 million worldwide. Unprecedented numbers that turn the company into a real golden goose for the benefit of its main shareholder, Lev Radvinski who, years later, will become one of the richest men in the world. But not only that. Because, shortly afterwards, thousands of content creators all over the world, most of them boys and girls from next door completely unrelated to the porn industry, start earning staggering amounts of money selling sensitive content to their followers thanks to the platform. But why do so many people decide to pay a lot of money, even quite a lot of money, for pornographic content that is abundantly available online for free? And what do creators who, attracted by the prospect of easy money, use the platform without being fully aware of the risks involved in such overexposure, risk? These are some of the many questions the podcast, available on the Sole 24 Ore website and on all major streaming platforms, tried to answer. A book, published by Il Sole 24 Ore, available on all digital stores has been adapted from the podcast.

The Il Pod award, now in its third edition, has confirmed itself as a key event for the podcast industry, as demonstrated by the hundreds of entries for the prizes up for grabs. In addition to Comprami, the following stood out: Tales from Gaza, the podcast dedicated to stories from the Strip and the West Bank by reporter Valerio Nicolosi (news category; indie-information category and Amazon Music Audience Award) and Troubles - An Irish Story, the documentary podcast by Samuele Sciarrillo about the IRA's independence battles in the 1990s (best Indie Podcast 2024 and winner of the documentary and indie-narrative categories). The complete list of the award-winning podcasts at the Italian Podcast Awards is available on the website of The Pod and on social channels.

The Pod, Italian Podcast Awards is conceived by Maura Gancitano and Andrea Colamedici. The artistic direction is by Fabio Ragazzo. The award is realised thanks to the support of the Fondazione di Piacenza e Vigevano, the Municipality of Piacenza and the Fondazione Teatri di Piacenza, together with the whole Rete Cultura Piacenza, with official award partners Amazon Music and Iren Mercato and the partnership of Audible and Spotify.