In exchange, we get more exposure
Hmm ... Castify doesn't have any other content (and thus, no subscribers) yet. They're literally brand new; the castify.co domain was registered last month. They don't have an audience yet to which to expose or promote LW.
For me, this whole exercise pattern-matches much closer to "a tech startup promoting itself in a known technophilic community" than to "an effort seriously designed to maximize accessibility and promotion of the content" or a crowdsourcing ripoff of the sort David Gerard is describing. (The Wikitravel case is pretty icky, but it doesn't resemble this case much at all.)
Not that an act can't be both a promotion and an accessibility effort; and it's pretty low-risk for LW, but on the other hand —
— how much do you usually charge for endorsements?
I see no reason to imagine that audiobooks would ever come to exist otherwise.
Ever? That's pretty strong. Even conditioned on the existence of audiobooks of HPMOR — which cannot be commercially done?
If you've been following the announced partnership between LessWrong and Castify, you'll know that we would like to start offering the promoted posts as a podcast.
So far, everything offered by Castify is authored by Eliezer Yudkowsky who gave permission to have his content used. Because promoted posts can be written by those who haven't explicitly given us permission, we're reluctant to offer them without first working through the licensing issues with the community.
What we propose is that all content on the site be subject to the Creative Commons license which would allow content posted to LessWrong to be used for commercial use as long as the work is given proper attribution.
LessWrong management and Castify want feedback from the community before moving forward. Thoughts?
Edit: EricHerboso was kind enough to start a poll in the comments here.