I run a small podcast. Over the past year I've watched as my traffic has slowly shifted from Apple being completely dominant (> 90% of traffic), to it being a 7

I run a small podcast. Over the past year I've watched as my traffic has slowly shifted from Apple being completely dominant (> 90% of traffic), to it being a 70/30 split between Spotify and Apple. My honest take on the situation is that Apple has let its podcast ecosystem languish, and Spotify is moving in to build the product users actually want. Here's just a handful of things Apple has failed to address to podcast publishers: - Apple Podcast search is terrible. At best, it looks at some of the notes / title metadata and does a global popularity ranking, with no regard for the actual spoken content of the podcast. This drives down discoverability and ultimately winds up creating a ton of "tentpole" hits but no long-tail. - Review / listener / ranking fraud is rampant. You can look on fiverr and find all sorts of "jobs" for driving up downloads, etc, and Apple doesn't do a great job of policing this behavior. Same for managing brigading / clusters of bad reviews that all mysteriously appear at the same time from new users. - Very little community support for growth. No social features. People wind up going elsewhere (twitter / yotube / etc) for discoverability and audience building. - No monetization strategy for publishers. - No recommendation outside of "top hits" in categories or featured podcasts. - No transparency into what it takes to get to "top hits" or featured podcasts. - Second-rate sync'ing between web, laptop, and mobile players for listeners - No way to get any Android users into the ecosystem (yes yes, I know, but there are 4 billion Android users. Either be a content platform or don't, but don't pretend like 2/3rds of the world doesn't exist). Overall if you think about how long Apple has "owned" podcasts (> 11 years) vs something like YouTube, you can see where they dropped the ball. YouTube isn't perfect but it has everything I listed above, and because of that it's ultimately the big draw for creators. This is so much so, that Descript has a whole toolchain about just getting podcasts into audiograms to get onto youtube to ... get people to go to Apple and find their podcast. Overall I don't love what Spotify is doing, especially since it's so nakedly a transparent land grab. However I can't blame them for building something people want when the dominant player has done nothing for a decade. And candidly, Apple is primarily a hardware company, secondarily a software company, and is a tertiary mainstream content provider. For indie podcasters, we are at best ... quaternary? I should not be surprised Apple doesn't care about my little podcast when it can make money other ways. Lastly, just to be transparent about what I see in my own metrics, all other podcast providers (Google, Castbox, etc) are a super long tail and far from Spotify or Apple. They're just nowhere close.