8 ms·

Seems like the podcasting ecosystem is a bit more resistant to walled gardens than most spaces. I wonder why? Is it just because Spotify's attempt was so pathe

Seems like the podcasting ecosystem is a bit more resistant to walled gardens than most spaces. I wonder why? Is it just because Spotify's attempt was so pathetic? Or some trait of the community? Maybe a little of both? Personally I'm very glad that podcasting has resisted Spotify's takeover attempt so far. But I'm curious if we can take lessons from this community and apply it to other communities dominated by monopolies and walled gardens, like the App Store on iOS or ISPs.

metalliqaz 4y ago
rss Same reason plain web browsers beat AOL and Compuserv
- emodendroket 4y ago
  Then why did Twitter displace RSS readers for the Web?
  - metalliqaz 4y ago
    Twitter is a different thing.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      A smart watch is a different thing from a quartz wrist watch but it would be foolish to act like the decline of the latter has nothing to do with the former.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        I feel like I stopped seeing quartz wrist watches before smart watches were a thing, because mobile phones were always available to tell time. At least from my cohort. Smartwatches (namely Apple Watch) then became a thing because it provided more than time, such as vibrating alerts, fitness tracking, etc.
        CamperBob2 4y ago
        Not only that, but the high end of the old-school watch industry has never been healthier than it is now. ( https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/luxury-watches-for-men-market/ https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/luxury-watches-for-men-... ) The conventional wisdom that smartwatches are killing traditional watches is just like the conventional wisdom that Starbucks and other corporate brands push out local coffeehouses: dead wrong. Instead, the new players validate the market and provide an anchor point for luxury goods.
        emodendroket 4y ago
        There's a reason I said "quartz watches" and the mid-range absolutely did get messed up by smart watches, so the only thing "dead wrong" is your reading of my post.
        CamperBob2 4y ago
        Mea culpa, looks like you win the Internet.
        emodendroket 4y ago
        Lots of younger people never had a watch in the first place, sure, but smart watches appealed to people who would have otherwise bought from, say, Fossil.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      But Twitter/HN/etc. are all discovery mechanisms. The fact is that I can think that a lot of interesting content is going to cross my screen sooner or later without my actively prospecting for it--and I'm mostly not wrong.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    Twitter replaced the 'web' portion - the publishing of content part that people used RSS to subscribe to.
  - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    Google Reader was shut down and lots of tech people were blinded by follower count self importance and early adopter bluechecks to claim Twitter was “just fine” to use instead of RSS.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    my recollection was that twitter was doing fine when Google Reader was still running, although I'm sure it did benefit some from Google reader going away. the value proposition for Twitter at this point was different than it is now I believe, but perhaps I am just on the wrong parts of Twitter. the value proposition for twitter at that time (at least whenever I saw something I thought was valuable) was that it was a TLDR provided by experts regarding some thing. RSS didn't have a length limitation, twitter's length limitation forced experts to write a quick thing as to why you would want to go read anything they pointed to. When less technical people came on it became a bunch of oh you'll love this, low information tweets, but in the past in my experience they were high information tweets considering the length. So the value of forcing tweeters to provide quality summaries of content for their audience.
gibolt 4y ago
I'd guess that the low upfront cost and barrier to entry contributes. Audio recording and editing sufficient for a podcast is very low lift for any passionate hosts. If one disappears off your preferred platform, 100 more are waiting to fill the void.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Another way to put it is that there are probably very few destination podcasts for a significant number of users. While there are some podcasts that I listen to most episodes of, if one were to go to Spotify (which I don't subscribe to) as an exclusive, I'd shrug and move on.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Also the fact that Apple pretty much bought the entire space by providing free infrastructure and discovery but didn't do anything with it and so it flourished.
emodendroket 4y ago
The barrier is very low. If I have to go to Spotify to get your podcast, unless I’m a huge fan of you specifically, there are hundreds of others on the same topic. I suspect many people open their podcast app and just add some popular ones, or search for topics they’re interested in, and go from there.
ghaff 4y ago
>I wonder why? Some guesses. People didn't historically pay for talk radio. (OK, Serius in part. But that was always a pretty narrow slice.) A lot of podcast content is pretty niche and not especially mainstream. Not sure how easy to monetize outside of advertising/sponsorships. It started out very grass roots.
user3939382 4y ago
Some anecdatum: I stopped listening to Rogan's full podcasts when he moved to Spotify because I'm sometimes interested to listen but not enough to download a new app, sign up for a new account, etc. Bootleg (and official, I think?) accounts post his clips which I watch sometimes, I notice they have 100s of thousands or millions of views. I assume Spotify was expecting to capture all those views. If Rogan clips disappeared from YouTube I just wouldn't watch it.
- Clubber 4y ago
  I was the same way but I ended up signing up to watch it. It was pretty painless. I'm glad Rogan is on Spotify because YouTube is getting pretty heavy handed with their strikes. They need some competition. I'm surprised Spotify hasn't ventured into video hosting more.
  - bnjms 4y ago
    This point is buried but really good. YouTube is a bit at fault here. Ideally we’d all keep using rss, but it’s hard to fault podcasters for going where monetization is possible. Respect to Sam Harris for going fully listener supported.
    - user3939382 4y ago
      Some of the political channels I watch feature the hosts using (very obvious to a human) coded language to refer to COVID, Hitler, Nazis, Hunter Biden, etc. because they don't want to get targeted. It's pretty dystopian and creepy.
      - aliswe 4y ago
        The Quartering? The only channel heard I code names for. And God is he sloppy! FD, I dont watch him anymore as he is becoming increasingly less interesting.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    I'm surprised as well, it's clear that music will always be a loss leader for them. Why not do more in video, which is at least a proven monetization channel (YT, Tiktok, IG Live). MTV-style programming is due a comeback.
seanalltogether 4y ago
My guess is because both the production side and the distribution side cost so little money, it's hard for anyone to monopolize it. Once someone really solves the advertising model for podcasters, the creators will flock to it naturally like how so many people only distribute through youtube now.
- criddell 4y ago
  > Once someone really solves the advertising model for podcasters Do you think solving the problem includes making it difficult to skip the ads?
faeriechangling 4y ago
As a user, personally it's because I have relatively little loyalty to podcasts, and because these platform are generally a value negative not a value add to the end user. Spotify's podcast UI is horrendous, I don't know how it's possible for Spotify to reverse my sort order and lose my place in where I was in a podcast series so many times. Something happening like a podcast going exclusively on Spotify is likely to make me just stop listening to it even if I'm actively a Spotify premium subscriber because Spotify's UI is actually that bad and having to use one specific service instead of any to listen to a podcast is terrible user experience. Spotify's PAID experience is a negative. Another huge thing is that podcasts being freemium is the norm, for a lot of other content types the inconvenience of logging into some portal isn't as noticeable since you had to do that to pay the content producer anyways, but for podcasts you can't help but notice how you're being made to jump through hoops and for what? I'm not sure there's a terrible amount of value here to extract because I think we really underestimate how much value things like the App Store really provide in terms of security or payments and customer service and all that. I don't know, call me nuts, but I think Spotify would have better invested their money into making their podcasts experience good instead of signing exclusivity deals, I would happily use Spotify if it was simply the best podcast player. I can't help but be happy that Spotify's bet is doomed to fail.
- soiler 4y ago
  Another thing I hated about podcasts when I used spotify: they still have ads. I find it pretty much intolerable to get ads on a paid service. But podcasts weren't near the top of the list of reasons I cut ties with spotify anyway. (Oh wait, actually their endorsement of Joe Rogan was very close to the top.)
  - moneywoes 4y ago
    Spotify injects ads into the podcast?
    - FinnKuhn 4y ago
      no, the podcasts (or to be precise their distribution software) does. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Subscriptions/Ads-on-podcasts-despite-premium/td-p/4753448 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Subscriptions/Ads-on-podcas...
makeitdouble 4y ago
I think it comes down to having no obvious pain point. There’s a comment about Spain podcasts going down that route because licensing music was a pain. Outside of Spain, that wouldn’t apply. For any of the podcats I listen to, the more complex part could be membership and advertisement sourcing, but there’s already strong players filling those gaps. If there’s no pain point to solve by centralization, people won’t care for walled gardens.
e40 4y ago
I paid for Spotify but I won't listen to podcasts in their app. I use Pocket Casts, which I've loved for years.
- stavros 4y ago
  Spotify is crap for listening to Podcasts. I can never figure out what I've listened to and what I haven't. Pocket Casts is amazing, but now that Every Little Thing is canceled, I don't know if it matters anyway, as that was the only podcast I listened to.
- malermeister 4y ago
  Ugh I used to love Pocket Cast, even sprung for the paid app. Then they changed their monetization model to a subscription and left their previous customers with... nothing. Screw them.
  - tapland 4y ago
    Previous customers got “Pocket Casts Plus, Lifetime membership” and a “thanks for your support”. If they wouldn’t have I would have dropped it when they changed monetisation models. You might want to log in to your account again since you have the premium for free.
    - fencepost 4y ago
      Similar, I got a lifetime subscription. Then again, I think I also purchased all 4 options (Android, the never very good Windows Phone, the web version of the was a separate charge for that and finally the iOS version). I still find it very handy to be able to jump between Android and iOS pretty seamlessly.
    - malermeister 4y ago
      I don't remember ever making an account, I just bought it on Google Play.
  - JanSt 4y ago
    I‘m using Pocket Casts and never have paid anything edit: as far as I remember
misterprime 4y ago
I'd like to thank Adam Curry and the Podcasting 2.0 team for helping ensure that it stays that way. https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/
- knewter 4y ago
  ITM!
pathartl 4y ago
I think it's a trait in the community. I remember the days sitting in an IRC channel listening to some bootleg live podcast/radio show broastcast over Icecast. It was sorta like pirate radio for a bit. Then podcasts started to show up more and more (in big part due to the iPod) and having a big publishing network wasn't really a thing. Sure, people could use iTunes, but a ton of us were just dropping MP3's from someone's site onto whatever MP3 player we had at the time.
rv3392 4y ago
I think Spotify's podcast UI is so awkward and terrible it has held back their growth. I started listening to podcasts 3 years ago because how easy Spotify had suddenly made getting into them. But, over those 3 years I've gotten so fed-up with Spotify's issues (which they refuse to fix) that I've recently moved to Pocket Casts (it took so long because of their walled-garden). I think the main differentiator for Spotify - making podcasts easy to start listening to with a music-and-podcast-app-in-one - is in fact its largest problem. The UI feels like it was designed for music with podcasts clunkily added as an afterthought. When you add the fact that Spotify's UI is already bloated, even for music, it basically becomes unusable. And then the features are different between web/desktop and mobile - there's literally no way to get a list of new episodes on desktop.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  What kind of issues do you have with it? In my listening i'm split between spotify and podcast addict and honestly haven't ever had much trouble with it's UI.
theluketaylor 4y ago
Podcasting's resistance to takeover is going to be hard to replicate. Podcasts are just mp3 files in an rss feed. Super established technology that anyone can publish. MP3 patents have expired and were basically unenforceable before that. RSS is completely open. Other ecosystems that have grown up in the social media era have higher barriers to entry and network effects to overcome. Apple Podcasts is the behemoth of podcasting. All the other podcast clients combined don't come close to Apple's player marketshare. Spotify certainly has a lot of users, but not all of them listen to podcasts. Most shows have been unwilling to dump their biggest audience by going to spotify exclusive, so the shows remain just rss+mp3. Apple also manages the only index of podcasts of any great significance and so far has been content to be extremely hand-off with it. They are happy to let anyone register a podcast in the itunes index and have only removed a few items for objectionable content. With Apple as a largely absentee landlord of the podcast space and the extremly basic nature of the underlying technology shows have developed many different monetization techniques. Selling user behaviour/tracking is far, far harder in the podcast space since Apple doesn't share and controls the biggest client. Shows have turned to largely untargeted* ads, patreon, touring, merchandise, and various combination thereof. For many creators Spotify forcing them to use a specific form of monetization as part of being exclusive isn't as attractive as owning their own destiny. *podcast hosting networks can get a source IP so you'll sometimes get a broad location targeted ad inserted dynamically into the mp3 as you download it, but the level of tracking is orders of magnatude lower than what's possible in a browser. For example, shows have almost no ability to know if you actually listened to a episode, just that you downloaded it. So far Apple has been happy to largely leave the podcast world alone. They recently added some monetization options for show creators, but that's above and beyond their hand-off management of the biggest player and index. Apple is a far, far bigger threat to the podcast world than Spotify ever was. The ecosystem as it currently exists depends on Apple continuing to the mainly nothing they have been. If Apple gets tempted to start selling even aggregate user behaviour from apple podcasts there will be very little to stop them.

metalliqaz 4y ago

rss Same reason plain web browsers beat AOL and Compuserv

emodendroket 4y ago
Then why did Twitter displace RSS readers for the Web?
- metalliqaz 4y ago
  Twitter is a different thing.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    A smart watch is a different thing from a quartz wrist watch but it would be foolish to act like the decline of the latter has nothing to do with the former.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      I feel like I stopped seeing quartz wrist watches before smart watches were a thing, because mobile phones were always available to tell time. At least from my cohort. Smartwatches (namely Apple Watch) then became a thing because it provided more than time, such as vibrating alerts, fitness tracking, etc.
      - CamperBob2 4y ago
        Not only that, but the high end of the old-school watch industry has never been healthier than it is now. ( https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/luxury-watches-for-men-market/ https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/luxury-watches-for-men-... ) The conventional wisdom that smartwatches are killing traditional watches is just like the conventional wisdom that Starbucks and other corporate brands push out local coffeehouses: dead wrong. Instead, the new players validate the market and provide an anchor point for luxury goods.
        emodendroket 4y ago
        There's a reason I said "quartz watches" and the mid-range absolutely did get messed up by smart watches, so the only thing "dead wrong" is your reading of my post.
        CamperBob2 4y ago
        Mea culpa, looks like you win the Internet.
      - emodendroket 4y ago
        Lots of younger people never had a watch in the first place, sure, but smart watches appealed to people who would have otherwise bought from, say, Fossil.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    But Twitter/HN/etc. are all discovery mechanisms. The fact is that I can think that a lot of interesting content is going to cross my screen sooner or later without my actively prospecting for it--and I'm mostly not wrong.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  Twitter replaced the 'web' portion - the publishing of content part that people used RSS to subscribe to.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Google Reader was shut down and lots of tech people were blinded by follower count self importance and early adopter bluechecks to claim Twitter was “just fine” to use instead of RSS.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  my recollection was that twitter was doing fine when Google Reader was still running, although I'm sure it did benefit some from Google reader going away. the value proposition for Twitter at this point was different than it is now I believe, but perhaps I am just on the wrong parts of Twitter. the value proposition for twitter at that time (at least whenever I saw something I thought was valuable) was that it was a TLDR provided by experts regarding some thing. RSS didn't have a length limitation, twitter's length limitation forced experts to write a quick thing as to why you would want to go read anything they pointed to. When less technical people came on it became a bunch of oh you'll love this, low information tweets, but in the past in my experience they were high information tweets considering the length. So the value of forcing tweeters to provide quality summaries of content for their audience.

gibolt 4y ago

I'd guess that the low upfront cost and barrier to entry contributes. Audio recording and editing sufficient for a podcast is very low lift for any passionate hosts. If one disappears off your preferred platform, 100 more are waiting to fill the void.

ghaff 4y ago
Another way to put it is that there are probably very few destination podcasts for a significant number of users. While there are some podcasts that I listen to most episodes of, if one were to go to Spotify (which I don't subscribe to) as an exclusive, I'd shrug and move on.
Spivak 4y ago
Also the fact that Apple pretty much bought the entire space by providing free infrastructure and discovery but didn't do anything with it and so it flourished.

emodendroket 4y ago

The barrier is very low. If I have to go to Spotify to get your podcast, unless I’m a huge fan of you specifically, there are hundreds of others on the same topic. I suspect many people open their podcast app and just add some popular ones, or search for topics they’re interested in, and go from there.

ghaff 4y ago

>I wonder why? Some guesses. People didn't historically pay for talk radio. (OK, Serius in part. But that was always a pretty narrow slice.) A lot of podcast content is pretty niche and not especially mainstream. Not sure how easy to monetize outside of advertising/sponsorships. It started out very grass roots.

user3939382 4y ago

Some anecdatum: I stopped listening to Rogan's full podcasts when he moved to Spotify because I'm sometimes interested to listen but not enough to download a new app, sign up for a new account, etc. Bootleg (and official, I think?) accounts post his clips which I watch sometimes, I notice they have 100s of thousands or millions of views. I assume Spotify was expecting to capture all those views. If Rogan clips disappeared from YouTube I just wouldn't watch it.

Clubber 4y ago
I was the same way but I ended up signing up to watch it. It was pretty painless. I'm glad Rogan is on Spotify because YouTube is getting pretty heavy handed with their strikes. They need some competition. I'm surprised Spotify hasn't ventured into video hosting more.
- bnjms 4y ago
  This point is buried but really good. YouTube is a bit at fault here. Ideally we’d all keep using rss, but it’s hard to fault podcasters for going where monetization is possible. Respect to Sam Harris for going fully listener supported.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    Some of the political channels I watch feature the hosts using (very obvious to a human) coded language to refer to COVID, Hitler, Nazis, Hunter Biden, etc. because they don't want to get targeted. It's pretty dystopian and creepy.
    - aliswe 4y ago
      The Quartering? The only channel heard I code names for. And God is he sloppy! FD, I dont watch him anymore as he is becoming increasingly less interesting.
- rchaud 4y ago
  I'm surprised as well, it's clear that music will always be a loss leader for them. Why not do more in video, which is at least a proven monetization channel (YT, Tiktok, IG Live). MTV-style programming is due a comeback.

seanalltogether 4y ago

My guess is because both the production side and the distribution side cost so little money, it's hard for anyone to monopolize it. Once someone really solves the advertising model for podcasters, the creators will flock to it naturally like how so many people only distribute through youtube now.

criddell 4y ago
> Once someone really solves the advertising model for podcasters Do you think solving the problem includes making it difficult to skip the ads?

faeriechangling 4y ago

As a user, personally it's because I have relatively little loyalty to podcasts, and because these platform are generally a value negative not a value add to the end user. Spotify's podcast UI is horrendous, I don't know how it's possible for Spotify to reverse my sort order and lose my place in where I was in a podcast series so many times. Something happening like a podcast going exclusively on Spotify is likely to make me just stop listening to it even if I'm actively a Spotify premium subscriber because Spotify's UI is actually that bad and having to use one specific service instead of any to listen to a podcast is terrible user experience. Spotify's PAID experience is a negative. Another huge thing is that podcasts being freemium is the norm, for a lot of other content types the inconvenience of logging into some portal isn't as noticeable since you had to do that to pay the content producer anyways, but for podcasts you can't help but notice how you're being made to jump through hoops and for what? I'm not sure there's a terrible amount of value here to extract because I think we really underestimate how much value things like the App Store really provide in terms of security or payments and customer service and all that. I don't know, call me nuts, but I think Spotify would have better invested their money into making their podcasts experience good instead of signing exclusivity deals, I would happily use Spotify if it was simply the best podcast player. I can't help but be happy that Spotify's bet is doomed to fail.

soiler 4y ago
Another thing I hated about podcasts when I used spotify: they still have ads. I find it pretty much intolerable to get ads on a paid service. But podcasts weren't near the top of the list of reasons I cut ties with spotify anyway. (Oh wait, actually their endorsement of Joe Rogan was very close to the top.)
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Spotify injects ads into the podcast?
  - FinnKuhn 4y ago
    no, the podcasts (or to be precise their distribution software) does. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Subscriptions/Ads-on-podcasts-despite-premium/td-p/4753448 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Subscriptions/Ads-on-podcas...

makeitdouble 4y ago

I think it comes down to having no obvious pain point. There’s a comment about Spain podcasts going down that route because licensing music was a pain. Outside of Spain, that wouldn’t apply. For any of the podcats I listen to, the more complex part could be membership and advertisement sourcing, but there’s already strong players filling those gaps. If there’s no pain point to solve by centralization, people won’t care for walled gardens.

e40 4y ago

I paid for Spotify but I won't listen to podcasts in their app. I use Pocket Casts, which I've loved for years.

stavros 4y ago
Spotify is crap for listening to Podcasts. I can never figure out what I've listened to and what I haven't. Pocket Casts is amazing, but now that Every Little Thing is canceled, I don't know if it matters anyway, as that was the only podcast I listened to.
malermeister 4y ago
Ugh I used to love Pocket Cast, even sprung for the paid app. Then they changed their monetization model to a subscription and left their previous customers with... nothing. Screw them.
- tapland 4y ago
  Previous customers got “Pocket Casts Plus, Lifetime membership” and a “thanks for your support”. If they wouldn’t have I would have dropped it when they changed monetisation models. You might want to log in to your account again since you have the premium for free.
  - fencepost 4y ago
    Similar, I got a lifetime subscription. Then again, I think I also purchased all 4 options (Android, the never very good Windows Phone, the web version of the was a separate charge for that and finally the iOS version). I still find it very handy to be able to jump between Android and iOS pretty seamlessly.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    I don't remember ever making an account, I just bought it on Google Play.
- JanSt 4y ago
  I‘m using Pocket Casts and never have paid anything edit: as far as I remember

misterprime 4y ago

I'd like to thank Adam Curry and the Podcasting 2.0 team for helping ensure that it stays that way. https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/

knewter 4y ago
ITM!

pathartl 4y ago

I think it's a trait in the community. I remember the days sitting in an IRC channel listening to some bootleg live podcast/radio show broastcast over Icecast. It was sorta like pirate radio for a bit. Then podcasts started to show up more and more (in big part due to the iPod) and having a big publishing network wasn't really a thing. Sure, people could use iTunes, but a ton of us were just dropping MP3's from someone's site onto whatever MP3 player we had at the time.

rv3392 4y ago

I think Spotify's podcast UI is so awkward and terrible it has held back their growth. I started listening to podcasts 3 years ago because how easy Spotify had suddenly made getting into them. But, over those 3 years I've gotten so fed-up with Spotify's issues (which they refuse to fix) that I've recently moved to Pocket Casts (it took so long because of their walled-garden). I think the main differentiator for Spotify - making podcasts easy to start listening to with a music-and-podcast-app-in-one - is in fact its largest problem. The UI feels like it was designed for music with podcasts clunkily added as an afterthought. When you add the fact that Spotify's UI is already bloated, even for music, it basically becomes unusable. And then the features are different between web/desktop and mobile - there's literally no way to get a list of new episodes on desktop.

RugnirViking 4y ago
What kind of issues do you have with it? In my listening i'm split between spotify and podcast addict and honestly haven't ever had much trouble with it's UI.

theluketaylor 4y ago

Podcasting's resistance to takeover is going to be hard to replicate. Podcasts are just mp3 files in an rss feed. Super established technology that anyone can publish. MP3 patents have expired and were basically unenforceable before that. RSS is completely open. Other ecosystems that have grown up in the social media era have higher barriers to entry and network effects to overcome. Apple Podcasts is the behemoth of podcasting. All the other podcast clients combined don't come close to Apple's player marketshare. Spotify certainly has a lot of users, but not all of them listen to podcasts. Most shows have been unwilling to dump their biggest audience by going to spotify exclusive, so the shows remain just rss+mp3. Apple also manages the only index of podcasts of any great significance and so far has been content to be extremely hand-off with it. They are happy to let anyone register a podcast in the itunes index and have only removed a few items for objectionable content. With Apple as a largely absentee landlord of the podcast space and the extremly basic nature of the underlying technology shows have developed many different monetization techniques. Selling user behaviour/tracking is far, far harder in the podcast space since Apple doesn't share and controls the biggest client. Shows have turned to largely untargeted* ads, patreon, touring, merchandise, and various combination thereof. For many creators Spotify forcing them to use a specific form of monetization as part of being exclusive isn't as attractive as owning their own destiny. *podcast hosting networks can get a source IP so you'll sometimes get a broad location targeted ad inserted dynamically into the mp3 as you download it, but the level of tracking is orders of magnatude lower than what's possible in a browser. For example, shows have almost no ability to know if you actually listened to a episode, just that you downloaded it. So far Apple has been happy to largely leave the podcast world alone. They recently added some monetization options for show creators, but that's above and beyond their hand-off management of the biggest player and index. Apple is a far, far bigger threat to the podcast world than Spotify ever was. The ecosystem as it currently exists depends on Apple continuing to the mainly nothing they have been. If Apple gets tempted to start selling even aggregate user behaviour from apple podcasts there will be very little to stop them.