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The incredible shrinking podcast industry?
- matteotom 3y agoSurely any sophisticated ad buyer would understand how "audience" is calculated, and know to account for people who download but don't listen, right? Like isn't part of the reason to have per-podcast promo codes is to figure this out?
- ttymck 3y agoSophisticated? Ad buyers? Not likely.
- smusamashah 3y agoThis shrinking might be localised. Where I am from, every other celebrity or famous person from any other similar medium (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram etc) have started their own podcast channels on YouTube. And many of them are able to get many well known people on their 'podcast' YouTube channels. If that is what podcast is about, then it's booming in my region(Pakistan).
- animal531 3y agoYou're right, it's a pretty common thing in many fields now. For example streamers on Twitch have realized that it's pretty easy to just get a group together with other guests for easy content.
- _justinfunk 3y agoThe article implies throughout that audiences are shrinking but the only mechanism for that is Apple Podcasts won't download episodes for a user who isn't listening anyway.
- slwto 3y agoThe article implies there never were audiences as estimated, due to faulty mechanism.
- fasthands9 3y agoIt does seem like the "shrinking" is confusing there. Probably should have been "The Podcast Industry Is Smaller Than Producers Thought" It is possible that overall podcast listening is still up yoy. It is also possible that even if the top podcasts decline (which the article sorta hints at?) that it may just be because the market is now saturated with thousands of competitors that each take a very small slice.
- bombcar 3y agoIt like those articles that talk about the year millions of US children disappeared- because the tax forms start requiring social security numbers for claimed dependents.
- jjordan 3y agoSo it's not necessarily shrinking, it's more that the biggest podcast publisher altered how they are delivered based upon current listener usage rather than automatically deliver every episode forever, and it turns out that most people actually didn't listen to every episode forever. Certainly this discrepancy has to have been known about for some time. I speculate that the ad industry had some influence on this decision to bring listener metrics more in line with reality.
- mccr8 3y agoThere's no need to speculate, as the article literally says that: "Industry groups agree: Sounds Profitable, a podcast monetization trade group, lobbied Apple to make the change, and said that it would lead to more accurate audience info and more effective advertising."
- daniel_reetz 3y agoGreat example of how the invisible hand of big tech enacts large scale behavioral change.
- vosper 3y agoI'm not sure it's an invisible hand - seems pretty well known amongst people affected by it (podcast producers, advertisers). This is the second time I've heard of this downloading change in the past few weeks, and I've got no connection to the podcast industry. And what's the large scale behavioural change? People weren't listening to all the podcasts that the app had been downloading, and they still aren't?
- brazzy 3y agoThe behavioural change will be one the podcaster's side, who now have to worry more than previously about keeping listeners enganged.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MDWolinski 3y agoIt’s amazing how little analytics there are on podcast listening by default as a standard that all apps should provide. Stuff like if an episode was started, marked as listened (but not actually listened to), etc. I get the reason for this change in general and the idea behind it, although this still gives inflated numbers for a minimum of 5 episodes.
- Vvector 3y agoPlease no. I don't want to be forced to use a special player to listen to podcasts just so analytics can be collected
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoBut if we put it on The Blockchain, you can mint PodCoins by listening to podcasts! Of course, to ensure you're really listening, you'll also need a secure cryptographic module installed in your auditory cortex. Depending on how well that surgery goes, maybe it finally can put the killer in killer app.
- kombookcha 3y agoThis is the wrong kind of cyberpunk, I was assured there would be USB-key knuckledusters so I could punch 1337haxX into corpo terminals.
- gsich 3y agoRSS is a RFC MUST for it to be called podcast.
- kartoffelmos 3y agoDo you have a source for this?
- philipwhiuk 3y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/AlignmentCharts/comments/xldke8/what_is_a_podcast/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AlignmentCharts/comments/xldke8/wha...
- eviks 3y agoIt's "surprising" how bad the important metrics are even when it's technically so easy to get better ones. "years in the making"
- jononomo 3y agoMy synopsis: 1. The Apple Podcast app has been updated to longer automatically download episodes of a show if the listener has stopped listening to the show. 2. This has resulted in the "download count" metric crashing for several high profile podcasts the publish frequently -- The Daily from NYTimes is mentioned. 3. This lowers advertising rates and is basically bad for the publishers of those podcasts -- the "download count" for some shows has fallen by 40%. --- Now to me this seems like an obviously good move because podcast episodes can be long and can eat up a lot of space on a device -- especially if they are never played, meaning that they never have the "delete after being played" opportunity. Also, advertisers obviously care about how many people hear their advertisements, not how many people download the podcast episode, so the fact that advertisers even have to consider the "download count" metric at all means they are operating with inferior information. Even when I do play a podcast that I have downloaded, I often skip the advertisements because it is so easy to hit the fast-forward-30-seconds button a few times. But I have been assuming that podcast apps collect information about whether or not a podcast episode is ever played, and also on what parts of the episode the user rewinds or skips, and so forth. For instance, it would be valuable information to know that of the listeners who actually download and start playing and listening to a certain 2-hour-long podcast episode, 99.4% quit listening within the first ten minutes.
- r3trohack3r 3y ago> But I have been assuming that podcast apps collect information about whether or not a podcast episode is ever played, and also on what parts of the episode the user rewinds or skips, and so forth. Why would you assume this? (Most) podcasts are RSS feeds. You can use any app to listen to them. You can even write your own app to listen to them. Why would you intentionally pick an RSS reader that told some rando everything you listened to?
- shiroiuma 3y agoThat's what people do with YouTube; why wouldn't they do it with podcasts?
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- dingclancy 3y agoThis is good news for me. It would weed out those VC-backed podcast platforms that are selling these high numbers to advertisers, and those will be left are who have always been there since the bubble happened.
- semiquaver 3y agoIt strikes me that the mechanics of podcasts are so consistent and simple that it would be straightforward for podcast apps to implement truly privacy-preserving analytics. As an example, Apple could make available to podcast publishers numbers like “how many people actually listened to this episode”, instead of the current status quo of “how many people downloaded it” using server logs, which is obviously inaccurate as this episode makes clear. There’s no need for Apple to disclose or even collect anything identifying to make these numbers available. It’s just a big distributed SUM() operation. Of course, once that was available, advertisers would next want attribution for who had listened to which ad segments, etc. and it would all be downhill from there.
- hacketthfk 3y agoThat's called telemetry. We hate that here on HN and always disable it. Do you want Microsoft to snitch on your listening habits? I bet not.
- prepend 3y agoDoes Apple even track app analytics? They definitely don’t share it with anyone. I’d stop using the podcast app if they gave my behavior data out to anyone.
- pbh101 3y agoA limited amount: https://podcasters.apple.com/5314-introducing-subscription-analytics-delegated-delivery-linkfire https://podcasters.apple.com/5314-introducing-subscription-a...
- MarkSweep 3y agoThey already do: https://podcasters.apple.com/support/5392-listener-analytics https://podcasters.apple.com/support/5392-listener-analytics That’s what makes this article slightly puzzling. The change described in the OP article would not affect Apple’s analytics ( I think). It would only effect download counts for their party analytics.
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- oldgradstudent 3y agoThe podcast industry is not shrinking. It was never that big in the first place, apple simply made it clear.
- nmz 3y agoIt kind of has, many NPR shows have been killed, they were in trouble for a bit even.
- jimberlage 3y agoPerhaps podcasts have broader appeal, but I always thought that talk radio was a good proxy for podcasts. I’d guess that only 1 in 20 people had a talk radio show they routinely listened to growing up pre-podcasts, and a smaller subset of that was engaged enough to not miss an episode. It felt popular, but still niche within the set of reasonably popular interests. It would surprise me a lot if the switch to the internet as a medium changed the fundamentals much here. It’s probably easier to discover new podcasts than it was to find new talk radio shows, but does that really move the needle enough to justify the VC funding in this space?
- newsclues 3y agoI think narrow appeal is the best part. I listen to niche podcasts from all over the world in a variety of topics spaces that would never have mass appeal required for radio or television but a global asynchronous audience is enough.
- prepend 3y agoI think so. The big shifts are: -production costs have dropped so much so there are more options from more content -broadcast costs have dropped so you can have 4 hour podcasts for basically the same cost as 1 hour -audience is global instead of local, so way more listeners -asynchronous nature makes it easier to fit into your schedule. I can’t listen to my favorite talk radio show because I’m working. But I can listen to my favorite podcast whenever. So this should mean that there’s more people, and more money. So investment makes sense.
- randycupertino 3y ago> Perhaps podcasts have broader appeal, but I always thought that talk radio was a good proxy for podcasts. I prefer audiobooks. At least audiobooks tend to have a beginning, middle and an end (and an editor!) so the content is a little more well planned vs just rando jabronis bloviating which sometimes happens in podcasts.
- theshrike79 3y agoI just can't stand a podcast where it's just 2-3 (usually) men shooting the shit in front of microphones for multiple hours. There is no subject, no editing and no point. They might end up with a few 20-30 second funny clips on TikTok. There are podcasts that are actually edited, those are the good ones. They stay on subject, boring / unfunny bits are edited out etc. My favourite example in this is the No Such Thing As A Fish -podcast from the QI crew. I didn't know at first it was carefully edited, but then they started releasing the outtake bits as bonus episodes and the curtain was lifted =)
- steveBK123 3y agoI never understood the boom given the economics of the space. Pretty much all the podcasts I regularly listen to are part of a larger brand/media ecosystem so they clearly aren't intended to make money as a standalone. Mostly a mix of guys with day jobs blowing off steam talking to people they find interesting, or media people with full time jobs on radio/tv or in print/etc. Bloomberg for example puts out a lot of interesting ones.
- satvikpendem 3y agoLooks like Gimlet and Joe Rogan got out at a good time. Just a few years later and we'd inevitably see the bust as we do now. Gimlet is apparently already gone and was merged into Spotify's other podcasting brand.
- Hippocrates 3y agoWhat!!! That stupid feature that gobbles up your phone storage was fudging everyone’s engagement metrics (that they misinterpreted)? That is just bonkers.
- nmz 3y agoThe stupidity doesn't end there, OPUS/Speex has existed since 2013 and is supported everywhere. Why do they use mp3's for a medium that is mostly speech? Mind you I'm not saying, toss away mp3's, but they could offer the low/mid/high bandwidth option, same as youtube.
- Scoundreller 3y agoAnd most of the content would work just fine in mono. Even npr’s app would cache several hundred mb of content when you started and eat up bandwidth to the point I had to stop using it. Maybe that’s been fixed but yeesh. I regularly stream a pirate radio station and AAC 32kbps is pretty damn good.
- maguay 3y ago"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Then Apple stopped automatically downloading podcast episodes for people who aren't actively listening, and Spotify presumably counts actual plays rather than downloads, and now we know which half is wasted. When you are what you measure, measuring more accurately isn't always a fun exercise.
- nradov 3y agoAdvertisers typically assign unique discount codes to each podcast so they immediately see conversion counts.
- LeafItAlone 3y agoI think that’s only part of the equation. There also must be many people who hear about a product or service on some media and then sign up later without remembering the code (or that the podcast was the reason they are doing it). You could have a “how did you hear about us” question, but those are annoying.
- m3kw9 3y agoShould track plays like music
- valeg 3y agoIt should have never become "an industry".
- debesyla 3y agoWhy? (Honest question.) In my eyes podcasts is just another form of media, like books, movies or video games - all of these are industries?
- valeg 3y agoPodcasts were great when they shared Web 2.0 ethos "Broadcast yourself". But today's conveyor belt of Spotify and other grifty podcast enterprises turned iPod casts into a lame adjunct to MSM/talk radio.
- nmz 3y agoForgot to mention that google podcasts will no longer be operational as of this year. Honestly, at this rate, I'm surprised google hasn't killed gmail. https://www.theverge.com/23891397/google-podcasts-youtube-spotify-alternatives-pocket-casts https://www.theverge.com/23891397/google-podcasts-youtube-sp...
- granzymes 3y agoGoogle consolidated the podcast features into YouTube Music. Many of the "killed by Google" entries are actually Google shuffling around features between different apps. Annoying, but the functionality is still there. From the outside looking in, it feels like Google lets their org structure dictate their product strategy to a comical degree.
- LeafItAlone 3y agoThey did the same with Google Play Music, but the YouTube Music app was so much of a worse experience for me that I just switched to Apple Music. So I do think moves like this still fit into some category of “killed by Google” lists.
- nineteen999 3y agoNot to mention, you needed to download and use a special tool to download your Google Play Music songs that you'd paid for before the shutdown, which didn't actually work.
- nmz 3y agoFunctionality is also the interface, it demonstrates the functionality, a podcast app is an rss feed reader tuned towards playing longform audio. I sincerely doubt youtube music integrated with rss feeds would be any good for podcasting, I've tried it and it always tries to play the video (which, its youtube music, why would it play video?). Not to mention that podcasts already have ads in them, so now its going to have youtube ads and also ads in the podcast. Not to mention the ad numbers have tripled, there's 2 minutes of ads every 5 minutes. Also we already have an example of podcasting functionality being integrated into a music app: spotify. And IMO it is a complete failure, the interface is constantly fighting between podcasts and music. Two methods of consuming media that are different, making the entire experience subpar.