4 ms·

Understanding Open Podcast Prefix Project (OP3) with John Spurlock

24 points by walterbell 3y ago

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Is a single point of failure with the URL prefixes not a terrible idea?
- benjaminbellamy 3y ago
  Indeed, you have to be really careful and monitor your prefix provider very closely. But it's the best (only?) way to get podcast analytics. Other technologies such as RAD would have been much more resilient, but no one wanted them. :-/
  - benjaminbellamy 3y ago
    At some point I wanted to embed a monitoring feature within Castopod that would disable op3 in case it fails to respond… but it would add some much plumbing that the monitoring mecanism itself would probably fail long before Op3…
- tootie 3y ago
  If you look at any major podcast, they likely already have 2 or 3 of these. They're rarely a problem. OP3 in particular is Cloudflare workers IIRC so it's about as reliable as Cloudflare.
  - benjaminbellamy 3y ago
    Apple will stop following 302 redirections after… 25 of them!
- johnspurlock 3y ago
  From the homepage [1] > We've been running smoothly since Sept 2022, now measuring over 15 million podcast downloads every month across more than 1600 shows Knock wood, but OP3 podcast redirecting has never had an single outage since it launched in Sept 2022. Turns out Cloudflare Workers do a great job at simple http redirecting via their hundreds of edge locations, even during extended outages of the other parts of their stack. [1] https://op3.dev https://op3.dev
tootie 3y ago
OP3 is a great tool and a great idea, but unfortunately the reason most existing prefixes have so much market share is because they are tied in to advertising. Podtrac is the biggest player despite being a crummy analytics tool because podcasters use their Podtrac ranking to signal their reach to advertisers. Everyone uses Podtrac so the numbers are apples to apples. I sincerely hope OP3 gets enough critical mass that it can fill the same need.
- benjaminbellamy 3y ago
  I hope it gets enough critical mass too!
kemayo 3y ago
Questioning the premise... is there a need for this? Chasing analytics is famously poisonous in other fields of content-creation. I guess advertisers want to know exactly who's listening. The point of centralizing it like this would then seem to be to make it possible to validate your traffic through a theoretically impartial third-party.
- benjaminbellamy 3y ago
  Having a third party is nice even if you don't have an advertiser in the loop. Being able to compare (between 2 episodes, 2 podcasts, 2 countries, 2 players…) is a real plus. And at least OP3 is open data.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  (I build Pinecast.com) One of the biggest things is knowing who's an actual human downloading your podcast. If it's all bots, that tells you very little about growth or what's working and what's not. Even if you're not running ads, having an inaccurate view of how many people are listening makes it hard to know what to do; it's very much not "if you build it they will listen".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
johnspurlock 3y ago
Podcasting is open in many ways, but RSS-based podcast apps have no idea what shows are "hot in cleveland" or have related listener bases, etc outside of their own app. When shows start using OP3, they open up these (listener privacy-preserving) stats to _any_ app, and set themselves up for future discovery / inbound opportunities on this basis.
walterbell 3y ago
Is Wordpress suitable for hosting a paid podcast with per-subscriber feeds, without using a commercial delivery network like Castos that costs $500+ monthly for a few thousand subscribers? It looks like open-source Castopod supports OP3 and could run alongside existing Wordpress sites, https://castopod.org/ https://castopod.org/
jesprenj 3y ago
What's wrong with RSS?
- johnspurlock 3y ago
  Nothing You stick this prefix in front the audio enclosure file urls inside your rss feed
  - jesprenj 3y ago
    Why should I do that? It only introduces a single point of failure and destroys my listeners' privacy.
karaterobot 3y ago
> Similarly, data should be open to stimulate innovation... At OP3, we apply this philosophy to both our podcasts and our data. Currently, OP3 focuses mainly on providing data to podcasters, then to podcast applications, and finally to the industry as a whole. The idea is not to allow the download of a complete database like PodcastIndex.org does, but to provide specific statistics and analyses. Users can get data on specific podcasts if they know their URLs. We may consider making the data more widely available on a paid basis in the future to support the project. That is not open data as I understand it. How can data be called open when it's locked on someone's server and I have to pay them to access it? What's the difference between this open data standard and collecting data about users and selling it to marketing companies?
- johnspurlock 3y ago
  Yea that part got lost in translation. The OP3 API is completely free to use: https://op3.dev/api/docs https://op3.dev/api/docs
  - walterbell 3y ago
    > OP3 API is completely free to use Is there a license for the data provided by the API? > The idea is not to allow the download of a complete database like PodcastIndex.org Can an API data client publish a private or public mirror of the entire database?
    - johnspurlock 3y ago
      It's freely available to anyone - the data (after securely hashing IPs) is provided as a service for everyone in the open podcast system. There is a bit about the data api in the privacy policy [1]. Feel free to engage over on the github repo if you are blocked on anything or to chat about it [2]. [1] https://op3.dev/privacy https://op3.dev/privacy [2] https://github.com/skymethod/op3/discussions https://github.com/skymethod/op3/discussions
      - walterbell 3y ago

24 points by walterbell 3y ago

hammyhavoc 3y ago

Is a single point of failure with the URL prefixes not a terrible idea?

benjaminbellamy 3y ago
Indeed, you have to be really careful and monitor your prefix provider very closely. But it's the best (only?) way to get podcast analytics. Other technologies such as RAD would have been much more resilient, but no one wanted them. :-/
- benjaminbellamy 3y ago
  At some point I wanted to embed a monitoring feature within Castopod that would disable op3 in case it fails to respond… but it would add some much plumbing that the monitoring mecanism itself would probably fail long before Op3…
tootie 3y ago
If you look at any major podcast, they likely already have 2 or 3 of these. They're rarely a problem. OP3 in particular is Cloudflare workers IIRC so it's about as reliable as Cloudflare.
- benjaminbellamy 3y ago
  Apple will stop following 302 redirections after… 25 of them!
johnspurlock 3y ago
From the homepage [1] > We've been running smoothly since Sept 2022, now measuring over 15 million podcast downloads every month across more than 1600 shows Knock wood, but OP3 podcast redirecting has never had an single outage since it launched in Sept 2022. Turns out Cloudflare Workers do a great job at simple http redirecting via their hundreds of edge locations, even during extended outages of the other parts of their stack. [1] https://op3.dev https://op3.dev

tootie 3y ago

OP3 is a great tool and a great idea, but unfortunately the reason most existing prefixes have so much market share is because they are tied in to advertising. Podtrac is the biggest player despite being a crummy analytics tool because podcasters use their Podtrac ranking to signal their reach to advertisers. Everyone uses Podtrac so the numbers are apples to apples. I sincerely hope OP3 gets enough critical mass that it can fill the same need.

benjaminbellamy 3y ago
I hope it gets enough critical mass too!

kemayo 3y ago

Questioning the premise... is there a need for this? Chasing analytics is famously poisonous in other fields of content-creation. I guess advertisers want to know exactly who's listening. The point of centralizing it like this would then seem to be to make it possible to validate your traffic through a theoretically impartial third-party.

benjaminbellamy 3y ago
Having a third party is nice even if you don't have an advertiser in the loop. Being able to compare (between 2 episodes, 2 podcasts, 2 countries, 2 players…) is a real plus. And at least OP3 is open data.
bastawhiz 3y ago
(I build Pinecast.com) One of the biggest things is knowing who's an actual human downloading your podcast. If it's all bots, that tells you very little about growth or what's working and what's not. Even if you're not running ads, having an inaccurate view of how many people are listening makes it hard to know what to do; it's very much not "if you build it they will listen".
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

johnspurlock 3y ago

Podcasting is open in many ways, but RSS-based podcast apps have no idea what shows are "hot in cleveland" or have related listener bases, etc outside of their own app. When shows start using OP3, they open up these (listener privacy-preserving) stats to _any_ app, and set themselves up for future discovery / inbound opportunities on this basis.

walterbell 3y ago

Is Wordpress suitable for hosting a paid podcast with per-subscriber feeds, without using a commercial delivery network like Castos that costs $500+ monthly for a few thousand subscribers? It looks like open-source Castopod supports OP3 and could run alongside existing Wordpress sites, https://castopod.org/ https://castopod.org/

jesprenj 3y ago

What's wrong with RSS?

johnspurlock 3y ago
Nothing You stick this prefix in front the audio enclosure file urls inside your rss feed
- jesprenj 3y ago
  Why should I do that? It only introduces a single point of failure and destroys my listeners' privacy.

karaterobot 3y ago

> Similarly, data should be open to stimulate innovation... At OP3, we apply this philosophy to both our podcasts and our data. Currently, OP3 focuses mainly on providing data to podcasters, then to podcast applications, and finally to the industry as a whole. The idea is not to allow the download of a complete database like PodcastIndex.org does, but to provide specific statistics and analyses. Users can get data on specific podcasts if they know their URLs. We may consider making the data more widely available on a paid basis in the future to support the project. That is not open data as I understand it. How can data be called open when it's locked on someone's server and I have to pay them to access it? What's the difference between this open data standard and collecting data about users and selling it to marketing companies?

johnspurlock 3y ago
Yea that part got lost in translation. The OP3 API is completely free to use: https://op3.dev/api/docs https://op3.dev/api/docs
- walterbell 3y ago
  > OP3 API is completely free to use Is there a license for the data provided by the API? > The idea is not to allow the download of a complete database like PodcastIndex.org Can an API data client publish a private or public mirror of the entire database?
  - johnspurlock 3y ago
    It's freely available to anyone - the data (after securely hashing IPs) is provided as a service for everyone in the open podcast system. There is a bit about the data api in the privacy policy [1]. Feel free to engage over on the github repo if you are blocked on anything or to chat about it [2]. [1] https://op3.dev/privacy https://op3.dev/privacy [2] https://github.com/skymethod/op3/discussions https://github.com/skymethod/op3/discussions
    - walterbell 3y ago