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.
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.
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.)
The first platform to solve this problem by offering a paid product that revenue shares back to the creator will get my $$$ as soon as I find it. I hoped this was what Spotify was up to, but clearly not. Youtube Premium could make an easy play in that space if they cared for it.
Dynamic ads ruin podcasts for me. Its the same 3 ads (often for other podcasts), and the technical execution leaves a lot to be desired. I'll often be listening to a podcast, only for it to repeat the last two minutes. That would be annoying by itself, but then the podcast cuts off 2 minutes before the actual end.
Doesn't YouTube Premium do that? I remember some creators saying they got a lot more money out of Premium views than ad views, but I don't know anything specific.
There is a lot of stiff (and free) competition when it comes to podcast players. I'm pretty happy with the now open source Pocket Casts. Previously I used the paid Dogg Catcher.
I can't imagine what features would need to exist for me to be willing to pay a recurring fee.
This is exactly my experience: Rogan moved to Spotify, podcasts became more difficult to track because of bad UI and ads were a constant irritation (I pay good money to not get ads).
Nowadays I spend my time listening to different podcasts and tune into Rogan if he has a particularly good guest on.
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.
I signed up (again) on Spotify for Rogan... of course, I was mostly watching on YouTube via an NVidia ShieldTV box, and Spotify didn't have video support for a long while, and even later it was just not a good app/experience for me... so when I dropped PayPal, I cancelled Spotify at the same time. I still catch clips from his JREClips channel on YouTube. It's pretty bad when Rumble has a better (not by much) AndroidTV app than Spotify, with a fraction of the revenue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same here. I like the JRE podcast but not enough to use Spotify and their terrible podcasting experience. Now I really only catch an interesting YouTube clip every few weeks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.