As an extremely heavy listener of podcasts, there's no way I would listen anymore if I had to have 20 different apps to run to listen to them. It's an absolute non-starter. And then to have ads on top of that. Fuck that.
Maybe the author's right that what works for current users won't work for the masses. I don't know. But I do know that I will not listen to more ads (that's why I stopped listening to radio and I suspect I'm not the only one), and I will not go to the trouble of using more than a single app.
If I can't get a podcast into Overcast (because there's no RSS feed or whatever) there's a pretty good chance I'm not going to bother. I have limited time to listen to stuff, plenty of things on my plate, and unless it's something really exceptional or central to my interests, no RSS means it goes at the bottom of the pile.
Yeah - and there's a bunch of great podcasts that I can't really see switching to their own apps exclusively (all of Radiotopia, of which my favorites are 99% Invisible and Criminal, for example, and many independent podcasters), so any podcasts that want me to go through a custom app would have to be truly mindblowingly good.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if PRX releases a Radiotopia app. (They already have one for the Apple TV, in fact.) Any podcast network that has more than, say, a dozen shows, and some data to support the notion they have listeners who subscribe to multiple shows on their network, might be very inclined to at least try an app. It doesn't have to be the only way to listen to their popular podcasts, but it might offer exclusive content. And maybe it'll be the only way to listen to older episodes, or to listen with fewer (or even no) ads.
I don't think this is a good idea in the long run, but I could certainly see it happening in the not-too-distant future. I think we're already moving toward a future where we get the unbundled cable service we thought we wanted in the form of a dozen separate streaming video apps, and I don't doubt that streaming music services are going to push for ever-greater numbers of exclusive premieres, back catalogs and even original content. The question isn't whether producers will try this with podcasts, the question is how many producers will try it--and how successful it will be.
I think you're right in that a lot of established and independent podcasts will tend to stick to the main channels of podcast distribution, but if it becomes too financially tempting to go through a custom app, they'd probably choose to do that.
There definitely doesn't seem to be a ton of money in podcasting right now. Many of the heavy hitters in that world regularly ask for donations from listeners.
I'm willing to pay $1-$2 per month per podcast. What I'm not willing todo is listen to ads. I appreciate podcasts that put their ads either at the beginning or end, that way I can fast forward through them.
You are implying that the current ad model, with a small number of high-value crafted announcements, doesn't work. I suspect it does. Gimlet has been pretty open about how their revenue exceeds their expectations and put them under pressure to grow their offering faster than planned.
It probably works for the listners, the direct advertisers and the podcasters. It doesn't work for the advertising industry as a whole because the middle men are cut out.
They want a cut and will work really hard to take it. L
I agree, I mostly hear ad's with promo codes on podcasts. The companies paying for the exposure know exactly what they are getting. It works out quite well as is.
Yep! GiantBomb is a video game website with some interesting personality. Something like 80% of their content is freely available with banner ads on the site and typical interstitials on their podcasts. For $50 a year, all ads disappear, the extra 20% content is available, and you get authenticated RSS feeds for the same podcasts minus ads that go into Overcast nicely. I love subscribing.
While that's an extremely niche website, I would happily subscribe to NPR, for example, in return for ad-free podcast feeds.
I mourn the death of the RSS reader and really really want RSS to continue to be an open model for distributing podcasts. But that being said, a business that handled premium subscription sales and also ad-sales for a publisher could do the unenviable work of inserting ads and distributing multiple feeds for free or premium users.
How else would I have learned about Dr. Carver's Shaveeeeeeeee Butterrr. Licensed by the California Board of Medical a Professionals to bring you Shaveeeeeeee Butterrrrr.
>publishers should offer podcasts through their own app that measures listens, and either sell ads themselves if they have the scale or outsource it to a company like Midroll. Midroll, for their part, should leverage their new player technology to offer skinnable apps for publishers who can’t build their own.
Here's my problem with this idea:
I, like many people, listen to a lot of different podcasts. Dozens, in my case. I have a podcatcher app that puts them all in one place. That makes it easy and convenient for me. Some of the shows I only listen to maybe once per month when there's a guest on that I enjoy, or if I run out of new episodes of everything else. If each show required its own app for me to listen, I'd only listen to the ones I really, really enjoy and support, and the rest I'll do without or bootleg. So, in a sense, the individual app per show idea would be limiting the potential audience.
I'm already seeing this happen with Libsyn custom mobile apps[0]. There are a number of shows I listen to that have paywalls for old episodes which can only be accessed through subscription plans available in individual apps. $1.99 or $2.99 may not seem like much by itself, but if it's 10 or 20 shows you're listening to this becomes an unjustifiable bill.
The only viable alternative I see is the further growth of podcast networks, where multiple shows are available for one price. But, currently, this model is still too small and fragmented. Until the Netflix or Hulu of podcasts comes out, I'll be left to pick and choose which deserve my support enough to justify buying into their distinct "ecosystem".
Edit: I see that my points here were addressed in the paragraphs following the one I quoted, but I'm still not buying the idea that siloing is the best way to monetize podcasts.
Regarding your point about "the Netflix or Hulu of podcasts" it is important to remember that by far the majority of their content is at least a full season old. They are able to secure the rights to it for less than the cost of producing it because the networks are receiving ad dollars the first time around.
Most of the podcasts I listen to aren't timely so listening to them a year after they "air" isn't a big deal. I'm not sure if I am in the majority there though.
My suspicion is that podcasts are going to borrow from the music industry in the form of podcasts being something they give away in hopes of making money through merchandise, events, additional media such as books or subscriber-only episodes, or more likely, broadcaster access in the form of communities. (Off of the top of my head I can think of four entrepreneurial podcasts that have their own membership communities: Startups For the Rest of Us, Tropical MBA, Entrepreneur on Fire, and Chris Ducker. I imagine there is a lot of audience overlap but not membership community overlap and maybe a different method would be to have a single entrepreneurial podcast membership community that shows can join for a portion of the subscription fees. A smaller piece of a bigger pie...)
And like music some people will still create them out of a labor of love.
>My suspicion is that podcasts are going to borrow from the music industry in the form of podcasts being something they give away in hopes of making money through merchandise, events, additional media such as books or subscriber-only episodes, or more likely, broadcaster access in the form of communities.
I primarily listen to podcasts from stand-up comedians, and this exactly what most of them do now, and I agree that it may be the best (or at least more realistic and palatable) option for everyone involved.
My favorite podcasts are the "comic hang" type. They're basically an hour or two of funny people being funny, and producing these podcasts seem to benefit the hosts and guests in a few possible ways:
1. As an avenue to gain fans who will attend live shows or buy albums and other merch (which are in turn promoted on the show)
2. As a platform to publicly work out new stand-up material in a conversational setting (giving us "civilians" a glimpse inside their creative process -- probably my favorite part)
3. As a direct revenue stream through donations/subscriptions/advertisments/sponsorships
I've been listening to comedy podcasts since probably 2007, and, unfortunately, I've seen more than a few take a nosedive in quality when point 3 becomes the priority.
'giving "civilians" a glimpse inside the creative process'
One of my favorite podcasts is Song Exploder. Artists talk about how they create a specific song, including the thought process, context, and history behind specific sounds and segments that make up the song, and then the song is played in full at the end. It covers quite a variety of genres.
I don't object to any genre wholesale, but there's only a couple that I really like listening to. But the story and creative process that is broken down in Song Exploder is completely agnostic from the genre it was produced under and is interesting enough for me to drop any other podcast I'm playing to listen regardless of the genre.
Probably my current favorite is Tuesdays With Stories[0]. It's a consistently funny show and a unique look into the lives of a couple of comedians with pretty distinct personalities as they continue to progress in their careers. I've had the chance to meet both of them and they're awesome dudes as well.
Obligatory mention for the No Agenda podcast [1], by the "father of podcasting" Adam Curry and tech broadcaster John C. Dvorak. They have an interesting model in being 100% listener supported, with no advertisers or sponsors, and yet still managing to make a living off their show, putting out 2 shows every week (today show #832):
"Their funding model is strictly listener supported, and it's working. The premise being that keeping outside influences away from content development gives listeners untainted news, opinion and entertainment... they refer to it as a "value-for-value" proposition -- listen to the show, if you get something worthwhile from it make a donation. This model should change the face of podcasting.
More and more independent podcasters will probably take note of this new model, and they should. Open, unsullied content creation and delivery should be the goal of everyone in the media -- a free exchange of ideas, opinions and content is the cornerstone of a free internet and a free society.
Podcasting has always been a medium searching for a successful funding model. Curry was a pioneer in getting podcasters to band together to try and attract funding from advertisers and sponsors. Curry started a couple of companies to support this model -- he would probably be the first to admit that the main-stream media model is not the best one for podcasting... but his constant tinkering and experimentation with the medium he created is starting to pay off. Curry and Dvorak may be the first "professional" podcasters to make a living doing a show that is truly independent, insightful and listener supported."
I suspect that Adam and John don't need the money they make from the podcast to pay their bills, so I'm not really sure what "it's working" means to them. The article you linked to doesn't mention any specifics.
Maybe Dvorak doesn't need it but Curry blew all his money from the MTV days I believe. He is not exactly living a glamorous life.
I like the show, the model seems to work although the newsletter is constantly pushing people for more donations. Their wording makes it seem like they are on the edge of being sustainable all the time. This could be true of course.
If you take the time to listen to them longer , > 10 podcasts or so your start to pick up on the type of thinking they have, it really can be refreshing and No Agenda should certainly be part of a healthy news diet, as they call it.
By the way, strange to see nobody mention TWIT, I enjoy it every week, they seem to do very well. Also, the Jupiter Broadcasting network (Linux Action Show, Linux Unplugged, Unfilter, etc) is an absolute joy to listen to. Very motivated team that exists by doing ads and using patreon. They prefer not to use ads and gladly take donation but I think they hit a nice balance.
My app of choice is Pocket Casts, works very well.
Oh, I also used to be a fan of Linux Outlaws, they had a fan made foss app that integrated with Indenti.ca (foss twitter clone based on status.net), you could automagically chat using a hashtag unique to the current episode. That was a nice experience and worth using the app for.
When I talk to non-listeners about podcasts, I hear two things:
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1. "I don't know how to listen to podcasts."
2. "I don't know what to listen to."
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There are many great podcatching apps out there, and for those of us who "get it" and are motivated to listen to podcasts, it seems like Pocket Casts, Overcast, even the default Podcast app for iOS are easy to use and understand. Yet apparently they aren't.
Discovery is another issue altogether. NPR One, Pandora, Stitcher, et al have tried to do some level of podcast recommendation, but the lack of thorough metadata and text transcripts make it difficult to apply the kind of algorithm that works for blogs or music.
What makes it easy for the average non-techie to use a browser to read blogs, an app like Spotify for music, or their Facebook app, but not to use a podcatcher app?
Is it simple lack of familiarity? Or do we need an entirely new approach? I wish I knew the answer.
> it seems like Pocket Casts, Overcast, even the default Podcast app for iOS are easy to use and understand. Yet apparently they aren't.
That boggles my mind, at least in the case of Pocket Casts, with which I have experience. It has a "Discover" section, which makes it fairly easy to find at least a few that should interest anyone, and I find the best way for me to find new podcasts are recommendations by hosts of other podcasts (or better yet, where a segment of the podcast in question is replayed). Once you're in the ecosystem, I think the available interesting (to you) podcasts increases exponentially over time, as you listen to more podcasts and get more recommendations.
I imagine people complaining about being unable to find anything to listen to are more likely having problems committing a small portion of time to actually try something new, which is not a new problem.
I'm not convinced by what people say. It might be partially true, but i think there's something deeper behind it: blogs, music and video are addictive for the right people. Hence they'll spend a bit of effort to ask around what app to use, and ask about good tv, etc. Also because they're addictive and the barrier for sharing is much lower, they'll get shared much more often, talked about much more often - so you get discovery.
Podcasts aren't addictive(and i like podcasts). Lectures are boring by nature, and demand tons of focus(something we we may have more than the average guy). And even in fields that could be addictive(and don't demand great focus), like comedy, the quality is terrible - most comedy podcasts don't even come close to professional comedians doing standup.
Here's one idea: build a podcasts comedy site that curates only consistently great podcasts, and enables extremely easy sharing including sharing of very short segments.
Make the transition from the using the site to using it while driving easy and habit forming.
I think doing that you can get users "addicted". And once they are, they'll get your app, they might listen to other podcasts, etc.
> What makes it easy for the average non-techie to use a browser to read blogs ... but not to use a podcatcher app?
A podcatcher is like wget running recursively; it downloads a lot of stuff and organises it logically, but doesn't help the user in determining where best to allocate their limited time in consuming that data.
I can quickly assess whether it's worth my time reading a blog post by scan-reading for key points. Is it a fluff piece or technical? Does it just aggregate other information or present first-hand experience?
But with a podcast I can only assess its value by downloading it, making time to listen and then giving it my attention for several minutes even when playing on double-speed and jumping forward. I have probably prematurely stopped and deleted about 90% of the podcasts that I've ever downloaded.
Not even the best podcast app can help with such subjective assessment, unfortunately, and I just don't have the time to invest in searching for good podcasts so I tend to ignore them all.
For Discovery, we've worked on human-powered curation to solve this, dividing into hundreds of niches - you can see the top-level topics here https://player.fm/featured/topics or search for them.
Transcripts will happen at some point, but it's arguably less useful than user recommendations and signals from what people are actually playing.
I think the average non-techie was probably scared off in the past. It was legitimately hard work when podcasting began. And the word still conjures up a geeky pastime, not a serious form of media. But with modern smartphone apps, it's become pretty darn easy - no need to faff with RSS or sync with iTunes on PC. And it's growing fast for that reason, as well as the improved content that comes with the audience.
I have a podcast of my own and in a position to consolidate a dozen or so similar podcasts into a network I could start. Hadn't really thought about it before this thread though. Would you be willing to share a bit of your experience with me about your podcast network?
Podcasting right now seems to working wonderfully. It's one of the most expensive ways to advertise. If it's not broken don't fix it. Tracking and the targeting didn't save online advertisment, it won't safe podcasting.
That is spot on. Advertising works great on podcasts, and is expensive as a result, because listeners develop a great amount of trust for the podcasts they listen. Anything that undermines that trust is likely to just create a regression to the mean of the value of podcast advertisement: just as valuable as a random online ad.
I've been wrestling with the idea of how to enable monetization for smaller podcast producers since I decided to start building an AppleTV app for playing video podcasts this past winter. What I think could work is namespaced tags for specific players that offer ad-insertion. This allows for the platform to remain default-open and opt-in for publishers who want to go this route.
For example, much like <itunes:explicit> is not part of any RSS spec, a publisher could choose to include a tag like <castanet:monetize>yes</castanet:monetize>, which would tell the Cast-a-net app that the publisher of that podcast would like ads to be inserted. The publisher would then need to setup an account with Cast-a-net to share the ad revenue, verify ownership, etc.
There is a significant chicken and egg problem, of course. The player needs to have enough users for the publishers to consider setting up an account to be worthwhile. The ad experience also can't get so obnoxious that users move to other apps. This approach allows publishers to gain monetization and metrics without ceding ownership and control to the platform.
By the way, my player, Cast-a-net, doesn't yet offer this feature. I've been working on making the UI good enough to attract real users first, then hoping it can grow to be something worthy of specific attention from video podcast producers.
(edit: as was pointed out in a reply, Marco is very anti-ads, so I swapped the example tags. I had only meant to use Overcast as an example of a popular independent player that doesn't want to become a walled garden for just a subset of the total podcast universe.)
If the feed supports this tag, a simple donate link appears in SkipCast and when tapped, takes you directly to the donate page. This tag can be supported by any Podcast client.
To me this is a clear win-win situation, though the feature depends heavily on adoption of simple, easy to use and deploy donation services, and of course the user supplying the tag.
One good example of the donate model working is the Crate and Crowbar podcast (PC Gaming). They created a Patreon and literally shut it down after a few months. The reason: they got hundreds in weekly, recurring donations and simply didn't need that much money.
Donations can work, and could be a huge boon to smaller, independent Podcasters. This could in turn ensure a healthy ecosystem that's more resilient to monolithic entities.
I think there is a lot of potential for funding the production of great content via donations. I think the "right" way to fund a particular piece of content depends largely on the content itself. For example, PBS funds NewsHour largely through donations and sponsorships, but NBC funds Nightly News via advertising. Both are valid choices, and I believe everyone is better off when publishers are free to decide how to monetize, and viewers/listeners are free to decide what they want to give their money and attention to.
I'd love to support the <rawvoice:donate> tag in Cast-a-net, but unfortunately AppleTV doesn't have a web view, so a link to a Patreon page wouldn't really work. I may try to set up something like a <castanet:acceptdonations> tag that uses in-app purchases, though. I think both users and publishers might like that better than the first monetization options being advertising.
This is actually pretty cool. It lets publishers just focus on content, while the podcast apps offer the opportunity to monetize. Kind of like YouTube.
As long as the apps don't start doing stupid stuff like unskippable commercials.
It's the player software making the request directly to the server hosting the xml file, no? Who would be doing the proxying?
The whole point is that other players are free to completely ignore the tag.
I suppose if the podcast creator didn't want other players to be able to access the feed, they could set up some flavor of authentication. Requests from the preferred player app would include a key, and all other requests would get a 403. I don't really see what advantage that approach would have over a completely closed platform, though.
Comparing Podcasting with Blogging is a neat approach. I think there's more overlap than the article might be able - or willing - to address when discussing monetization.
To wit: In order to monetize, a lot of what is appealing about Blogging/Podcasting would be diminished - paying is the opposite of free content, commercials interrupt the listening, and authenticity corrupted by advertising perogatives.
Just like in music, there will be a few case studies with large revenues, and thousands barely making anything, if not actually going into the red for their troubles.
Podcasts are hot right now. Big Money is coming. Big Money isn’t going to sell nicely designed, hand-crafted, RSS-backed podcast players for $2.99 or ask you to pay what you want to support them, because that doesn’t make Big Money. They’re coming with shitty apps and fantastic business deals to dominate the market, lock down this open medium into proprietary “technology”, and build empires of middlemen to control distribution and take a cut of everyone’s revenue.
Hats off to that guy for succinctly summarizing why we can't have nice things.
Why do podcasts need to be monetized through advertising like the rest of the web? It seems like a perfect model for old fashioned paid subscriptions. There might be other models. I know some podcasts release all episodes for free and charge for older episodes. Or perhaps releasing every third episode behind a paywall, and make rest are free to get people hooked.
Some podcasts upload to youtube, and then get monetization through youtube's ads. That has a lot of downsides obviously, but it somehow seems better than some proprietary app.
And whatever model works, I think that there will still be many free podcasts run on donations, audible ads, or just for the love of it. I don't think anyone starts podcasting to make money. And if they do they must be crazy. Although I do appreciate some unusually good podcasts that are made by professionals and absolutely need funding to keep producing content.
The biggest problem above everything else is discovery. As a user I don't often hear of new good podcasts. I don't see unusually good podcast episodes promoted on reddit or HN, or normal channels where I find content. I'm (perhaps irrationally) cautious of investing time in new podcasts. Maybe that's just me, but it does seem like the most popular podcasts are by established celebrities or radio shows - not random joes.
There a few podcast networks that have their own software but if you want good data on your listeners you're basically stuck between Blubrry & Libsyn and they're both severely outdated platforms. And you pretty much have to use iTunes.
I've been toying around with building my own open platform for podcast hosting/analytics for a while since I could use it for my own podcast and I have friends who would use it.
[Shameless plug inside] a friend of mine and I have built a podcast hosting platform that is trying to fill exactly that void.
We built https://www.podigee.com/en as a podcast hosting platform, batteries included. You just need to upload an audio file, add the relevant metadata, and we will take care of everything else (improving and encoding the audio into different formats, generating a blog with a correct RSS feed, delivering your audio through a nice, embeddable player from our CDN, connecting with social media accounts, etc.).
The platform itself is mostly built with Ruby on Rails + AngularJS, the CDN is a highly-optimized nginx with some clever Lua scripts.
We provide world-class, personalized support to free and paid accounts. The business model is based on paying for a given amount of minutes of audio per month, no matter how big your back catalog is.
We have been doing it mostly in our free time, but have a good bunch of paying (and happy!) customers. We even help you with getting your feed on iTunes without the hustle.
Sorry for the (probably annoying) marketing speech, but it's something we've been doing out of passion and mostly in our free time. Happy to answer any of your questions!
It's still a platform that someone has to live on and may be hard to switch off. My idea is to give the podcaster ownership of everything by allowing them to self-host.
Well, this is the same discussion as cloud vs on-premises. Sure that you can run your own VPS, install Wordpress, MySQL and all the other jazz, make sure backups are done correctly, maybe even have a load balancer and two servers behind it. You need to keep everything up to date, take care of installing all those weird plugins that might break your site...
Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time?
You can do all that, sure. But it's not something everyone WANTS to do. I am a software engineer and have a blog myself, and I pay a company to host it and maintain it for me, because I don't want to waste my time on keeping it running, although it's the kind of thing I do for a living. I just want to spend my reduced amount time on providing real value. And that's the whole value proposition of SaaS.
> Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time?
And an open platform could still be built to do all of that.
I'm not saying SaaS has no value, I'm saying that people who don't want to be behind a closed platform have no option. Why be obtuse about it?
Being obtuse wasn't my intention. It's true that some people want something they can run themselves, no question. I was just explaining the value that we currently try to provide and the reasoning behind it.
Honest question, why are podcasts not just platform independent .mp3's or Ogg Vorbis audio for the purists?
Note that I don't understand how a podcast is different from a radio show that somebody recorded on a computer, so maybe I'm missing key functionality.
I get that it is very coolkid to assert that advertising is evil or something, but this is how the content that podcast listeners want gets made. "Fuck advertisers" (you can say "fuck", it's the Internet, I promise it's okay) sounds great but without an "okay, and now what?" it rings really hollow.
Nope. I listen to about 15 podcasts regularly. They are all made by people in their free time as loving hobbyists. "Content" gets made regardless if there is money exchanged for annoying/misleading your audience.
Thats exactly why I love podcasts. I can listen to them on my freetime no matter how old it is. What are your top podcasts? if you dont mind me asking, I've been meaning to listen to new ones. I currently listen to No Agenda with Adam Curry & John C Dvorak . BBC Newshour. The History Hour ((BBC) to name a few
This is something that we've been trying to solve at Podigee for quite a while now. Truth is, it's tough. It's not easy to know exactly how many people have listened (for how long) to a podcast, but you can do some heuristics based on streaming / downloading.
Since the audio data is coming from servers that are under our control, we can get interesting data like the amount of bits that have been downloaded / streamed by a specific client. It's not perfectly accurate, but there is some tricks you can do just by matching the user agent + ip + the bits requested. You can for sure get a better picture than just knowing that someone has downloaded an episode.
And yes, advertisers want to know everything, but at the same time, are clicks on banners an accurate way of knowing if people are really interested in your ads? Can you say that people really watch all the TV ads and do not go to the toilet instead? These are tough problems to solve, yet there are some approximations that should be good enough.
It's still a hard thing to integrate an RSS feed into a modern website...RSS is only really popular with podcasts and hasn't had much development in a while. Working with XML sucks.
Libsyn and Blubrry manage this part for you (having an RSS feed that is also a site's content and does tracking) but you're limited to hosting on their sites, wordpress or needing a developer.
I have history podcast directory site that I had write my own RSS integration for. As much as I dislike Apple, thankfully there are able to enforce a de facto standard for podcast RSS format that people actually follow.
The thing that I'm trying to avoid is forcing people into a pay-to-play platform to host their podcast. You don't know if it's going to make money. There is nothing open to compete with the paid services right now -- nothing that's packaged for general use anyway.
Podcasts are just platform independent .mp3 files. They're mp3 files referenced by an RSS feed. But apps like Stitcher and the Apple Podcast App read those feeds, add good functionality, present a searchable database, etc.
I think the article's ideas on advertising, particularly the idea that brand advertising HAS to come to podcasting because direct advertising won't scale is a bit flakey.
Why won't direct advertising scale? Direct advertising opens up the long tail of companies. Small Business X can't spend money on branding but can spend money on acquiring paying customers.
In fact, direct advertising has become so popular thanks to things like AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc. that companies need to find new places to address their target audiences and podcasts might just be a great place to do that. The stuff with coupon codes, special URLs, etc. are pretty trivial to set up and a company like Midroll is going to coordinate between you and the podcast so you can line up that stuff well ahead of time.
There was also this:
"The not-so-secret reality about podcast ads, though, are that advertisers are quite concentrated: a FiveThirtyEight intern heroically listened to the top 100 shows on the iTunes chart and counted 186 ads; 35 percent of them were from five companies. More tellingly, nearly all of the ads were of the direct marketing variety."
I did not read the 538 article on this, but it makes a lot of sense for a company to carpet bomb their advertising. So if you're listening to all the top 100 podcasts in a one-week period, you might have an advertiser hitting a lot of those podcasts in a one-week period. However, if you listened to the same 100 podcasts three weeks later, you might hear another set. Presumably, the companies finding routine success are the ones who you hear all the time.
On the carpet-bombing strategy, if you deploy in relative isolation, you should be able to measure the real effect of the advertising and not just the people who came through a URL or used a coupon code. If I normally sell $100 per week and the week I advertise I sell $200, I don't have to rely on campaign tracking to assume attribution. Wait a few weeks and advertise again and see if the effect holds up.
> Stitcher is thought to be the 2nd most popular podcast player, although it has long been controversial in some circles for its default practice of hosting podcasts itself (instead of directing users to download them directly from a podcaster’s server) and inserting ads.
Why would a consumer install such a program, when AntennaPod exists?
If you're looking for a free, hyper-functional podcast app that will search _thousands of RSS feeds_, allow me to introduce [PodcastAddict](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...). I've been using it for some time now, and every day I discover something new to enjoy. It's indisputably the best podcast app for Android, and it's leagues beyond iOS's native app.
"They’re coming with shitty apps and fantastic business deals to dominate the market, lock down this open medium into proprietary “technology”, and build empires of middlemen to control distribution and take a cut of everyone’s revenue"
This made me realize that Midroll/Earwolf already tried this to an extent last year with Howl.fm. It was an iPhone exclusive app/service that launched with a ton of exclusive podcast series, some old comedy albums, and the thing that really showed how little they cared about their listeners-- Earwolf was taking down all the old episodes of their podcasts and putting it behind the Howl paywall.
Many people might not be familiar with Earwolf, but in the comedy world it's huge. improv4humans is hosted by a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade and it's basically like sitting in on a master class in long-form improv. Comedy Bang Bang has recurring characters that date back years and people love going back and listening to hear how they evolve by "yes and"ing their way through conversations. They don't get dated like maybe a tech podcast might, so taking them down just to help bolster some cash-grab podcast subscription service was just so insulting, and to make it only available on iPhones showed how out of touch they were.
There was a big thread on Earwolf when this was announced. Everyone agreed that Earwolf was deserving of money for its wonderful products, but Earwolf never combatted the question: why not just a password-protected RSS feed? (Jimmy Pardo's podcast, which Earwolf acquired, had successfully used this model for years)
Largely, it seemed to be paranoia of users sharing files (Earwolf was also unsympathetic to the concept of downloading shows locally for listening offline), which seems to be missing the big picture.
...I'm not a typical user (I don't own a smartphone, and I don't plan to), so their attitude was fairly disappointing.
It increasingly feels like we're living in the end of the "golden age" of podcasting to me. I've got my little homegrown podcatcher downloading files and sticking them on my server so I can stream them over my LAN or load them onto my devices for offline play. Presumably publishers will muscle into this market to "monetize" the entire thing and completely fuck it up. No more MP3s to load on my devices, etc.
Oh, well. It was nice while it lasted. Maybe I'll end up breaking out the old rig I built back in the early 2000's to timeshift public radio shows to MP3s.
One more model: the guys at Partially Examined Life used their content-rich philosophy podcast to build a participatory community of listeners. Now you can pay a subscription to be a P.E.L "citizen" which gives you the chance to participate in "not school" seminars with other citizens. Also, of course, access to their back catalog which is behind a paywall.
George Hrab leaves his 400+ episode Geologic catalog open, but pushes a subscription fee: be a "geologist" to get a weekly email and access to other subscriber-only material.
I've been using the Remarks social podcasting app for the past week. They are trying to address the retention (for sure) and monetization (I assume they're going to roll out an ads platform) problems mentioned in the article.
I've been posting my thoughts as I listen and really like when the host is on the platform and I can react to their posts. Only challenge for me is that I listen to a lot of my episodes while driving and can't scroll through posts.
Founder of Remarks here. Currently, we're focussed on building a great platform for people to discuss the podcast their listening to with other fans and the host. We're trying to get as many hosts as possible on board.
An ad platform is something we've talked about, but I'd need to see a huge upswing in usage before building that out.
My imagined future involves serving podcasts with different ads each time you download the episode. Maybe a subscription to ad-free versions. There's no need for a separate player for subscriptions, Rss feeds can already be password protected.
If anyone is working on the above, hit me up - I'd love to talk.
I'll take the (probably unpopular) advertiser-centric approach here...
I agree with a lot of what Ben says (and his podcast is the highlight of my commute these days). What is fascinating is that the space has been the domain of direct response advertisers for a while, and only a handful. I was familiar with all of the ones mentioned, but was absolutely shocked that they were such a large percentage of the mix.
Either podcasting ads are so nascent that only a handful of people are in on it, or there are performance challenges (whether it be attribution or overall poor performance). What I'd love to see is the # of advertisers to made a solid go of it and had dismal experiences despite having success in other channels. That would be very telling.
The conversion tracking piece is a big missing chunk of the equation. I could see ads embed audio tags that any reader could parse, but I fear the tracking restricted to individual platforms. That puts all of the control on the sell-side of the equation, and also conveniently impossible to audit or compare numbers against. I'd LOVE to see DoubleClick/Turn/etc. get into the game with some tracking solutions here. They are the industry standard and would integrate well into existing ad stacks. Anyone who provides good tracking solutions might consider them for possible acquisitions.
Beyond that, I think that podcasts make a lot of sense with the shift to native ads. Many people feel they have a relationship with the podcaster because it is in fact a real live person that you listen to because you like them. In speaking with Midroll for our own forays into podcast ads, it looks like you provide a list of bullets on your offering, and the podcaster works to craft the ad in their voice to make it more natural.
That is a win for both the advertiser and the listener. The more natural format likely boosts receptiveness (and thus performance) for the advertiser, and the listener gets something that isn't horribly disruptive to the listening experience as good podcasters (like Roman Mars on 99pi) make them fun and have found that people stick around to even listen to the post rolls because he's so good at them.
Anyway, that's my $.02. I think the space is nascent, and I hope that the inevitable power struggle between publishers and platforms doesn't kill it as it could be really powerful when done right. Advertisers have some challenges but that hasn't stopped them from testing before. I'm frankly just shocked at the lack of overall advertiser volume.
My take - snippets will drive discovery. Take a ten second snippet of a podcast and you can find a hundred "keyword" searches or Facebook headlines that it will fit perfectly.
tl;dr - facebookization of podcasts (one discovery process in one app) is the worst outcome for publishers (who already have this for actual text)
So the least worst alternative is for each publisher to have their own app for listening to their podcasts and drive folks to download said app by using star power and marketing. To get there we will see some podcasts bribed with huge gobs of cash.
Ok - seems plausible but frankly as a podcast listener I prefer the Facebook solution, and am unconvinced by his arguments that most people wont
> A major challenge in podcast monetization is the complete lack of data: listeners still download MP3s and that’s the end of it; podcasters can measure downloads, but have no idea if the episode is actually listened to
That's not exactly true. Marc Maron always encourages his listeners to use his offer code (often "wtf") to get discounts. Surely they have data on that.
There is some value in that because an advertisers knows how much they invested and what they return is. This tells you very little about the actual size of the audience and nothing about the conversion rate.
That's addressed in the article. Direct marketing with offer codes or special URLs is only applicable to certain products. Brand (awareness) advertising is where the real money comes from.
podcast stats, amirite?! I don't trust feedburner, libsyn, or blubrry -- but i've been _thinking_ about using keen.io redirects in my rss & itunes feeds so i can collect ip/agent info and analyze that.
i distribute my podcast (well, it's a video show, but still podcasty) via YouTube in part because I can actually get view/retention/source/subcriber stats + use links/annotations + I can also feed it into itunes. I even made a little jekyll repo that helps you make landing page & video/audio feeds: https://github.com/nealrs/Jekyll-YouTube-Show
Reposts are allowed on HN if a story hasn't had significant attention yet (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Links to previous submissions aren't helpful if there's no actual discussion at the other end, which explains the downvotes here.
Your post beat this one in time but this one won the luck of the draw. Sorry about that. We're hoping to change the duplicate detector in a way that gives the original submitter credit more often, but for the time being there's still a lot of randomness in which post gets traction. For now, the way to mitigate that is to submit many good stories; it evens out in the long run.
Maybe the author's right that what works for current users won't work for the masses. I don't know. But I do know that I will not listen to more ads (that's why I stopped listening to radio and I suspect I'm not the only one), and I will not go to the trouble of using more than a single app.