Apple and the Future of Podcasts:

Dissecting the NYT Podcast Article Kerfuffle

On May 7th John Herrman of the NYT published an article on podcasts titled Podcasts Surge, but Producers Fear Apple Isn’t Listening, which chronicled the rise of podcasts, the role of Apple, and the dissatisfaction some major podcast creators have with Apple not doing more to support the growing ecosystem with respect to monetization, demographic information, social sharing, etc. I found the article to be succinct, accurate, and interesting, as did others in the community including Hot Pod creator Nick Quah. However Marco Arment took issue with it, accusing the NYT article of “getting a lot wrong” and being “ill-informed.” Marco, the first CTO of Tumblr (which sold to Yahoo for $1.1B), an angel investor in Gimlet (you may remember him from StartUp Season 1), a veteran podcaster, and the creator of Overcast, a popular podcatcher among tech enthusiasts, responded with his own article: Apple’s actual role in podcasting: be careful what you wish for.

I wasn’t able to pinpoint what specifically was ill-formed or wrong from the NYT article, but my guess is that it left out information and perhaps a cautionary tale that Marco finds essential to this discussion, and the future of the ecosystem.

The Current State of Podcasts

Both John and Marco do a good job of summarizing the current state of podcasting and so I’m going to cherry pick and paraphrase from their articles, and pepper in some additional context, to consolidate it here for you:

Podcasts were essentially birthed by Apple when, in 2005, they made it possible to access the mp3s, from enclosure elements in RSS feeds, on the iPod (hence Pod-cast), predating the existence of the iPhone.

But Apple does not and has never owned podcasts. Podcasts are independently owned by their creators and hosted on their own RSS Feeds (which are just static domains with XML that contain metadata about the show and their episodes). And this open, decentralized nature is something that is a boon to the space because anyone is free to create and control their own content, or even podcast apps.

But even though Apple doesn’t actually own podcasts, they are the power player in the space. Mostly because 60–70% of all listening happens on their technology (iPhone, iPad, iTunes) and 20% directly on the iOS native Podcasts app. Owning the listening experience is incredibly important for many reasons I will get into and because they own what is essentially the universal podcast directory of consequence. As Marco points out, “The iTunes Store’s Podcasts directory is the only one that matters, and being listed there is essential for podcasts to be easily found when searching in most apps.” Additionally, Apple has been the only entity to provide standards for how data should be structured in RSS Feeds and provides some of the only guidance for new podcasters getting into the game. Essentially Apple is the de facto structure in the podcast ecosystem.

The podcast ecosystem has grown considerably since 2005, hitting milestones like the first break out success with Serial Season 1 (110M downloads and counting across 12 episodes), 325k shows in existence, over a billion projected listens in Apple’s app next year, and Edison predicting that next year 57 million Americans will listen to podcasts every month. But as John pointed out, some prominent podcasters are unhappy that Apple isn’t expanding its support for podcasts despite the fact that the medium appears to be outgrowing its infancy.

Specifically, some podcasters are unhappy that they don’t have anonymous demographic information on who their audience is (age, gender, region, etc.), how people actually listen to their content (e.g. time stamps of when they stop listening rather than inaccurate and opaque download counts), and any type of control, access, or input to improving the in-app experience to innovate monetization, communicate with their listeners, or to improve how listeners discover, interact with, and share episodes on the internet.

But despite all the structure Apple provides, they make virtually no revenue from podcasts. So basically Apple, the world’s largest corporation by market value since 2013, is the benevolent backbone of the podcast ecosystem and is working for us pro bono. Because in reality, I don’t think anyone ever decided to buy an iPhone because of podcasts; they are just as easily accessible on Android devices as iPhones.

The reason podcast creators have no control over changes they want implemented is because they don’t control the listening experience (or at least not enough of it to matter). Their concerns can only be addressed by modifying the code that runs in the podcast apps we use to download, stream, and listen. Currently, that is 60–70% Apple, which is likely why “Apple brought seven leading podcast professionals to the company’s campus in Cupertino”; the impetus of John’s article if you will.

The Future of Podcasts

But what is being illuminated here is bigger than Apple. It’s a broader sign that podcasts, despite their continual growth and increasing relevance in society, are still broken in many ways. And this isn’t necessarily new, I think many folks just thought it would already be fixed by now.

Last September, This American Life hosted a hackathon that I attended with 50–100 others with the goal of addressing some of these very problems. Ira Glass wanted to know when listeners (anonymously) stopped listening to episodes; the exact minute and second, so that he could better understand abandonment and improve story-craft. Alex Blumberg wanted to know how to evolve the in-app experience to have better ads and monetization. And many others in attendance, ranging from producers to technologists, fixated on how sharing episodes from one person to another is broken. And that’s because all of these problems have merit, can be fixed, and should be for the betterment of the listener and the creators. I don’t know of any meaningful products created as a result of the hackathon, likely because you’d need to create a podcast app to even begin to address these issues, which is out of scope for a weekend hackathon whose participants have full time jobs.

So to reiterate, the podcast producers and hosts are powerless to make change on their own without control over or partnerships with major podcast apps.

To this day, Apple’s team that runs and oversees podcasts has been very small and lean, which may be surprising given the reach of the medium is so expansive. But John offers the key insight as to why this is: “podcasts bring Apple virtually nothing in direct revenue”… “as it stands, podcasting is effectively just one more free feature to help the company sell hardware”.

As John puts it “Apple has at least two obvious choices: to rush to accommodate an industry that is quickly outgrowing its origins, or to let podcasting be, at the risk of losing its claim over a medium that owes its very name to the company” which I think is spot-on. I think even Marco agrees that this choice exists, but his major fear is Apple “accommodating”; i.e. investing heavily into its podcast division to lock down future control of the medium, appease some major players, and eventually profit from its future state.

As best I can tell, Marco’s position is this: “Apple has only ever used its dominant position benevolently and benignly so far, and as the medium has diversified, Apple’s role has shrunk. The last thing podcasters need is for Apple to increase its role and dominance” because “ Apple [will] insert itself as a financial intermediary to allow payment for podcasts within Apple’s app”, possibly track demographic and listening data to give or sell to podcast creators which is “creepy” and would contribute to the “’data’ economy”, and generally “add rules, restrictions, delays, and big commissions, [to] increase Apple’s dominant role in podcasts, push out diversity, give Apple far more control than before, and potentially destroy one of the web’s last open media ecosystems.”

This is where I don’t agree with Marco. I think the future of podcasting necessitates collecting anonymous demographic and listening data to help give feedback to podcast creators on what is working and what’s not (i.e. better content creation) and to increase the efficacy of ads, which in turn make the listener’s experience suck less and make the podcast creators more profitable and self-sufficient. Among other important benefits.