Apple seeks input from top podcasters as it weighs future of medium
In an attempt to address, and potentially assuage, long-standing concerns over podcast monetization, data and other perceived platform issues, Apple employees and top brass late last month met with leading podcast publishers at the company's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.
According to two people familiar with the matter, Apple invited seven podcast professionals to take part in a candid discussion regarding the state of the medium, particularly problems that since late cofounder Steve Jobs introduced the platform onstage in 2005, reports The New York Times. While Apple fell short of promising change, employees at the meeting later relayed podcaster grievances with iTunes chief Eddy Cue in a closed-door meeting.
"We have more people than ever focused on podcasting, including engineers, editors and programmers." Cue said in a statement. "Podcasts hold a special place with us at Apple."
Despite a self-professed sentimentality for the medium, podcasts are far from being a major focus for Apple. Producers lament a dated iTunes support structure that has been outgrown by the fast-moving industry. Chief among complaints are issues related to advanced monetization tools and related features like promotion within iTunes and social media sharing. For the most part, Apple's backend services have remained largely unchanged since 2005.
For example, podcast publishers make money by selling advertisements, but mechanisms for obtaining and measuring listener statistics are woefully outdated. With iTunes, producers are unable to break down show metrics beyond absolute download count. Podcasters don't know if a listener turned off the show after 10 minutes, or shared the episode with 10 people. Such measurements are vital to assigning value to and selling advertisements.
Part of the problem is Apple's hands-off approach to podcasting, the report says. Since the company does not take a cut of advertising revenue, and restricts publishers from selling episodes or subscriptions through iTunes, it has little skin in the game. For Apple, podcasts are effectively a value-added feature to promote hardware platform stickiness.
Further, podcasters jockey for position on iTunes' top charts. Netting a spot as a top show on Apple's Podcasts app can often make or break a production, and there is a single person -- Steve Wilson -- in charge of that space. Apple's podcast ranking and featured content systems are also in question.
Competitors are taking the opportunity to step in, offering podcasters the tools they want and the monetization they need. Spotify in January activated a podcast service promising publishers access to listening data, as well as episode hosting and streaming. Amazon's Audible.com is also making a push into the sector, the report said.
Apple is still the market leader when it comes to podcasts, and according to podcast tracking firm RawVoice is pulling in 65 percent of listeners. That number is down 70 percent year-over-year. As it stands, there are more than 325,000 podcasts served through iTunes and the company estimates listeners will have consumed some 10 billion episodes by the end of the year.
AppleInsider, for example, produces a weekly podcast discussing the hottest Apple news and rumors.
After essentially creating the podcast segment out of whole cloth, Apple now risks losing control to industry upstarts. Before that happens, however, it seems Apple is at least willing to entertain new ideas from podcasting's top performers.
According to two people familiar with the matter, Apple invited seven podcast professionals to take part in a candid discussion regarding the state of the medium, particularly problems that since late cofounder Steve Jobs introduced the platform onstage in 2005, reports The New York Times. While Apple fell short of promising change, employees at the meeting later relayed podcaster grievances with iTunes chief Eddy Cue in a closed-door meeting.
"We have more people than ever focused on podcasting, including engineers, editors and programmers." Cue said in a statement. "Podcasts hold a special place with us at Apple."
Despite a self-professed sentimentality for the medium, podcasts are far from being a major focus for Apple. Producers lament a dated iTunes support structure that has been outgrown by the fast-moving industry. Chief among complaints are issues related to advanced monetization tools and related features like promotion within iTunes and social media sharing. For the most part, Apple's backend services have remained largely unchanged since 2005.
For example, podcast publishers make money by selling advertisements, but mechanisms for obtaining and measuring listener statistics are woefully outdated. With iTunes, producers are unable to break down show metrics beyond absolute download count. Podcasters don't know if a listener turned off the show after 10 minutes, or shared the episode with 10 people. Such measurements are vital to assigning value to and selling advertisements.
Part of the problem is Apple's hands-off approach to podcasting, the report says. Since the company does not take a cut of advertising revenue, and restricts publishers from selling episodes or subscriptions through iTunes, it has little skin in the game. For Apple, podcasts are effectively a value-added feature to promote hardware platform stickiness.
Further, podcasters jockey for position on iTunes' top charts. Netting a spot as a top show on Apple's Podcasts app can often make or break a production, and there is a single person -- Steve Wilson -- in charge of that space. Apple's podcast ranking and featured content systems are also in question.
Competitors are taking the opportunity to step in, offering podcasters the tools they want and the monetization they need. Spotify in January activated a podcast service promising publishers access to listening data, as well as episode hosting and streaming. Amazon's Audible.com is also making a push into the sector, the report said.
Apple is still the market leader when it comes to podcasts, and according to podcast tracking firm RawVoice is pulling in 65 percent of listeners. That number is down 70 percent year-over-year. As it stands, there are more than 325,000 podcasts served through iTunes and the company estimates listeners will have consumed some 10 billion episodes by the end of the year.
AppleInsider, for example, produces a weekly podcast discussing the hottest Apple news and rumors.
After essentially creating the podcast segment out of whole cloth, Apple now risks losing control to industry upstarts. Before that happens, however, it seems Apple is at least willing to entertain new ideas from podcasting's top performers.
Comments
On the plus side of things I kind of like the iOS Podcasts app these days. I only wish MacOS had a dedicated app as good and one that'd copy settings to a mirror image of the iOS version. I'm often confused with all the additional episodes on my Mac over my iPhone. I've never been able to figure it out. If the email client on your Mac didn't match the read/delete layout of your iPhone I've got to imagine there'd be heads rolling in Cupertino.
The same meeting should happened for FCPX years ago. High profile influential editors in the world of editing meet at Apple to talk candidly to how the feel about FCPX. Apple lost a ton of trust when they launched this application version and were far too slow to do anything and did too little. Adobe swooped in and took far more of the market than they should have. And they add heavily requested features and clever community suggestions to their apps far more often than Apple has.
give Podcasts there own place and space.
like someone mentioned it seems they're only taking it serious after losing share. This is Apple's platform no one else's.
i heard someone say "check out our android podcast" and I thought it was too ironic.
Really though Apple needs to rule this platform with an iron fist and share ZERO with any copycats even attempting to take a single show from them.
https://marco.org/2016/05/07/apple-role-in-podcasting
Look, the podcasting community wants revenue-generating tools similar to what exists for YouTube, Facebook, Wordpress and other platforms for content creators. They've actually wanted these things for years, as these tools aren't exactly new. It is just that Apple is finally taking requests seriously after years of ignoring them because podcasts are finally taking off, and as a result competitors like Spotify and Google have popped up offering podcasters the same tools that video loggers, bloggers and social creators on their platforms already enjoy, and Apple is losing market share as a result. And keep in mind: Apple had plenty of time to be the innovator and market leader in this area and have everyone else be an imitator or reactionary, the way that they did with the MP3 player, smart phone and app store. Instead, Apple allowed Google, Facebook and the rest to fill that void in the market, and they are going to have to either copy what the cloud software and services companies innovated or come up with something innovative AND is better - or as least as good - at helping content creators generate revenue than what currently exists.
The good news: Apple is lucky that it is only Google and Spotify, who offer services that aren't profitable, and precious few people actually use or both. So Spotify can still add podcasting and not be anywhere near profitable, and for Google podcasting will be just something else that the 1 billion owners of Android phones and Chrome web browsers will generally ignore, just as they do with nearly everything else except search and Gmail. So for now the market share loss is small and meaningless. Google, for instance, once again screwed up something that might have actually worked by pairing podcasts with their failing Google Play Music product that no one uses instead of pairing it with one of their two platforms that actually consistently makes money in YouTube. So Apple dodged a bullet there thanks to the incompetence of the competition and not due to anything of their own, and as a result they still have time, plus the clout that goes with being the #1 company in the world, so big and profitable that a $51 billion quarter is somehow viewed as a negative.
But what if something that is actually popular, enjoys heavy user engagement/loyalty,makes tons of money and is actually competent, like Facebook, offers a podcasting service? That would not be good for Apple at all. Just as Facebook crushed MySpace and just as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have surpassed SMS, you would have all those people that have installed Facebook and Whatsapp on their iPhones install FaceCast (or whatever)? Apple would be crushed and have no recourse. Someone mentioned locking competitors out? Nope. Try that and the podcasters would just jump ship en masse.
For Apple, meeting this need in the short term is easy: migrate their podcasting operation to Google Cloud Services. Before you blow your stack, realize that Apple has already done this for some of their iCloud services and done it for the same reason: they lack their own cloud infrastructure and they need Google Analytics. Spotify moved some of their platform to Google Cloud Services for the same reason: analytics, even though they compete with Google Play Music (not really because Google Play Music is an even bigger failure than Spotify) and now with podcasts. It really is no different from Google competing with Apple for Android market share on one hand and getting a ton of search revenue on iOS on the other, or Apple competing with Samsung for device sales while buying memory and SOCs from them for their own devices.
That will buy Apple some time to create a new, better way of helping podcasters - and themselves - make revenue on the platform that they created without betraying Apple's values on user privacy and such. But the bottom line is that if Apple doesn't step up and do this, someone else - again, likely Facebook - will.
I hope that Apple listened to them carefully, then either explained in great detail how wrong they were, or possibly laughed them out of the room. Apple shouldn't want to get involved in the management of podcasts. Even if it didn't involve a lot of work to pull it off, it's way too late to put that genie back in the bottle.