FD, I dont watch him anymore as he is becoming increasingly less interesting.
Use https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp to grab what you need before the account is nuked.
Then they changed their monetization model to a subscription and left their previous customers with... nothing.
Screw them.
If they wouldn’t have I would have dropped it when they changed monetisation models.
You might want to log in to your account again since you have the premium for free.
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. Spotifies 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.
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.
I can't imagine what features would need to exist for me to be willing to pay a recurring fee.
Nowadays I spend my time listening to different podcasts and tune into Rogan if he has a particularly good guest on.
With TV shows, if my friends talk about it, I want to watch it too
With podcasts, I don’t seem to really care. If I can’t listen to a podcast because it’s not available, I won’t miss it
If one disappears off your preferred platform, 100 more are waiting to fill the void.
Do you think solving the problem includes making it difficult to skip the ads?
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.
Some guesses.
People didn't historically pay for talk radio. (OK, Serius in part. But that was always a pretty narrow slice.)
A lot of podcast content is pretty niche and not especially mainstream. Not sure how easy to monetize outside of advertising/sponsorships.
It started out very grass roots.
Same reason plain web browsers beat AOL and Compuserv
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.
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 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.
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.
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.