I thought this might be of interest.
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Well, Apple News crashed when I clicked the link, so that’s not ideal. 
But when I clicked again and read the story - this may explain some of why I have been hearing about the declining ad market for the last several months, and why many podcasts have fewer sponsor reads.
I’m unable right now to make the link work, but as an avid podcast listener for many years, I can see how this shake-out is inevitable. More podcasters chasing too few advertisers (or other types of funders), and people having only so much bandwidth to actually carve out time to listen which forces people to be much more selective with a smaller list of “used” subscriptions. Same economic forces which drive consolidation in radio, then TV, now ongoing with podcasts, streaming TV services, social media services, etc. Economics 101 that used to be taught at most universities…perhaps no longer?
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The Apple News link works for me, but I would not have been surprised if it hadn’t.
People, please bear in mind that Apple News is a very limited release product. Most countries of the world do not have it. No, I don’t mean Apple News+, I mean plain old Apple News. Why that is still the case so many years after launch is beyond me.
The links never work for me in Slack for iOS/iPadOS.
Part of the problem appears to be that advertisers want listener info, age, income, region, etc. Data that Spotify and other services can provide but RSS podcasters cannot.
I had no problem opening the link. But I do not have Apple News installed on my iPad and iPhone so the link opened in Safari.
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I’m hoping that someone out there is coming up with better ways of making a sustainable income from providing content over the internet (whether podcast, video, blog, newsletters, courses, resources) than selling advertising or sponsorship. This has always been an issue in the “long tail” of radio where audiences are in the hundreds or low thousands, which is why advertisers want such detailed “metrics” - they’ve got to ensure that their product or service sales increases to more than cover the cost of advertising, so they’ve got to know who is hearing the ads and going on to become a customer. If you have 1000 listeners and 1% of them buy as a result of hearing an advert that’s probably viable, but if 0.5% do, that might not be.
I can see why it would make advertisers unhappy to be paying for ads in automatic downloads that are much less likely to be heard. Apple’s move is probably right in the sense of measuring real listenership better.
Modern technology drastically cuts the cost of entry. It’s very much cheaper to set up to make a podcast than to set up a radio station and it’s considerably cheaper to “deliver” a podcast than any form of broadcast. That requires less income to sustain and so audiences can be much smaller and still worthwhile, but it also means there are many, many more people in the game and vastly increased competition for ads and sponsors, even if it also lowers the cost of entry for them. A boom during the pandemic had to be followed by contraction and some dubious business decisions driven by cheap debt did not help.
I remember reading articles about this challenge as soon as the web began to emerge in the 1980s. There were multiple attempts to sort out micropayments and e-currencies to make them: so that we’d pay directly the (very small) advertising income that is currently received when we listen to a podcast episode, or read a page of an online newspaper, but no-one seems to have found a way to pay someone a tenth of a cent without it costing 4c to do so. Subscriptions (including such things as memberships and patreon) are an attempt to resolve it, but it places a bigger burden on your keenest consumers and makes their data even more valuable to advertisers, so it doesn’t even relax the grip that sponsors and advertisers have.
As I said, I hope someone finds a way as so much of the web is horribly distorted by advertising and worse things paid for by big money.
I did not realize that. In the future, I’ll look for the web version of the stories.
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USA, Canada, UK and Australia only!
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My impression is that advertising for shows like MPU, ATP, etc. is almost a completely different market from the big media companies’ podcasts mentioned in the article. Indie podcast advertising tends to rely less on download numbers and more on actual response rates based on coupon codes and the like. I doubt this change is responsible for the downturn in that market. Especially since a big portion of their listeners are probably using Overcast or other alternatives to Apple’s Podcasts app.
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Here’s the web version for anyone who wants it.
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That could well be. I did hear a comment somewhere about Spotify eating everyone’s lunch, and that being somehow related to the downturn in the MPU, ATP, etc, advertising market, and I hadn’t realized that Spotify had done so well in podcasts.
I guess I should subscribe to a Relay show and see if their behind-the-scenes podcast mentions it. I know companies don’t like talking too openly about financials, but I find the giant interconnected machine of the economy, and little parts of it, fascinating.
I agree - this topic fascinating and I would like to know more. Advertising and its associated data gathering has profound effects on podcasting. I suppose there is a positive effect in that podcasting is financially supported, but there are many negative effects including massive user privacy violation, user annoyance and market distortions. When I search for a podcast on a particular topic the result is usually from whoever paid the most money instead of what I am actually searching for.
Readers of this thread might find this old MPU Talk forum thread (link below) of interest. This is from 2019; the podcast industry has changed substantially since then. The 5th paragraph in the first post (beginning with “But that could change …”) may have been prophetic.
link: https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/growth-of-the-podcast-industry-analytics-and-rad/10295?u=arthur
Apple’s tightening of its podcast download reporting is probably a step in the right direction for more accurate analytics reporting without necessarily compromising user privacy.
Thanks. It is understandable when the majority of the Apple-centric press (and really even all of tech) is based in the USA, as are most tech podcasters.
Another little gem I struggled with recently… you know how you no longer need to use the word “Hey” for Siri? Hands up who knew that was severely limited by territory? Wanna guess where you can actually use it?
Not exactly emblazoned across the web, is it? Any time new Apple products are announced, I always make sure to visit the New Zealand Apple home page. Even then most of the differences are in what is not said. (Ah, well, 'cept the Apple Watches for a week in December 
)
But back to the original topic…
Yes! Pretty much every time I see “podcasts” or “the podcast industry” mentioned in an even vaguely mainstream outlet, they are referring to the “podcasting industrial complex” to coin (or rather abuse) a phrase.
I do regularly listen to one podcast I would put in that class, but it is at least honest about itself, and was born from the same kind of passion as those like in the Relay stable. Everything else is “indie” and, frankly, the better for it.
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Heh, “Podcasting industrial complex,” I love that.
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