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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

We're already sort of in that state now.

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but if you want good data on your listeners you're basically stuck between Blubrry & Libsyn and they're both severely outdated platforms.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!

This all sounded great but I slowly realized that it's closed source and proprietary.

Right.

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.

Sounds very interesting... But link is broken, gives me "Sorry, the page you are looking for does not exist."

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.

They are.

Which is why podcasters don't have any good statistics.

I recommend listening to the Startup podcast, they do a great job of explaining how the industry works :)

Right now? They are. A podcast is really just an RSS feed of episodes in MP3 or AAC format. That's it.

You can barely track how many people download, let alone listen, when they stop, etc. All the things advertisers want to know.

> All the things advertisers want to know.

Well, F them.

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

Some very niche ones that the list might ruin my privacy, they are all in my local language.

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.

SoundCloud Pro, I believe, offers this type of functionality.

There are lots of Podcasts on SoundCloud.

Also Soundcasts [1], which turns non-pro SoundCloud pages into podcasts.

[1] https://www.soundcasts.net

Right.

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.

There's a lot of room for improvement here.

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.

https://www.History-Podcasts.com

You're right for websites. Other services can take care of both sides (Squarespace, for example).

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.

Stitcher does more than that. They actually re-host and (I believe, from the difference in audio quality) re-compress the files.

Most egregiously, as mentioned in the article, they also add their own advertisements.

For websites we have good analytics, but it hasn't become any easier for bloggers to make money. Be careful what you wish for.

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