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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

The podcasts I enjoy the most I can 99% guarantee that they will not go to Spotify:

The Talk Show - the most popular (and profitable AFAIK) Apple related podcast. The chance of Gruber going Spotify only are basically 0.

Accidental Tech Podcast - seeing that one of the cohosts (Marco Arment) actually developed one of the most popular podcast apps for iOS, I don’t think he is going to make a podcast that can’t be listened to on his own app.

Under The Radar - another podcast by Marco Arment.

Exponent - Ben Thompson of Stratechery. He doesn’t directly monetize his podcast. He has a very successful paid newsletter. He wouldn’t want to put his podcast out of reach of the most people.

Manager Tools/Career Tools - the only ads they do on their podcasts are for their own products.

Some developer focused podcasts

Various NPR podcasts.

Etc.

All the podcasts I listen to have a vested interests in reaching the broadest audience possible.

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> The podcasts I enjoy the most [...] All the podcasts I listen to

Emphasis on "I". You are not everyone, and so you don't control all the demand, and so you don't control the direction that the market moves in. Though it's not self-evident that we're headed towards podcast centralization, I think it's a legitimate concern here.

Social networks like Facebook ate a decent part of the open internet's cake in the 2000s because the centralized services were easier to set up and user for the end users (compared to the RSS and SMTP hacks).

I think that's what is going to matter here: If Spotify does a significantly better job than plain RSS, then they're going to be "the" place to listen to podcasts, and can start building a closed ecosystem and then use their monopoly to rent seek. And like in the social networks case, I don't think it's going to be that hard to improve on plain RSS. Some podcasting apps already have comments, user ratings, etc. and I definitely find this sort of thing useful.

Maybe the path of least resistance in these sorts of situations is always some degree of centralization, but I obviously hope the tide starts going back out at some point - preferably complete decentralization, rather than just federated protocols. I think it's a bit like how native apps can move faster (in terms of new APIs and stuff), and the web slowly follows along, waiting for certain things to be "proven" before standardizing them. I think the web wins in the long run, but native apps end up being the "exploratory" instrument in our search algorithm.

Well, seeing that almost every stat shows that the majority of podcasts listeners are iOS users. (https://musicoomph.com/podcast-statistics/) - 54% iOS users - what are the chances that Spotify can become overwhelming on Apple’s platforms? If you want to be a mass market success and reach the largest, most affluent audience, you can’t be a Spotify exclusive.

How many of the top 50 podcast do you suppose would be willing to give up their broader market to be Spotify only?

iOS user here that is a longtime Spotify subscriber. By all other accounts I’m fully bought into the Apple ecosystem but After multiple free or cheap multi month trials on Apple Music I’m still not sold.

Most podcasters that are made an offer that they can’t refuse, probably won’t refuse.

Well, seeing that Apple Music doesn’t host podcasts and there is a separate podcast app with all your other podcast, how does Apple Music play into it?

Would you take your website off the web and host your content exclusively as a Facebook page?

You go where consumers are. I mean there are plenty of businesses that don't have their own web page, but do have a facebook page. Not only is it free, but it is easier to set up. Plus you know that is where all your consumers spend all their time. So if I were a small podcast and knew I could reach the most audience on Spotify that is where I would be.

Spotify only has about 10% of consumers and now if you go exclusively to Spotify, you aren’t reachable by the most popular podcast apps.

Spotify works fine on iOS, so going Spotify only doesn't "lock out" iOS users. There's a paywall, sure, but that's no different to on Android.

If the most affluent audience is iOS users, then Spotify probably sees this as critical to success on iOS because it gives them something that people can't get from Apple Music.

How many of the top 50 podcast do you suppose would be willing to give up their broader market to be Spotify only?

It's interesting: exclusive deals haven't worked well in the music industry because artists make most money outside the platform in concerts etc, and exclusive deals eats into that. OTOH, media plays (eg streamers, TV shows) make most of their money directly from the show and so exclusive deals make sense.

I think many of the top 50 podcasts are exclusively advertising supported, and so they will be tempted by an exclusive deal.

Would you go to a special browser to read not-web pages?

We know that the top Apple related podcasters charge between $5500-$6500 a spot for three to four ads per episode. How much do you think the top more general podcast like Stuff You Should Know charge?

Do you think they would stop publishing podcast that can be found not only when people click on the Podcast app that comes preinstalled with all iOS devices, but can also be found on other podcast apps that use Apple’s public API to its podcast directory?

Based in reports that Spotify is planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on podcasts each year, I'd guess $100k an episode isn't that crazy.

It may even be cheap - Howard Stern's deal is reported to be $90m/year (and that is exclusive to one publisher).

Spotify isn’t that profitable, what happens when the easy debt money dries up?

I assume that the hope is that by that point they are a monopoly/oligopoly and can make money.

Spotify is profitable, and they can adjust profit/growth by adjusting marketing spend.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

What is the problem with using Spotify on iOS and listening your exclusive Spotify podcasts?

No problem, but Spotify is rapidly losing market share to Apple Music and people are not likely to download another app just to listen to an not-podcast. You will lose a large portion of your audience if you can’t be found in the default podcast app not all of the third party apps that use Apple’s public API.

If you were creating a website, how much would Microsoft have to pay you to be exclusively discovered with Bing and not be found with Google?

>Well, seeing that almost every stat shows that the majority of podcasts listeners are iOS users. (https://musicoomph.com/podcast-statistics/) - 54% iOS users

How would they even measure this? What share of those is Spotify users?

When you retrieve the RSS feed for the podcast, your client sends its name in the header just like a browser.

Spotify is at 10%

https://a16z.com/2019/05/23/podcast-ecosystem-investing-2019...

Spotify "caches" episodes so it's clout tends to not be actively reflected in such numbers.[1] I don't know how much but I can assure you it's way higher than 10%

https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasting/comments/9ytna1/does_spo...

If that’s the case, it doesn’t help podcasters. Podcasters get paid based on number of listeners. If the podcaster can’t count Spotify users, they are not as valuable to podcasters.

However, Overcast also caches RSS feeds but it does send the number of subscribers for a feed in the header of the GET request. It also doesn’t cache the actual audio.

Once you put your podcast onto Spotify they give you better info on your listeners and subscribers and number of listens (at least the ones listening on Spotify). You don't lack any data.

We've refused to put any of our 8 podcasts on Spotify for various reasons. One of the reasons is that they will accept money from paying customers and from ad co's for non-paying listeners, but simply want our content for free. Ummm... no thanks.

Additionally, Spotify has older podcasts ‘marked’ on where the audio ads go, and will serve an updated audio ad within the podcast, even though the episode may be several years old.

Could this be Spotify’s version of AdWords for audio?

You can already get dynamically inserted ads with podcasts without going exclusively Spotify. https://marketingland.com/your-quick-start-guide-to-podcast-...

It doesn’t matter if the hosts can no longer book advertisers. Many of those hosts used to use The Deck ad network on their websites. It died because Facebook took all the ad revenue.

Do you have an actual argument? Because all you have been saying is basically "it won't affect me so it's not a problem."

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