> Is RSS Dead
Have you heard of podcasts? They're booming and they rely on RSS. The way they're subscribed to and the way they're submitted to large platforms is via their RSS feeds.
Have you heard of podcasts? They're booming and they rely on RSS. The way they're subscribed to and the way they're submitted to large platforms is via their RSS feeds.
It's not just better ad statistics -- with apps like Stitcher/Spotify, the app contains both discovery and download, and also the player. When you listen to podcasts on their apps, they're able to report useful, interesting metrics to podcast producers like skip rate, bounce rate, etc. They're valuable metrics.
As far as I know, podcasts that are distributed by RSS and consumed by the apple podcasts app / any other app don't gather these metrics. There's no reason they couldn't though, because RSS / Atom have plenty of flexibility to add a field for a metric reporting callback/webhook. We could have an open convention for what goes over that webhook, maybe even some competition in providing podcast playback metrics as a service.
(... does this all exist already and I'm just behind the times?)
Podcasts work really well as is. They don't need fixing. Barrier to entries are low, and like the early days of youtube, you can have a successful podcast with a relatively low production value. They are published openly, monetizing gets easier with some traction. There is so much cross promotion that discoverability isn't a challenge either. I just hope the 'open podcast ecosystem' can resist attempts to be destroyed by Spotify/Luminary etc. This happy medium doesn't need personalized targeted advertising.
[0]: https://rad.npr.org/dotorg/about-rad/ [1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/501/
* Is Spotify trying to "fix" that now like iTunes tried to "fix" that 20 years ago?
* Why should I "enjoy" Spotify as much as I "enjoyed" iTunes? [I didn't, not even a little bit]