I get the reason for this change in general and the idea behind it, although this still gives inflated numbers for a minimum of 5 episodes.
Granted the odd ball out would be Apple and if they’d support the analytics in their podcast app, but much like Apple’s podcast directory is the defacto directory, there’s an opportunity for a better, OPEN, solution.
EDIT ADD: I’d be surprised if every podcast app doesn’t already collect a robust amount of analytics on listening, they just don’t report it where podcast owners could see easily.
Do not enshittify podcasts.
Not sure we're not already on that path.
Nothing wrong with paying for a product. A common method is a private patreon RSS (Atom) feed. It's still an open standard but the podcast earns money. It's at least a better option than the path Spotify took.
> Many thus feature localized ads.
I'm not against dynamic ads per-say, but it really reminds me of TV with the Ad's being wildly irrelevant to me and often being significantly loader than the actual podcast
Basically the aggregator can grab the main RSS feed and tell the server "I'm not just one person, I'm actually serving this to {subscriber count} people" and the server can use that information if it wants to.
Some porn sites (i.e. PornHub) make info about where people spend the most time watching available in the UI in the form of a small graph over the seek bar at the bottom of the video. Even though the adult entertainment and sex work industry has historically been a pioneer of new tech, I don’t think they’re alone in tracking that stuff.
And I’m not thrilled about any of that. I’d be upset if my podcast app started reporting more info. I don’t really care about the specific privacy implications of knowing which podcasts I listen to, but I do care about the loss of privacy in general, especially because some people might be potentially more affected than me.