Google Podcasts is gone – and so is my faith in Google | Hacker News Reader

Google Podcasts is gone – and so is my faith in Google

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80 pointsApocryphon71 comments

This closes with an interesting quote that I agree with:

  "But if you’re a Google Podcasts user, should you use YouTube Music for podcasts? No, you shouldn’t. Because Google has made it clear over and over and over again that it can and will be distracted by shiny new things. The stuff you love will get worse, and it’ll die. Get out of the Google Cycle wherever you can."

While I agree with the quote in general, I find nothing wrong with YouTube Music. In fact its Auto-Play feature is often much better than Apple Music's.

I'm sure they'll manage to ruin it eventually but I see no reason for us not to use it until that happens.

Nope they won't. It's cash machine

As mentioned earlier in the article, it's more like YouTube Music is a poor substitute for a proper app for podcasts, specifically.

Ah, I see, that's a much better explanation actually, thank you. Somehow I missed that part in particular.

I understand why Google would shut down an expensive gambit like Stadia, but cheap good-will projects like RSS and Podcasts? Why not just keep them running for PR alone? How expensive could they possibly be to run?

I assume that RSS was killed because the company that deals with ad-space doesn’t like when you don’t visit the places they show ads on.

Makes sense. But I don't think this actually answers OPs question. Google is swimming in money, less so wrt good will.

Each engineer gets paid something around 200k-500k all in depending on seniority. I doubt just 1 team worked on this product given the bureaucracy of big tech companies like google. So why shell out millions of dollars in salary per year when the product isn’t making money?

We're talking about maintenance though, not a fresh build out

Google isn't a charity. The product doesn't make any money, so all maintenance is an irrecoverable expense.

What's the business cost of leaving a sour taste in people's mouths over and over again?

Really depends on "how many people". Also if its roughly the same group of people they're making angry over and over, and they don't see an impact to the bottom line, then I'd say the answer is "pretty small", at least relative to Google's size (at which its all about volume)

Google answered this. The cost is higher than leaving a sour taste in people's mouths.

Maybe, or maybe they haven't even considered it and the cumulative effect it will have.

Google is basically split into "build things that make users happy" teams and "build things that make Google money" teams, so I think that on an individual product level you may be correct, but in aggregate at the high level Google believes there is a ton of value in revenue-less products.

Now for Podcasts (or any given product) there's always going to be some calculus of "is it enough value to justify the cost", and clearly Google believes the answer here is no.

Even worse. What engineer goes to Google and wants to be stuck on a maintenance project? No advancement potential. At best usable to claim you were a googler.

Most of us do much less glorious maintenance for much less money and fewer perks. They drill Leetcode for months because it pays.

Maybe part of the problem is paying people 200-500K for this kind of job? Is it written in stone at all products require that kind of "skill" to function?

The problem is not that. The problem is that managers will insist that businesses are in danger if they face any competition.

Of course, the only thing that's really in danger is the careers (and egos) of those managers. Internal competition would be an extremely good source of information on the performance of the business those managers manage.

So anything remotely competitive gets eliminated.

My understanding is that the codebase was partially shared with Google+, which was a corporate priority. But having to check changes against both reduced velocity so the easiest thing was to just kill Google Reader which didn't have much love in Google' C-suite.

I doubt it has anything to do with the direct cost of maintenance. Google has a tendency to introduce multiple products that serve similar markets, as the article cited with Podcasts and YouTube Music. They have to cut the cruft eventually. Given the numbers cited in the article (23% listen to podcasts through YouTube Music, 4% through Podcasts), YouTube Music made more sense from the business perspective. I would imagine that is especially true when you consider that they can promote more products through YouTube Music.

That said, I somehow doubt that many people are going to transition from Podcasts to YouTube Music. There are too many alternatives out there, alternatives that would likely reflect the interests of Podcasts users better. Heck, nearly three quarters of podcast consumers are already using those products.

> I doubt it has anything to do with the direct cost of maintenance. Google has a tendency to introduce multiple products that serve similar markets, as the article cited with Podcasts and YouTube Music.

Besides both using audio files, Podcasts and Music are totally different markets, with different use cases, etc. Are spreadsheets and games in similar markets, because they both use graphics on video screens?

Jamming them together because of some superficial similarity is a stupid simplification, even if many users already do things sub-optimally.

Google really needs to get some cheap offshore teams that can do maintenance on the products they'd otherwise kill. They'd stop burning so much goodwill that way.

> Are spreadsheets and games in similar markets, because they both use graphics on video screens?

Slightly more realistic examples would be "spreadsheets and databases" or "spreadsheets and word processors". Plenty of people use a spreadsheet when data is represented in a tabular format, even when it isn't the most appropriate tool. (Tangentially, I've also heard of 4x games referred to as spreadsheet games. Though that's more of a description of play style than presentation!)

Don't get me wrong. I agree that podcasts shouldn't be jammed in with music. At least for myself. Yet when Google's numbers are saying that about a quarter of people access podcasts through YouTube, there are clearly a lot of people who do not agree!

They made the same calculation with Google Play Music and "merged" it into Youtube Music. Not to worry, they migrated all my music over! Except most of the Youtube "Music" was people's personal uploads of dubious quality. I ended up moving to Spotify instead.

"I can't count that low" is less of a joke than it sounds. Google's approach to developing software and products is great for ensuring that everything they make can scale up, but is terrible for scaling down and minimizing the maintenance work required for a small service.

Mature products don't have enough scope for Google engineers to get good performance reviews.

Maybe you could spin up a lower tier of engineers who aren't on the same career track and exist only to maintain mature/deprecated products, but that could come with its own set of problems.

Anyone have a sense of whether the launch-and-abandon behavior actually works for Google, or is it more like a trust-funder whose checks keep coming no matter how much partying they do?

Did they really abandon it? First Google Music was rolled under the YT umbrella, now the podcasts app was rolled into the music app. Makes sense to me; why have them in different places? This is exactly how Spotify and iTunes work. I have some small quibbles with the UI but overall it's great.

You could blame them for launching separate apps in the first place but hindsight is 20/20. I can also agree that the migration should have been smoother. Not migrating listening history is definitely an annoyance.

"Did they really abandon it? First Google Music was rolled under the YT umbrella,"

Not really, Google Music and Youtube Music were very distinct products at least at the consumption end.

Apple has separate Music and Podcasts apps.

Works for the employees, because maintaining a service in as-is state doesn't bring promotion opportunities, so who would want to be part of that?

Not sure if anyone at Google really cares about Google in general. And who could blame them?

The conventional wisdom is that this cycle happens not because it works for Google as an entity but it happens as a byproduct of how promotions and compensation work within Google (heavily based on new product launches).

I have no idea if this is actually true and/or if it was ever true based on personal experience (never worked at Google) but I've heard it repeatedly including from some seemingly reliable sources.

I remember when Google was waaay smaller the sorts of goodwill projects like Gmail were required. Engineers had to work on side projects in part of their paid time. I've worked at a couple of companies that supported a "10% time" for side projects that was inspired by this. So products like Podcasts might be like a mutation of that earlier company culture.

Contrast with Apple's significantly less experimental, more refined approach to product releases.

Apple's approach has been a disaster recently with the glorified (and polished) beta test kit "Vision Pro" and the cancelled Apple Car.

If Apple has embraced the Vision Pro as an experimental product, they probably could have released it with an order of magnitude or two less expenditure. But Apple does not experiment in the marketplace, they release solid polished products that have been in a sense validated by their competitors (Blackberry etc).

When it comes to innovation, an experimental approach like Google's is key. If you don't have that culture, you will get left behind. Apple is in a precarious position: the iPhone is over 15 years old, becoming "my parent's phone". They're not a player in AI and the car project failed. How will they capture the next generation?

> Contrast with Apple's significantly less experimental, more refined approach to product releases.

Apple's recent updates to iTunes broke basic functionality like playlists. I'm not sure "refined" is the right description, perhaps "more conservative but just as broken".

Everyone makes mistakes but I think you would agree that Apple is known for product excellence overall.

Then people project that approach onto other co's like Google, that have a more experimental bent, and get upset when experiments have undesirable results (of course Google deserves some blame here for how they frame things).

They're known for it because of inertia from Steve Jobs' leadership. They've declined noticeably since then IMO.

Google is like that really rich guy whose wife runs a boutique store that loses $10k per month. If the wife decides to change the way the store runs, it doesn't matter and doesn't materially change his financial position.

I hate that google shuts down things too and I wonder what things I should avoid

at the same time, I know that nearly every company, google no exception, has less person power than they need. So at some point a triage happens because they can't keep people on every project. And, yes, they are laying people off which makes it worse. even if they didn't lay people off this issue would still exist.

maybe you could argue the problem is they shouldn't launch the service in the first place. I don't know if that would be better or not

Google is in a league of their own though. They have killed so many IM services I can't even keep track anymore. And then when they fail to grab market share they lobby legislators to bully Apple...

" I know that nearly every company, google no exception, has less person power than they need. "

That's a wild statement to make when looking at Alphabet. Their core products could be run on a fraction of the tens of thousands they employ. They are a hugely flabby company which lacks focus, not resources.

They dabble in anything new that comes along, looking for a new hit and almost never succeed. Almost everything outside Search that you could call a success Google acquired. Despite decades of attempts their rate of producing homegrown hits is utterly dismal.

Their advertising success blinds people to what an inept organization Google are.

I really don't understand why when they do things like this the data does not port well. Like I listen to some smaller podcasts run by friends, and the YT Music Podcasts only have episodes up thru December, but Google Podcasts has 15 more recent episodes listed. It's all these little sloppy things that Google keeps doing that really makes it seem like no one quality checks or cares that stuff is just broken? Like how Google Homes now barely respond properly to anything beyond the time and weather.

Just remember, Google Reader was killed so Google Plus could live.

Then Google Plus died.

Google rolling podcasts into YouTube Music is great, for me. Much easier to use and track your subscriptions.

Sorry for people who liked Podcasts, I didn't. The app was horrible, I barely used it.

I have the exact same thoughts but in opposite positions. Google Podcasts was a simple, straightforward, and easy to use app that just worked. YT Music is so cluttered and filled with useless garbage when all you want is to listen to a podcast. It's an awful app. As a result of them shutting down Podcasts I'm not going to YT Music despite paying for Premium. I'll have to find a different app that I imagine will be worse than the UX of Podcasts.

> Google cited a statistic from Edison Research that said about 23 percent of podcast listeners in the US say YouTube is their primary podcast platform

I assume this means YouTube Music, not plain YouTube? The article (and Google itself) is confusing in this regard. It mentions YouTube, YouTube Music, and also something called YouTube Shorts. Am I supposed to know what all these things are and how they differ from each other?

> YouTube Music is a subscription app, and nobody’s going to pay $10 a month for a podcast app

Is it? I just logged onto https://music.youtube.com/ and started listening to a podcast for free. But apparently there's also a YouTube Music Premium service that costs $11/month.

It's really difficult to keep all these products straight, but this article isn't helping any.

I'd say plain YouTube, a lot of podcasts put them up as videos,not to mention the ones that also have a video component as well.

It's probably proper YouTube, as many major podcasts record video of the show and post it there. I'd be very surprised to hear YTMusic was popular in any metric.

You could be right, but (as the article says), trying to listen to a podcast on the vanilla YouTube app is extremely frustrating, since you can't play audio in the background. Is it still a podcast if you have to watch it like a video? It's hard for me to imagine that 23% of "listeners" in the US do that.

>Is it still a podcast if you have to watch it like a video?

Maybe.

I often listen to YouTube video essays while falling asleep or doing chores. I don't watch the video portion during this time, but it's playing on the phone which is face down and probably in another room. Sometimes even while driving, I'll have the phone face down in the glove box.

Can't really do this if I'm walking, but that's not my major use case.

Ultimately it's just "audio that people are listening to in some way."

YT Music makes it easier to just listen to the audio part of it... that includes music videos posted on YouTube proper.

No, it means what it said: plain YouTube. One of YouTube Music's main selling points (vs. say, the old Google Play Music) is that it incorporates YouTube, so you can, say, add YT mixes to your YTM playlists.

No, plain YouTube. A lot of what people call "podcasts" don't exist as audio-only version, they are just YouTube videos. Even if they are audio-only YouTube videos.

I did not know this either until I heard a former friend who did me dirty started a podcast and my friend and I couldn't find it. A mutual friend suggested checking YouTube because "that's where most people put podcasts." Sure enough, it's on YouTube but not as an audio-only RSS feed.

>Is it? I just logged onto https://music.youtube.com/ and started listening to a podcast for free. But apparently there's also a YouTube Music Premium service that costs $11/month.

Eventually they won't let you listen when the screen is off unless you have a YouTube music subscription. Id you don't mind keeping the screen on you can listen for free.

Thanks for clarifying. I didn't know that either. I wouldn't even call it a "podcast" at that point, but I guess the definition is changing.

>I wouldn't even call it a "podcast" at that point, but I guess the definition is changing.

Yeah, it's a generational thing.

My friend and I who couldn't find the podcast were all like "WTF? That's not even a podcast! It's a YouTube video!" Our mutual friend (who is more than a decade younger than us) was like "YouTube is where everyone goes for podcasts, I don't see problem?"

When I really, really think about it there isn't much difference between a YouTube video essayist like Shaun (https://www.youtube.com/@Shaun_vids) who I usually "watch" without visuals and a podcast. So the distinction is... blurry, and ultimately not important.

Then there's podcasters who put a video of them recording the podcast up as a YouTube video.

And there's OSW Review (https://www.youtube.com/@OSW) who call themselves a "video podcast" but I definitely wouldn't want to listen to in audio-only format. So what's the difference between a "video podcast" and a "YouTube video?" Nothing.

Sure it is. The whole reason for why YouTube Music exists is that YT is very convenient for uploading and sharing audio tracks (and to defy copyright restrictions). There are huge amounts of "videos" with no graphical elements, that only exist to stream sound. And so, many podcasts upload their episodes to YouTube because it's a truly ubiquitous, universal platform for audio and/or visual needs.

Does this mean that there will be no first-party podcast app on Android? I’m deep into the Apple ecosystem, so it doesn’t really impact me, but I would guess that most people who listen to podcasts use the default podcast app on their platform¹ so this would potentially be a killer blow to podcasters similar to how the closing of Google Reader decimated the blog ecosystem.

⸻

1. HN readers would be outliers in this respect. I haven’t used Apple Podcasts for around a decade or so, using Overcast except for one podcast whose delivery method (dump a whole week’s daily meditations at once) and Overcast don’t play well together so I listen to that one on Downcast. What I’ve heard about the newest revisions to Apple Podcasts, though, make me curious about what it’s current state is.

Relatedly, I used to be a happy Google Music user getting pretty fed up with YouTube Music. Are there any good services letting you upload a collection of music files and then play them from your phone or browser. Preferably also letting you download certain playlists for offline use?

I use iTunes match for that. I’m not sure if Apple still lets new people sign up for it, but you can have the master collection of your music on Apple’s servers (there are some limitations on length (but not size, oddly enough) so the lossless single-file recording I have of Richard Strauss’s Elektra is marked ineligible, but otherwise they have my full music collection.

I wouldn't consider Google Podcasts a first party app. Even as a Pixel user, I only ever interacted with it by searching for a podcast. I could install it, but it wasn't pre-installed.

I'm not sure but YouTube Music _might_ be pre-installed. I can't recall.

Google Podcasts wasn’t installed on my Samsung phone out-of-the-box, and the app is 5 years old. I imagine most people found a podcast app they like, or they perhaps discovered podcasts on Spotify and stayed there.

They lost all credibility to me. All the apps and services that I love that have been shut down over time… this culture is so wrong. Instead of building quality products that stand the test of time and continue to pour quality over time, it seems that only thing that matter is the individuals inside. Like a F1 driver that only care about its career. It’s the best thing that can happen, let this culture and their products die and be eaten by the competition that care about the users and the quality of the products they make. I hope OpenAI eats them with a search product.

When Google announced they were shutting down Podcasts, I decided to switch to iPhone and de-Google the rest of my life.

Until that point, all of my phones had been "official" Google supported products (from the ADP1, through Nexus and every single Pixel phone), I had several Chromecasts, Nest cameras, etc.

Obviously it's not that Podcasts affected my life that much, it was just the final straw of Google taking the carpet out from underneath me; my Google Reader moment, I guess. Anyway, I'm now enjoying polished products with good battery life and have no intention of going back.

Google Podcasts was an example of a product that didn't even become fully fleshed out before getting deprecated. It was so painfully basic, the Settings menu had like two 'settings' from what I recollect.

Google engineers make new products, put the most basic functionality, consider everything else as "P2", and move on to the next project. So the product never rises above basic functionality.

Lots of posts about Google Podcasts shutdown. Has anyone mentioned that Google Podcasts wasn't a feasible app for Google to start inserting ads into podcasts through? YouTube is much better set up insert ads into podcasts.

The best add is no ad. If there are going to be ads, it's better that they be relevant to me and the podcast creators get better compensation for them.

Product skill issue. They're Google, surely they can find a way to insert ads into an app. The article itself suggests several ways they could innovate, surely some of it is monetizable:

> What’s most frustrating in this case, though, is that Google had an opportunity to do something genuinely great in podcasts. Podcast discovery is a problem, and so is finding information buried inside hours of audio. What Google should have done was find ways to actually connect its services. When you discover a podcast you love in YouTube Shorts, it should have offered you a one-tap way to subscribe to that podcast in Google Podcasts. It should have made transcripts searchable in Google so you can find the moments and insights you’re looking for right in the audio.

Google Reader shutting down - 1964 points by knurdle on March 13, 2013

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725

You were warned.

Google Podcasts service shuts down in the US next week

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866748

I replaced Google reader with Newsblur and Google Podcasts with Antennapod and I could not be happier.

> Get out of the Google Cycle wherever you can.

I think this is a bit much. Maybe the better lesson is "don't get attached to products whose providers aren't sustained by and dependent on you and your money." Yes, google tries some stuff, and kills it if it isn't important and successful. Should they really need to run and maintain free products indefinitely if they haven't gained traction?

A smaller company can start a product that doesn't succeed in the way the business needs it to, and they'll pivot, get acquired (and the new parent kills the product or subsumes it into some larger offering), or die. We might be disappointed when that happens, but we don't feel burned or distrustful.

(edited for typo)

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