Marco.org • About ▾

This New York Times article gets a lot wrong, and both podcast listeners and podcast producers should be clear on Apple’s actual role in podcasting today and what, exactly, big producers are asking for.

Podcasts work nothing like the App Store, and we’re all better off making sure they never head down that road.

Podcasts still work like old-school blogs:

• Each podcast can be hosted anywhere and completely owned and controlled by its producer.
• Podcast-player apps periodically check each subscribed podcast’s RSS feed, and when a new episode is published, they fetch the audio file directly from the producer’s site or host.
• Monetization and analytics are completely up to the podcasters.
• Some podcasts have their own custom listening apps that provide their creators with more data and monetization opportunities.

It’s completely decentralized, free, fair, open, and uncontrollable by any single entity, as long as the ecosystem of podcast-player apps remains diverse enough that no app can dictate arbitrary terms to publishers (the way Facebook now effectively controls the web publishing industry).¹

Apple holds two large roles in podcasting today that should threaten its health, but haven’t yet:

• The biggest player app: Apple’s built-in iOS Podcasts app is the biggest podcast player in the world by a wide margin, holding roughly 60–70% marketshare.
• The biggest podcast directory: The iTunes Store’s Podcasts directory is the only one that matters, and being listed there is essential for podcasts to be easily found when searching in most apps.

Critically, despite having these large roles, Apple never locked out other players, dictated almost any terms to podcasters,² or inserted themselves as an intermediary beyond the directory stage.

Like most of the iTunes Store, the podcast functionality has been almost completely unchanged since its introduction over a decade ago. And unlike the rest of the Store, we’re all better off if it stays this way.

Distribution

Apple’s directory gives podcast players the direct RSS feed of podcasts found there, and then the players just fetch directly from the publisher’s feeds from that point forward. Apple is no longer a party to any activity after the search unless you’re using Apple’s player app.

There’s nothing stopping anyone else from making their own directory (a few have), and any good podcast player will let users bypass directories and subscribe to any podcast in the world by pasting in its URL.

Promotion

Apple’s editorial features are unparalleled in the industry. I don’t know of anyone who applies more human curation to podcasts than Apple.

The algorithmic “top” charts, as far as podcasters have been able to piece together, are based primarily (or solely) on the rate of new subscriptions to a podcast in Apple Podcasts for iOS and iTunes for Mac.

Subscriptions happening in other apps have no effect on Apple’s promotional charts because, as long as this remains decentralized and open, Apple has no way of knowing about them.

Playback

Apple’s Podcasts app for iOS is fine, but not great, leaving the door wide open for better apps like mine. (Seriously, it’s much better, and it’s free. Trying to succeed in the App Store in 2016 is neither the time nor the place for modesty.)

Apple’s app has only a few integrations and privileges that third-party apps can’t match, and they’re of ever-decreasing relevance. They haven’t locked down the player market at all.

So let’s get back to that misguided New York Times article.

What (big) podcasters are asking for

Ignoring for the moment that “podcasters” in news articles usually means “a handful of the largest producers, a friend or two of the reporter, and a press release from The Midroll, who collectively believe they represent all podcasters, despite only being the mass-market tip of the iceberg, as if CBS represented all of television or Business Insider represented all of blogging,” and this article is no exception, what these podcasters are asking for is the same tool web publishers have used and abused to death over the last decade to systematically ruin web content nearly everywhere:

“More data.”

On the web, getting more data was easy: web pages are software, letting their publishers use JavaScript to run their own code right in your “player app” (web browser) to creepily record and analyze every move you made, selling you more effectively to advertisers and letting them algorithmically tailor their content to maximize those pennies at any cost to quality and ethics.

Podcasts are just MP3s. Podcast players are just MP3 players, not platforms to execute arbitrary code from publishers. Publishers can see which IP addresses are downloading the MP3s, which can give them a rough idea of audience size, their approximate locations, and which apps they use. That’s about it.

They can’t know exactly who you are, whether you searched for a new refrigerator yesterday, whether you listened to the ads in their podcasts, or even whether you listened to it at all after downloading it.³

Big publishers think this is barbaric. I think it’s beautiful.

Big publishers think this is holding back the medium. I think it protects the medium.

And if that ill-informed New York Times article is correct in broad strokes, which is a big “if” given how much it got wrong about Apple’s role in podcasting, big podcasters want Apple to add more behavioral data and creepy tracking to the Apple Podcasts app, then share the data with them. I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.

By the way, while I often get pitched on garbage podcast-listening-behavioral-data integrations, I’m never adding such tracking to Overcast. Never. The biggest reason I made a free, mass-market podcast app was so I could take stands like this.

Big podcasters also apparently want Apple to insert itself as a financial intermediary to allow payment for podcasts within Apple’s app. We’ve seen how that goes. Trust me, podcasters, you don’t want that.

It would not only add rules, restrictions, delays, and big commissions, but it would increase Apple’s dominant role in podcasts, push out diversity, give Apple far more control than before, and potentially destroy one of the web’s last open media ecosystems.

Podcasting has been growing steadily for over a decade and extends far beyond the top handful of public-radio shows. Their needs are not everyone’s needs, they don’t represent everyone, and many podcasters would not consider their goals an “advancement” of the medium.

Apple has only ever used its dominant position benevolently and benignly so far, and as the medium has diversified, Apple’s role has shrunk. The last thing podcasters need is for Apple to increase its role and dominance.

And the last thing we all need is for the “data” economy to destroy another medium.

According to this Bloomberg report that reads like an intentional leak from Apple:¹

Apple Inc. has constructed a secret team to explore changes to the App Store…

Among the ideas being pursued, Apple is considering paid search, a Google-like model in which companies would pay to have their app shown at the top of search results based on what a customer is seeking. For instance, a game developer could pay to have its program shown when somebody looks for “football game,” “word puzzle” or “blackjack.” …

About 100 employees are working on the project, including many engineers from Apple’s advertising group iAd that’s being scaled back, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. The effort is being spearheaded by Apple Vice President Todd Teresi, who led iAd.

Lots of developers have thoughtfully weighed in with almost unanimous disdain and disbelief, and I mostly agree.

But Ben Thompson’s counterargument is especially worth reading:

As for the concerns of Apple bloggers that such a scheme will reinforce the tendency of the App Store to ensure the rich get richer, well, I’m sorry to say but there is no evidence that Apple cares. The company has done nothing to help developers with more traditional business models (i.e. not pay-to-play games) monetize; indeed, in a telling twist the team working on this search ad product is the former iAd team, which Steve Jobs himself said existed so that apps could be as cheap as possible.

“We” — by which I mean the community of well-read Apple writers and their small, well-known Mac and iOS developer friends — represent only a tiny fraction of the App Store by any measure: quantity, revenue, and quality.

The App Store isn’t ours, and Apple has little business justification to serve our interests. The idea that Apple should change the App Store to make it easier for us to succeed (and correspondingly harder for everyone else) is arrogant, exclusionary, and disconnected from reality.

Ask your non-geek friends or relatives which apps they use most. How many came from people like us, rather than a major tech company, social network, content publisher, retailer, bank, restaurant, big socially-manipulative game publisher, or bulk game cloner? We barely register for Apple or App Store customers.²

Apple does what’s best for Apple first, and the majority of their customers second. Sometimes that aligns with what our little group of developers wants, but usually not.

The only surprise is the idea that something major about the App Store may actually be changing, which has arguably never happened since its introduction in 2008. As Manton said, that’s a good thing: I’d rather Apple do tons of crazy experiments, some of which may hurt my business, than keep neglecting their major role in the entire consumer-software market by continuing to treat apps like music singles forever.

App Store search ads³ are absolutely plausible, especially if the staff and leadership of the alleged “improve the App Store” team came from iAd (whose staff originally drew heavily from web advertising companies). People apply the tools they know.

Such a system would exacerbate much of the App Store’s dysfunction, disincentivizing improvements to organic search and editorial features while raising the cost of acquiring new customers above what many indie developers and business models can sustain.

But it might not be all bad. Imagine if paid search was deployed tomorrow. (Because if it’s going to happen, that’s about as much say as you’re going to have in the matter.)

• What would you do?
• What would your competitors do?
• What would scammers do?

When I consider what paid search would really be like, it simultaneously sounds like a decent idea but also shows just how far today’s App Store is from doing a reasonable job of it.

Assuming the system would be auction-based by keyword like Google AdWords, for less-contested keywords, marketing apps could become much easier. Buying a few good phrases could inexpensively put your app at the top of the list to help you get off the ground and start to seed organic growth.

More significantly, we could buy increased exposure to the most likely customers to buy our apps. More paid-up-front apps could become viable, and prices could rise.

The App Store also has a serious “oversupply problem” — put less gently, it’s full of garbage. If searches were topped by apps that were actively being marketed with enough of a budget for a few keywords, finding good apps as a customer should become easier as well.

But the App Store’s infrastructure is utterly unprepared to do paid search well today.

Developers currently have very little idea where sales come from. We can track sales that come from websites, but most don’t, and any sales coming from within the App Store are a mystery. We have no idea whether people get our app from an editorial feature, a Top list, searching for it by name, or searching for it with other keywords.

For paid search to be worthwhile, we need to know which keywords to buy. We need to know the words people are already using to find our apps, and we need to know how we rank organically for those words. If we decide to buy some keyword ads, we need to know how many sales they brought in.

For the search ads to have more value and command higher prices, we’d also need more precise targeting — for instance, only buying a keyword when searched by someone in a certain region, in a certain age range, possibly with certain other apps installed or other creepy filters. (Which isn’t very Apple-like, but it sure makes ads more effective.)

Google figured this all out 15 years ago. Before that, they figured out how to do highly relevant organic searches, which Apple still doesn’t offer. And they were searching the entire web.

Not only is Apple searching the comparably tiny App Store, but they review every app before publishing it. With a huge staff of humans reviewing all of the input, good search should be much easier because the apps and their metadata should be relatively well-structured and regulated, and very little abuse and fraud should get through.

And yet, the App Store is still full of spam, scams, clones, and flagrant violations of Apple’s own rules, while the app-review team still capriciously nitpicks trivial and arbitrary details with the few developers who are actually trying to make good apps and represent them honestly in the Store.

While a good search-ad system could benefit the App Store, customers, and many of us, nothing in Apple’s track record suggests that they’re willing or able to do this well.

But a bad search-ad system, on top of bad search, will only further damage the App Store, funnel more of our already slim margins back into Apple like a massive regressive tax, and erode customers’ confidence in installing new apps.