Metrics are unclear for podcasts... and that's a good thing.

[smcoakley]

Inspired by one of the topics on the 5/16 WAN Show, but also a general comment and PSA I have about podcasts, and my fears for the future. Maybe someday I'll write a more in-depth article about this topic (this is my abridged version, lol). I know its long, but I think you'll find this interesting and educational.

 

Background

 

If you aren't familiar with the world of podcasting then my topic title can seem like a pretty weird take, but once you understand the technology behind podcasts, it might make a bit more sense. First thing to know about podcasts is they're actually decentralized, and they always have been. Podcasts were decentralized before decentralization became "cool" in the last couple of years; it has been around in much the same system since 2003. (Worth noting that decentralization was kinda the default way most people built technologies back then, but that's a different topic for lament.)

 

Essentially, a podcast is just an RSS feed (yes, the same technology used for text news by the late Google Reader, though it is used by many readers and is still alive today), except each "article" in the news feed is instead a metadata entry representing a new podcast episode pointing to a separate download link for an MP3 file (or other audio format) of that episode. As long as you have your RSS feed formatted correctly, you can host this feed along with your audio files anywhere you want. It could be on your own server in your basement, on a cloud VPS server, on a SaaS podcasting platform, whatever. This is very freeing, as you can move podcasts between providers and/or servers (usually...) and there's no lock-in for you as a creator.

 

The benefit is not only for the publisher of the podcast, the benefit is also for the listener, because that RSS feed is an open format. A "podcast player" is just an application that knows how to parse and understand these RSS feeds that you've subscribed to, stream and/or download the linked audio files, and play them back as an audio player. This is what makes it possible for there to be so many different podcast players to choose from and allows all these players to work with any podcast. (Usually...) You as the user have a choice; you can find something free, you can pay for a premium application, you can find something that has accessible features for your specific needs or disabilities, etc. Your choice of player doesn't also dictate which podcasts you can listen to; after all, it is an open protocol. It is a very good system.

 

By the way, if you like video podcasts, those work with the open RSS protocol too. Essentially you just replace your audio file links with video file links. There's some extra complication here as video delivery and playback can be quite tricky, especially at scale... it also requires the user to use a player that supports video playback, which some do, but many don't. But at least it is supported, and you can do it if you want! Though only 1 podcast I've ever subscribed to had video available this way...

 

How do metrics work?

 

Now you may begin to see the challenge in delivering metrics for podcasts, not even just for listeners but to creators as well. Who hosts the metrics? What if you host your podcast on multiple locations? How do you aggregate the numbers? And how do you even collect a "listen" metric? After all, traditionally, podcast players would download an entire episode file, and then offline would play it back. There's no way for you to know if the user listened to the episode multiple times after it was downloaded. Or maybe they only listened for the first half and then stopped. Or maybe they never listened at all! The only thing you can really track is "how many downloads/streams to players did this episode file receive" which is inexact.

 

Now, many podcast hosting systems do attempt to collect these metrics for you as the podcast creator, and make them available to you. And that's good, as its better than nothing. But how would anonymous users find out these numbers? There's no system in the open RSS protocol that gives you a standard way of communicating this data point to a player app, and player apps have nowhere to show this info.

 

Moreover, if you are hosting a podcast on your own server, this would be very trivial to spoof your listen metrics publicly. Unlike a centralized platform like YouTube which can be the authoritative place to (hopefully) fairly track views in a way out of the control from each individual channel, there's no such authoritative body for podcasts. Hey, nobody ever said that decentralization doesn't also have downsides as well as upsides.

 

About Spotify... and my fear for the future

 

So now people seem to be upset about Spotify making public the number of listens a podcast has on Spotify's platform. The reasons people are resistant to this are probably less about the technical geekery I've been talking about, and more about advertising like Linus speculated. That seems like a fair speculation. But how can Spotify do this, technically speaking?

 

Well, its because Spotify podcasts are a closed ecosystem. All that cool stuff I discussed earlier about the tech behind podcasts? Yeah, Spotify podcasts don't use any of that. Spotify built their own centralized podcasting platform from the ground up that is entirely incompatible with the existing podcast ecosystem, and leveraged their huge presence in the market to sway people to their platform and gain market share. It doesn't use RSS at all. You cannot use just any podcast player to listen to podcasts published on Spotify; you can only use the Spotify app.

 

But because it is a closed platform, very similar to YouTube's model, they can much more easily develop a system on their backend to track listens much more accurately and authoritatively, and make that data available to creators. Or, apparently if they choose, to users publicly. Which is cool I suppose, but was it worth giving up decentralization for? I would say no. It also means Spotify can proceed with this change, feedback be damned, because they have the market share, and users can't leave the platform if their favorite podcast is a Spotify exclusive, and creators can't leave if their listeners use only Spotify. [Insert Vader "I am altering the deal" meme.]

 

My fear is that RSS and open protocols for podcasting will continue to be eaten away by centralized platforms like Spotify's, and soon podcasts will be subject to the same enshittification that other media systems have already been vulnerable to for some time. We can't just throw away something that is already working and allows for healthy competition in exchange for something that matters a lot less, like public view counts.

 

What can we do?

 

To Creators: Please publish your podcasts as open RSS feeds. I don't care where you host them. If you want to make them available on Spotify, I understand. There's a lot of users there. But if you do, don't exclusively do so. Also ensure you have a public RSS feed that follows open standards. Though if you want to take more risk in order to make a statement, reject platforms like Spotify and refuse to publish on platforms that don't support RSS. If everyone did this, then attempts to centralize will die.

 

To Listeners: This will hurt you more than creators. Use only podcast apps that leverage RSS feeds. If a podcast is exclusive to a closed platform, then refuse to listen to that podcast. I realize that sucks, and it hurts the creator in the short term. But creators publish to exclusive platforms because that's where users are. We need to make it so that that's where user's aren't. Ask your favorite creators to publish RSS feeds of their podcasts. If enough people are asking for this, that's a signal to the creator that it might be worth their time.

 

To Everyone: If you like podcasts and care about open standards and competition in this space, educate people about podcasts and open RSS feeds. Many people don't understand what it is, or what the point of it is, or what we might lose if we lose RSS. And why would they unless you tell them about it?

 

Please, do not let centralized podcast platforms like Spotify become the norm. Don't let RSS die. I know the Internet's track record for holding onto decentralized technologies is poor, and there's few survivors left. But amazingly, podcasts are still going strong decades later, and centralized platforms are still the minority for now, so now is the time to push back while we still can.

 

Thanks for coming to my TED talk, lol.