A Post-Mortem for Social Podcast Discovery

Trade-offs Since adopting RSS saves podcast listening apps an enormous amount of time and money by not forcing them to reinvent the way content flows through the podcasting ecosystem, it means the barriers to finding an audience for these apps is lower. As a result, many of these apps exist, and thus a tremendous amount of market fragmentation has ... See more

Example: RSS (Really Simple Syndication)SS has long been the backbone of podcasts, providing a powerful distribution mechanism that enables creators to publish their audio from a single endpoint and immediately syndicate their content to any consumption platform that wants to ingest it.

RSS has also been instrumental to enabling the consumption side of podcasting. Virtually all of the world’s podcast listening apps that exist in the world of podcasts (such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and many others) support the ingestion of RSS-powered podcasts. The benefit of doing so is huge: if a podcast listening app adopts this sta... See more