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

Don’t get me wrong. I am fearful of a Facebook-like algorithm that chokes my podcast off from those who subscribed to it. Just as I sometimes get nostalgic about the old school blogosphere from a decade ago, I’ll no doubt look back at the open podcast ecosystem and miss parts of it. And I’m not super excited about a future where I have to toggle be... See more

The effectiveness of this approach varies widely. Why does a playlist generated off a single song on Spotify work so well and yet its podcast recommendations feel generic? Why, after spending years and millions of dollars on research, including the fabled Netflix prize, do Netflix's recommendations still feel generic, and why doesn't it really matt... See more

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