The Bloomberg Apple article & original content:From Nick Quah: assuming the Bloomberg report holds true, Apple is now another major buyer, and that’s good news for a certain kind of audio producer, creator, and entrepreneur.https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-16/apple-plans-to-bankroll-original-podcasts-to-fend-off-rivals
Apple category changes and Blubrry explains what this really means inside Apple:These new categories and subcategories will now have their own top 200 shows featured within them, which will give over 13,000 podcasts top 200 exposure in the Apple podcasts directory. https://powerpresspodcast.com/2019/07/17/how-the-2019-apple-podcast-category-changes-affect-for-your-podcast/?sfns=mo
Tom Webster’s article on “What will kill podcasting”...some interesting insights as always from the Wise Webby and he starts with what WON’T kill podcasting: - No one has a right to an audience. Though your cause be just and your hearts be pure, you don’t get handed an audience. You don’t deserve one. Not one single pair of earballs.
And thus, podcasting simply becomes like every other medium known to humankind. No blogger has the right to an audience, either. Wilkie Collins out-Dickensed Charles Dickens and wrote the first detective story before Poe. But we read Dickens and Poe today, not Collins. Dickens had his own magazine. Go figure.- The atomic unit of the podcast is not RSS. It’s the show. (Alex Carter pointed out on Twitter that it’s actually the episode, which is fair.)
And anyway, it’s never been up to the creators. It’s always up to the audience. If I put my show on Spotify, it may no longer be a podcast by definition. But what do you think the average Spotify listener will call it? We’ve done a pretty good job normalizing what is a pretty wonky technical term: “podcast.” Why screw this up now?- Now, where I sort of disagree with TomPut yourself in the shoes of a media buyer. You’ve got a buy from a leading national advertiser, and on the one hand, you’ve got a podcast network offering something risky — host-read content, or something bespoke to the show, at (say) a $25 CPM, or another network offering reach across all their shows, using your existing audio/radio creative, for a $5 CPM. What is the safe bet for your media buying career?
Great content is expensive to produce, and great advertising native to that content’s form and delivery is well worth a premium. But if several large players in the space start taking poorly executed, irrelevant ads at ultra-low (for podcasting) CPMs, that’s going to have repercussions on the economic feasibility of great audio content.(By the way, revenue reports have been trickling out and Audioboom & Acast report record growth in revenues. What do they use? Those “cheap ads”. https://medium.com/@webby2001/what-will-kill-podcasting-6996cf898977
Blubrry charging for dynamic advertising:https://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/19/07/n14058249/blubrry-podcasting-releases-dynamic-advertising-insertion-for-professional-podcasters
Last week’s Hot Pod:One more thing on Stitcher. Before I move off this topic, I wanted to flag something I found interesting: Stitcher appears to be in the process of changing platform vendors for hosting services provided by Midroll, the company’s sales division. Midroll’s preferred platform had been Art19, but it’s now switching to Omny, the Australian hosting platform that Triton Digital acquired in June. Here's some matryoshka doll action for ya: EW Scripps, Stitcher's parent company, acquired Triton Digital last December.
“Over the past few months, Stitcher has been testing Triton Digital’s ad serving infrastructure and programmatic...
