Four Dumb Things About Podcasting We Still Haven't Fixed

There's no doubt that podcasting today - producing and listening - is much less complicated than before. But some lingering challenges remain that we must overcome to capture more public attention.

Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.

Looking back over the last 16+ years that podcasting has been a thing, we've made some pretty huge accomplishments. Yeah! We've minted a few millionaires with the space. We now have two million shows available. Production houses exist now that gainfully employ dozens, and sometimes more than a hundred people.

I mean, we have built a real economy out of this thing called podcasting. It's what I do full time. It's wonderful. But some things in the podcasting industry are still dumb. And I just hope it doesn't take us another sixteen years to put some of these dumb things to an end. So I'm going to cover those four things with you right now on the program.

#1: Smart speakers still suck for listening to podcasts. I've been watching the reports. I'm sure you've been watching the reports as well. And we see the numbers growing steadily as people use their smart speakers and other assistant devices to listen to podcasts, but it's still a tiny number. And the reason it's a tiny number is because the experience is still terrible.

Now, I lay a lot of the blame of that at the feet of AI, which is clearly not there just yet. The UX is not the greatest thing. We're used to giving commands with our voices, but we're used to people on the other end, responding to said commands and giving us what we want. The AI is not quite there yet.

Last night, it took me about ten minutes to get the machines to dim the lights in the master bedroom. Yeah, because I didn't say the words properly. What else I could I have said I do not know. But it's no different than finding a podcast, right? I mean, finding a podcast on a smart speaker is difficult enough without a screen, I get that, but again could be solved.

But just getting that speaker to follow me from room to room. I have like six of these things in my two-bedroom condo. Why can't it follow me with the thing I was playing? Why can't it intelligently pause when Sheila says something to me and I want to have a conversation? We're not there yet. And that's a problem with AI, I think. I'm hopeful. Maybe that'll be fixed later on.

#2: Data in podcasting is still untrustworthy and obfuscated. Now, you're thinking, hang on Evo, we've solved this problem. We now have the IAB guidelines and everything's great. Yeah, well, I wish that was true, that it was all great. It's not. It's still untrustworthy.

Look no further than the announcement - what was it this week? I think? Buzzsprout came out and said that Spotify is bigger than Apple Podcasts as far as people downloading content from Buzzsprout goes. Nobody else thinks that. No other podcast hosting company thinks that, which means either Buzzsprout is counting weirdly or every other podcast hosting company is counting weirdly, but we're not sharing the data.

The podcast hosting companies aren't saying this is it. 11%, 12%, whatever the number is the number. So we can all compare and contrast, right? When different hosting companies make these different bold claims, it makes people not trust the data and that's not helping us. That's not helping bring people into the space.

Plus podcasters, maybe you lie about the size of their audience when asked how many downloads we get we lie. Almost always. Or worse than that, we don't know. Or the hosting companies we're using have given us data in such a way that doesn't mean a lot to us. It is also obfuscated. So we don't know what to say.

We just kind of make up numbers because that sounds like a number - I saw a number, I'll use that. Look, I'm not looking for perfection in stats. I'm just looking for some consistency. I want them to be trustworthy. And why can't we do that?

#3: RSS feeds still suck. We've had a lot of advancements in RSS feeds over the several years this podcasting thing has grown, and that's great. We also have podcastindex.org, which is helping to crowdsource and vet. And we're now seeing other podcast hosting companies implement these new namespaces to extend the RSS spec. And that's wonderful. But they still stink. They're still limiting what we can do.

Why can't I name a season? That's pretty important. And it seems like a pretty basic thing, we're stuck with season one, two, and three. Why can't we list out credits like at the end of a movie roll? You know, you watch a movie or an episode or a movie on TV, you see the credit roll afterwards.

Why can't we put that in an RSS feed? So that, you know, we can start making some connections. Oh, this person was on this show, this person produced this show, all of these things. We're not doing that yet. Can't even reference other episodes within an RSS feed, if you'd like this, you'll like this. We can't do any of those sorts of connections because it's not what it was designed for. RSS feeds still suck. Getting better. They still suck.

And the last thing. #4: Podcasting is still terribly under-monetized. Yeah, it's really great news that we're going to hit a billion this year, we were supposed to do that last year, but COVID. But a billion dollars is still tiny in the grand scheme of all other ad dollars that are coming into the space. And advertising is still really hard to get right on podcasting. And by that, I mean how to buy it at scale and also see returns at scale.

Sure, some companies have nailed it down. It's why Better Help is spending more money on podcast advertising than any other form of advertising they do. But other companies getting to the space, look at this and go, I don't know where to begin. And how do I know this is going to work for me? There's not a lot of, no help bringing them along. So, yeah, under-monetized.

Look, I'm not cranky about this, I'm just realistic. Maybe I'm a little bit cranky. But I'm also more realistic than that. Now, the good news here is I think that all of these issues I just raised are solvable and I think almost all of them are being actively worked on. Someone or many someones are actively working on all four of those areas to bring about change. And that's exciting to me. Because once we get them fixed or closer to perfection, a more perfect podcasting union, that is what's going to make podcasting better.

Now, if you found this eye-opening, and maybe a little bit cranky, but more eye-opening than cranky, Evo, please go to buymeacoffee.com/evoterra, and slide a virtual coffee my way.

And if someone you know in the podcasting space needs to hear this harsh bit of reality, but with maybe a slice of hope, then please send this episode to them. I would greatly appreciate that.

Okay. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!