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Podcast Categories Have A Bad Apple At The Core

Podcasters can’t even agree on the definition of podcasting. So it’s not surprising our categorization system stinks. Worse: our reliance on arcane structures excludes many worthy podcasting topics.

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I recently signed Podcasters Declare, an open letter to Apple designed to pressure the tech-giant into adding Climate Change as a top-level category inside of Apple Podcasts. 

The goal of the group is awareness building with a clever twist: If they are successful in getting Climate Change as a new top-level category in Apple Podcasts, then every podcast hosting company will have to add that new top-level category to their interface. Because of that, every other podcast listening app, directory, or other services will have to follow suit, so that anyone browsing the list of podcast categories on any device will see Climate Change as the scroll through. Clever activism at its finest!

Still, I had reservations about signing the petition. Not because of the topic, you understand. I fully accept what scientists have been telling us for years about climate change and how humanity’s progress is accelerating and exacerbating the delicate balance that lets our species—and others—thrive on the surface of Earth.

No, my reservations were much more mundane. A quick examination of Apple Podcasts’ categories shows several sub-categories where shows on the topic of climate change are already listed. Was a new top-level category warranted? And if so, did that put us on a slippery slope where a myriad of topics worthy of increased awareness would demand their own top-level listing? There are already glaring holes, like no LGBTQI+ category. What about eating disorders? Or personal finance or debt? Or just about any topic that has it’s own “Awareness Week”?

There are already over 100 categories inside of Apple Podcasts. Can the categorization system handle the pressure of giving every category its due?

No. No, of course it can’t. And therein lies the problem.

100 is 100 Times Too Small

One hundred categories sounds like a big number. I know I’ve quickly grown weary of scanning those 100 category names to find the right categories for my clients’ shows. Increasing that list certainly won’t reduce my weariness, I think we’d all agree.

But we’re not approaching the problem from the correct angle.

Your average bookstore has a few thousand titles on its shelf at any given time. Not tens of thousands.  Not hundreds of thousands. And certainly not millions. Yet those bookstores have categorization systems that are incredibly expansive. Heck, the Dewey Decimal system your local library uses is nearly infinite. 

But in podcasting, we do have millions of titles. Yet only around 100 categories to sort them into. That’s never going to work. Sure, it’s great that we podcasters can choose up to three categories for our show, where a book can only be shelved in a single location. But that’s small comfort, at best.

Building Awareness For Podcastings Fundamental Categorization Problem

If the Podcasters Delcare petition showed me anything, it's that we clearly need more awareness around this issue. Climate change, sure. But also, we need more awareness on the fact that that we’ve ceded control to Apple on how podcasts should be categorized and stored. That’s untenable.  

I was pleased to learn that the Podcasting 2.0 initiative is considering re-defining podcast categories as part of its third phase. But even that only lists 112 categories currently. And that's just not enough. Nor do I think it will ever be enough. Because I don’t think cataloging podcasts into nice and neat categories is all that helpful at our current scale.

Look no further than Yahoo!’s attempt to categorize every website on the internet. The Yahoo! Directory stopped being relevant at least a decade before it was finally shuttered in 2014. Google ate their lunch, realizing that relevance was much more important than some arbitrary structure. Google even rejected keywords after realizing that humans, for all our great pattern-recognition skills, are largely shite at categorizing for people other than ourselves.  

The solution isn’t to add more categories. The solution is to ditch categories altogether and do something fundamentally different.

Maybe the Podcasting 2.0 initiative will be better. At least it’s run from the bottom up and has some dedicated and smart people addressing several concerns and limitations. So I’m not counting them out.

Maybe we need more heavy pressure on Apple to add more and more top-level categories to their directory, gumming up the works so that the limitations of their current approach become more obvious to all of us and them as well.

Or maybe you and your fellow podcasting compadres have a novel notion worthy of consideration? Discuss this topic the next time you’re on a virtual call together. Or share a link to the article in an online discussion group to seed the conversation. Because what we have right now hasn’t worked for a while, and we need a better way.

If this sparked an idea for you, please visit BuyMeACoffee.com/evoterra and slide a virtual coffee my way. That's always nice. 

I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications. 

Cheers!



Published On:
February 22, 2021
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Podcasters can't even agree on the definition of podcasting. So it's not surprising our categorization system stinks. Worse; our reliance on arcane structures, excludes many worthy podcasting topics.

Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra so last week I was asked to sign podcasters, the Claire it's an open letter to Apple podcast, to pressure Apple podcast, to add climate change as a category at the top level of Apple podcasts. Now their aim of doing this as clearly to raise awareness.

Makes a lot of sense. Lots of podcasting companies. I think Omni studio is, is deeply involved with it, but there are a lot of other companies that are doing it as well. Their idea ideas to raise awareness because they know that if they are successful in getting a top level category in Apple podcasts, all of the other apps will have to follow it.

Every podcast hosting company will have to follow and suddenly there'll be an increased awareness around the topic of climate change. This happened when Apple, according to the petition, when Apple put true crime as a top-level category, it elevated the overall awareness of that. Can't argue with their rationale there.

And I signed the petition last week, but honestly, I had reservations, not about the issue of climate change, I'm a crazy progressive person. So of course I accept and understand climate change is real. No, I had reservations because I was thinking about all of the other sub categories that would currently work for podcasts about climate change.

And did we really need a brand new top level for that? I hate to say it, but where my mind immediately went to was the slippery slope argument. What about all the other worthy topics that need more exposure? I mean, just do a quick search on the topic on the word awareness week, right? Anything that has an awareness week probably could use some increased attention that it doesn't get right now from the current list of categories.

LGBTQ plus, yeah, Nope, not a category for that content. What about eating disorders or even debt and personal finance? Those don't exist in our current category system. So do we need to put all of those in there? I mean, what's to stop us from happening, what what's to stop more people from requesting that and getting more.

I mean, there are already over 100 categories on Apple podcasts. Do we need a whole bunch more therein lies the problem because he, yeah, it's not working. I mean, just think about this for a second. A hundred categories. Sounds like a big number, right? Would you consider for a second though? There are a lot more categories in books, right?

I mean, books can be sliced and diced a number of different ways we have entire. Card catalog Dewey decimal systems that are really expensive over there. There are in average bookstore, I don't know when the last time you were in a bookstore was, but in an average bookstore and they held thousands of titles, not tens of thousands of titles, not hundreds of thousands of titles, and certainly not 2 million titles, which is how many we have in podcasting.

Bookstores, which have way more than a hundred categories list, a few thousand titles, but our bookstores, our podcasting stores, our directories have a hundred. Told 2 million individual shows today. What's it going to be by the end of the year? It's not enough. It's great that we can pick three different categories for our podcast where a book can only be shelved at one particular spot in a bookstore.

That's great. Don't get me wrong, but it's not enough. If this petition showed me, it's clearly we need more awareness around climate change, but also we need awareness around the fact that. Why are we letting Apple be in charge of the categories for all of podcasting? Why are we doing this? So that's, that's that, that's it.

They are the arbiters of that. Everyone follows suit with them. I think that's a problem. Now the podcasting 2.0 initiative is picking this topic up. There is in their third wave of accepted changes categories and new categories tag is in there, but it only has 112 currently. But that's just not enough.

So while I like the idea of a more community focused efforts being controlled, the categories, I wonder what's the point of categories all. I mean, what is this Yahoo? 2001, I remember back in the day, Yahoo was a directory that categorized every show and, and tried to index everything by category. They got their lunch eaten very quickly.

Why scale. It became very quickly impossible to categorize every podcast. EPSCoR every webpage that was out there, every website that was out there, they got their lunch eaten by Google, who said, we're not even going to do that. We're not looking at tags. Even. We were going to ignore that keyword tag.

We're going to examine the contents and come up with our own structure that relates not to how we should put these in a nice semblance of order, but based on relevance of what someone is searching for. Wouldn't that be awesome if we had something like that, I mean, sure. We can level four top level category changes because we're going to have to do that for a while, whether it's at Apple or what the podcasting 2.0, I think it works.

I think it makes sense if for no other reason then to possibly show just how much that won't scale. To really expose the problems by just kind of overloading the system. It's just, that's the only way I think we're actually going to wake and, and work around and find and find some change with this is if we kind of overload things and point out that this is crazy, that we're trying to do it this way.

There are better ways of getting people, the content they need that don't require some structured categorization that just black doesn't really work. So I'm curious how you. See this changing, maybe how you would like your podcast to be categorized, I guess, but really more of a, what's a better way of doing things.

Discuss this topics, this topic amongst your other podcasting friends, or if you want to share a link to this episode or the article for the episode in a discussion group online and get the conversation going. Let's see what shakes out, because there's gotta be a better way to do this. And if you'd love the ideas that are sparked inside of you.

And now you're getting mad about the whole concept, too. Great. Go to buy me a coffee.com/evo Terra, and slide a virtual coffee my way. That's always nice. That's it. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications cheers.

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Podcast Pontifications is produced by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insight as it happens.
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