Some are uploaded by podcasters as they would on any other platform, via an RSS feed.
In the first half of 2020, the company’s share of monthly active users who listen to podcasts rose from 16% to 21%, and the number of shows doubled to 1.5 million. In the second quarter, podcast consumption on the service grew by triple digits compared to the previous year, it said in July.
So far, the company’s expansion plans are working. With podcasts, Spotify doesn’t have to hand over a big chunk of its revenue to record labels. Sinclair Target, a software engineer, gives his take of what led to this in his blog on computer history: By 2013, Google phased out its RSS reader, the most popular feed aggregator, and the RSS feed was declared dead. Once the social media giants came into the picture, the RSS feed started to feel quaint, and its developers couldn’t agree on how to make it better. The information flowed directly from the source to the consumer.
It was the equivalent of following someone on Twitter or Facebook-except without Twitter or Facebook. Users would subscribe to the feeds, whether it be the New York Times or a blog, and get the latest information delivered through a reader. It is a type of file websites used to automatically transmit updates to their audience. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, depending on whom you ask. Created in the late 1990s, it is very much a product of the decentralized internet of those days. Some podcast veterans say the same idiosyncratic, independent nature that has made some shows so successful gives the industry a better chance of avoiding that fate.īut to understand where podcasting is today, you have to start further back, with the format used to transmit shows: the RSS feed. This transition is raising questions of whether podcasting will follow the same path as the internet, which also began as a freewheeling, do-it-yourself space, before evolving into the data-obsessed, tech-giant dominated sector we know today. This year, spending on podcast ads in the US is expected to hit nearly $1 billion (pdf.) Now a slew of companies are deploying techy solutions to bring metrics up to speed, helping attract big-brand ad dollars. But podcasters have been unable to fully cash in because of the medium’s old-school distribution technology, which makes it virtually impossible to collect data on listeners and target them for ads. Audiences in the US have been growing for a while-to more than 100 million listeners (pdf) this year. Zohrob’s short career in podcasting illustrates the industry’s speedy transformation over the past couple of years.