[paxys]

The entire podcasts industry seems to be on a downward spiral. I feel like the days are numbered for Spotify's podcast dreams as well, looking at how little they are promoting them now in app or outside. What on earth happened? It was the hottest new thing in media, and then...everyone just collectively lost interest? Was it just the Covid bubble, or something else?

[verdverm]

Making premium users listen to ads on podcasts was the primary reason I stopped using Spotify

The podcasts I listen to are available on all the major platforms

I think what we might be seeing is that the walled garden approach to content is not working out. People don't want to have to subscribe to a ton of services just to get access to a few pieces of unique content. There was a recent Disney+ thing to this effect recently too

[rickdeckard]

> The entire podcasts industry seems to be on a downward spiral.

I think the podcast market got ridiculously inflated when COVID hit, with every remotely known person starting a own podcast. Many more podcasts were created, so more of them also fade away now.

For the media industry it was fantastic. It was so damn cheap because everything was taken care of by the podcaster himself. They just had to observe if it can gain momentum on its own and then randomly decide to accelerate it with some additional ad-money or exclusivity contract.

This was shortly interrupted by a "let's acquire every media in the world / let's pay Joe Rogan 200 MILLION dollars for his podcast" hype, now it's back to "let's see which ones of chicklets will make it"...

[mrweasel]

Advertisers lost interest, so there's no resources to promote some random podcast. If you listen to something like "Coder Radio" from Jupiter Networks you will hear the hosts talk about there being a lack of ads and Leo Laportes TWIT network is expressing the same concerns. Both of those two podcast producers will survive, because their audience is willing to pay for the content, and because they have a few niche podcasts where advertisers are able to target a narrow group of people with the right messages.

Large podcast aggregators like Spotify have no real business model, they produce way to many shows with to fewer advertisers and subscribers to cover the cost and their audience isn't nearly as loyal those of TWIT.

Partly I believe that there's simply to many podcasts available, with to low content quality.

[bane]

It might be. But it's also a great place to find extremely niche audio content.

[eYrKEC2]

Exactly. "Blogs" might be dead -- also, many blogs are still the best content on the internet. Democratizing both the newspaper column and the radio show is great -- so many interesting voices out there.

[paxys]

There was never a time when a popular blogger was offered $200M by a company to move to their platform and continue writing. The situations aren't even close to the same.

[eYrKEC2]

The content was never about the $200M and the listeners/readers probably never even cared about helicopters with bags of money.

[enumjorge]

It strikes me as a similar situation to Meta and the whole VR/metaverse thing. A company takes an ecosystem that's gaining popularity, makes a big bet on it in the hopes that it fuels the growth that Wall Street constantly demands and tries to turn it into a market of a size that the ecosystem was not ready for, and possibly never was going to be.

[Zetobal]

But but everyone else is selling shovels (Podcast Microphones, Cameras, Lights, streamdecks) so well.

[upon_drumhead]

Their moat didn’t pay off. Pulling podcasts behind their paywall didn’t convert to subscribers nearly enough for it to justify the price in acquiring the source material.

There are so many great podcasts that when gimlet shows went to Spotify, I missed them, but listened to other shows instead.

[rchaud]

> What on earth happened? It was the hottest new thing in media, and then...everyone just collectively lost interest?

Spotify tried to acquire the biggest whales in the podcast market, thinking that it would be a revenue stream that wouldn't require paying massive royalties to record labels, which is why they've never made a profit on the music streaming side.

They overspent, buying up celebrity podcasts and creating some of their own, all financed with super-cheap capital that lasted until 2022 when interest rates rose globally. Interest in podcasts have also fallen since the stay-at-home peak, but Spotify added a layer of enshittification by splicing in ads into podcasts dynamically.

This is a massive UX fail because podcasts are supposed to be static audio files without additional monetization. But Spotify spent so much acquiring Rogan et al, they have no choice but to saturate podcasts with ads.

[master-lincoln]

I feel like the issue is exactly that capitalists ruined it by making an industry out of it. Also if there is no rss feed I can subscribe to to get the releases, I don't consider it a podcast. So Spotify doesn't offer podcasts in my view...

[rchaud]

Capitalists want a return on their capital. Spotify committed the original sin of taking VC money, which has no endgame besides IPO'ing. And once you IPO, you're at the mercy of Wall St.

They never made a sustainable business by licensing music, and thus see podcasts as free real estate they can monetize without having to bay Universal, Warner, Atlantic etc.