Much of the podcast problems were due to Honey leaking any promo code to the world, including employee discounts and customer specific discounts.
When Intuit is scraping every browser tab, there is no way to link a podcast campaign with engagement, so the way they were paid for driving traffic is lost.
Basically Honey copied the Ashley Madison model, unconstrained addition with a pay for delete. Ashley Madison had no email verification fyi, any bot or angry neighbor could sign you up for an account, then they wanted payment to delete.
Honey would extract any promo code they could find, then try to make you pay to remove it.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's partly because a couple of large ad companies decided to stop backing podcasts which took a large amount of money out of the ecosystem.
Podcasts are much harder to get analytics on since the ecosystem is made up of a bunch of different podcast platforms and services, and I bet that plays into part of it. You might not be able to tell if people are downloading your podcast (a copy might be cached by a podcast provider), you might not know if people are listening or listening all the way through, if people are skipping over your ad, etc.
As a podcast listener, I can think of a few reasons:
- 10-20 companies focused on Direct to Customer (DTC) products seem to make up the majority of advertisers for a lot of podcasts: VPNs, mattresses, personal grooming products, discount code providers, online courses, etc. If their ad budgets are reduced in the current economic climate, podcast earnings will fall. It's also possible that they've collected enough data to know that ROI in this medium isn't great, and growth of podcast creation is slowing.
- A lot of top podcasts have been being acquired by Spotify and Apple as exclusives over the past few years, where a lot of this ad spending was concentrated . This reduces the total pool of advertising money available.
- Programmatic advertising (where ads are spliced into the downloaded file, varying by geographical location) has lowered the cost of advertising, so the money paid out to podcast owners is less.
When Spotify picked up podcasts they could now offer way more information and targeting to the ad buyers. Podcasts they just know if you played their podcast can't compete.
When Intuit is scraping every browser tab, there is no way to link a podcast campaign with engagement, so the way they were paid for driving traffic is lost.
Basically Honey copied the Ashley Madison model, unconstrained addition with a pay for delete. Ashley Madison had no email verification fyi, any bot or angry neighbor could sign you up for an account, then they wanted payment to delete.
Honey would extract any promo code they could find, then try to make you pay to remove it.