Apple Announces Podcast Updates

This is huge. I hosted a podcast for a brand for three years before leaving the company earlier this year. We were fortunate enough to turn a profit by selling ad space after growing our audience over the course of the first year and a half. Got asked constantly for deeper metrics that showed listener habits and how long listeners were staying with each episode. This has the potential to be massively enlightening for potential advertisers and impact the podcast market pretty drastically.

 

If I'm a podcaster that generates ad revenue I'd be a little worried right now. There are very few ad spots I don't skip through.

 

Whoa

 

Maybe I'm in the minority but podcasts listening is such a passive activity for me I just hit play and let it play all the way.

 

Even if only half of listeners skip them I would assume that spells trouble.

For me it depends on the podcast. Gimlet stuff that's always in the middle and at the end I'll skip every time. If the show weaves in and out relatively quickly, I feel like Maron is pretty good at this, I'll let ride. Podcasters/advertisers will have to figure it out I guess.

 

Now that I think of it if I ever listen to Joe Rogan experience I usually skip the first 10 minutes because it's all ads. But that's because I realized they all start like that.

 

the number of people that actually end up buying from the ads won't change though, just the details of the metrics.
so if a company saw that, say, 10% of listeners engaged with an ad out of the total number of downloads, now they'll see the number jump up because they can now see how many people engaged out of the number of people who actually heard the ad.

 

True.