Guest: Craig Hewitt – Castos founder (public and private podcast hosting tool, 13 employees)
Podcast stats are broken – different download numbers across different services
Both podcast analytics startups Chartable and Podtrac were recently acquired by Spotify
Spotify is a closed podcast ecosystem
Rob believes in competitive market, if open software is the best, it will win (eg, WordPress/Automattic)
Felt it was offensive when Spotify walled off their podcasts – “something that was once open is no longer”
“Open source creates community-based accountability”
Rob gets podcast data from Blueberry, Chartable, Castos
Why is podcast data hard?
-Castos benchmarks their analytics with Podtrac to make sure data is in range (~10% range)
-There’s a lot of bot traffic to remove
-Podcast analytics services only have visibility when the file is downloaded – can’t see how long they listen, how they interact with the file
-Spotify has that closed loop – takes file, distributes locally, have their own app, so 3rd party analytics can’t see Spotify user activity
20-40% podcast listening audience on Spotify – more international, more younger audience
Apple recently launched podcast analytics – helpful indicator but not very accurate
A lot of podcast apps are quite privacy focused – won’t share their user behavior / listening data back to publishers or analytics services
Podcasts will be built into all cars, planes – still quite early