Instead of a dedicated app, they initially made podcasts available to stream within a mobile browser before creating a dedicated experience. Google’s podcasting strategy hasn’t quite bore fruit. Not everyone has taken advantage of the opportunity. While some will argue this hands-off approach has allowed podcasts to remain free and open - as opposed to Spotify’s largely closed garden strategy - the inaction has allowed competing apps to continue innovating and gain significant market share.
The app has been slow to adopt more advanced features found in other players, they’ve been hesitant to develop original content or sign exclusive partnerships, and have overall taken a complacent role in the industry. However, it seems the podcast market was never large enough (and still might not be) to merit significant resources to continue innovating and growing that side of the business.
Apple was the first major audio player to support podcast RSS feeds, the Apple Podcast app comes native on every iPhone, they’re called “podcasts” because of the iPod. It’s impossible to overstate how much of an advantage Apple started with. Instead of just pulling listeners from other podcast apps, they’ve primarily grown by introducing millions of new listeners to podcasts.” Head of Marketing at Buzzsprout, Alban Brooke tells us, “in the past four years, Spotify has grown from not having podcasts on their platform to be neck and neck with Apple Podcasts as an industry leader. When we updated our data, this caused a significant drop in the number of plays we attributed to Apple Podcasts.” Until October 2020, we included these plays as being Apple Podcasts, but after digging into the data, we determined it was actually various apps that were using an Apple API and not properly identifying themselves. There are a large group of downloads that were using something called Apple Core Media on iPhones. Rossi says, “Whenever somebody downloads an episode from Buzzsprout, we have to determine which podcast app is making the download, where the listener is located in the world, and what type of device they are using. Two months later the two competitors were closer: Apple 30.3%, Spotify 26.4%. Though nearly double, Buzzsprout’s CTO, Tom Rossi, tells me it’s likely due to an attribution error other podcasts hosts likely see as well. Starting to measure in October 2020, Apple maintained a 47% market share versus Spotify’s 24.4%.
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