In these muddled times, at least one thing is clear:Nearly everyones tracking you, always.
Podcast players, also known aspodcatchers, like Apple Podcasts and Castro then aggregate those episodes in easy-to-use apps.
The change has provoked considerable debate,sometimes combative, within the podcasting industry.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
In February, podcasting giant PRX hosted aconferenceon emerging threats to privacy so you can encourage more productive discussion.
Theres a danger that this is a moment that can change away from privacy.
Podcast listening habits, like browsing history, can potentially reveal a lot about someones interests.
There are podcasts about mental illness, substance abuse, sexuality, debt, and other sensitive topics.
So what do your podcasts know about you?
Advertisers, meanwhile, have tended to target listeners based on a podcasts subject matter.
This could rapidly change if the podcasting industry were to ever shift away from RSS.
And there are some signs of that happening.
Spotify has been signing exclusive deals with megastars like Joe Rogan and Kim Kardashian West.
Needless to say, these exclusives will likely not be available via RSS.
They are not podcasts.
Theyre audio shows, said Andrew Kuklewicz, the chief technology officer of PRX.
How are you being tracked now?
In 2014, the podcast Serial debuted, introducing the medium to mainstream listeners.
(As of September 2018, Serial hadmore than 340 million downloadsacross its first two seasons.)
That same year, Acast, a podcasting company based in Sweden,announceddynamic ad insertion.
Much of the advertising on the web, including Google Ads, is bought and sold this way.
Thats probably when I certainly saw things start to change, said Kuklewicz, the CTO of PRX.
At this point, were still just talking about basic data.
Megaphone did not respond to a request for comment.
Some of the smaller podcatchers, however, have emerged as bulwarks against anything potentially invasive.
Thats not something users are expecting.
Spotify knows if your phone isin your hand or in your pocket, for example.
Another way to collect more data would be if different layers of the ecosystem agreed to work together.
And it really gives users what they wanted.
This enables NPR to experiment with its fund-raising campaigns as well as the content of the show.
RAD has not seen a large amount of adoption, Goers said.
But not everyone agrees that podcastings health relies on gathering more data.
Joe Rogan makes more money podcasting with advertising than any of these people.
Advertisers want to go where the deepest, richest data lives.
And by default, youre not going to get data out of podcasting.
Nothing has fundamentally changed, he said.
We gather the exact same information about a listening session today that we did five years ago.
This article wasoriginally published on The Markupby Adrianne Jeffries and was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
