Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…So let’s get into why Stitcher is a garbage. So the tech industry and especially the corner of the tech industry that is concerned with podcasts or have podcasts of their own, basically erupted in an outcry when this happened. John Gruber who hosts The Talk Show, which might be the largest and most influential technology podcast, he wrote a blog post saying, “Midroll owning Stitcher is not good for the podcast ecosystem. Stitcher is popular, but my show is not on Stitcher because Stitcher re-hosts the audio, compresses it to hell, and unless you opt out, inserts their own ads. That’s not how podcasting is supposed to work. I firmly believe podcasting should be open, like the web.” Yeah. So Gruber is a grumpy old man on this one. I mean, I think that there is a lot of things where I don’t believe that the user experience delivered by Stitcher is very good and I don’t think the fact that they’re compressing the audios is great. You want to let podcasters kind of have creative freedom on that. I think the way they currently deliver ads is kind of garbage. The list goes on. However, is publishing worst than it was when you had to purchase your own rack-mounted web server and install your own blogging software, like, are we in a place where if somebody creates the blogger or medium or the worst case scenario going around everyone’s mind is the Facebook of podcasting is the world’s worst. I think there’s a very valuable business to be made there and I think you can provide potentially podcasting to more people than here today because you can come up with a real sustainable business around it. There’s definitely some sacrifices that would have to be made there because I think that ultimately it would be a programmatic ad network with a full bidding system, the way that AdWords is or the way that Facebook Ads are. Maybe that upsets a lot of people and changes the way that it works a little bit, but I think it makes podcasting a more sustainable business. I totally agree. I completely agree Gruber’s being a grumpy old man here. The problem isn’t what Stitcher is doing. It's that they’re doing a really crappy job of it. Like the parallels here, and I completely agree, I think the opportunity is huge to create as terrified as Gruber and Ben Thompson, another one of the folks we talk about on the show a lot – he has a blog post about this on Stratechery and talks about on his podcast which is excellent, Exponent, that he does with James Allworth – they’re terrified of the Facebook-ization of podcasts. But the difference between Facebook and Stitcher is, like we talked about in the Instant Articles episode, Facebook cares a lot about the user experience and about making things beautiful. The analogy is exact between Instant Articles where they’re taking content that publishers have created, they’re self-hosting within Facebook and then they are serving ads that they’re inserting into it and then sharing that ad revenue with the publishers. It’s the exact same dynamics. The difference is Facebook acquired Push Pop Press to do this very, very beautifully, and Stitcher is a piece of crap.…

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