The incredible shrinking podcast industry
Posted on AllSides January 15th, 2024
From The Left
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PickPix
Apple has quietly tightened its reporting of how many people listen to podcasts, sending shock waves through an embattled audio industry still reeling from the end of the COVID-era production bubble.
The shift, Apple wrote in a blog post, was technical: The dominant podcasting platform had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks.
But while few users noticed the shift, some of the biggest podcasts in the world saw their official listener numbers drop dramatically. Long-running...