This week on The Download: Spotify’s earnings call happened, Apple improves podcast statistics, and podcast pros weigh in on how many ads is too many ads.

Podcast statistics are about to get better, thanks to a recent update from Apple that’ll help take a bite out of AppleCoreMedia’s presence on podcast statistics. Anyone who just opened the linked source and doesn’t have a background in coding: we promise that page makes sense.

User Agents are how we truly understand what specific app is being used to play a podcast. AppleCoreMedia is the default displayed by iOS apps if they haven’t built their own player from scratch. Few do. This leads to a snowball effect of either over or under-counting Apple’s presence in the market. As James Cridland explained in Tuesday’s Podnews: 

“Buzzsprout’s global stats don’t include AppleCoreMedia, under-estimating downloads from Apple Podcasts. On the other hand, Libsyn’s stats wrongly attribute all traffic to AppleCoreMedia as Apple Podcasts.”

This new update from Apple solves for that. For a more detailed breakdown on AppleCoreMedia, we recommend the Podnews article from April “Mythbusting: are downloads from 'AppleCoreMedia' mostly from Apple Podcasts?”

Edison Research’s 2022 edition of the Smart Audio Report is slated for June 16th. 

In 2017, for the original Smart Audio Report, NPR and Edison surveyed smart speaker owners to learn how the technology was being integrated into their lives. 

“The 2022 installment of the Smart Audio Report will not only offer an update on some of those original families, but also fresh data from a recent national study that measures attitudes around voice tech among those who use it and those who don’t.”

For those listening in time to register, one can do so for free at the link provided in our show notes.  

This Wednesday Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman live-tweeted the Spotify earnings call. The music powerhouse had a fair bit to say about their podcasting efforts, including some numbers that come as a bit of a surprise after such heavy investment over the past few years. As reported by Carman: 

“A number! Spotify had 200 million euros in podcast revenue in 2021. They expect it to be a $20 billion opportunity.” 

If that number feels low, that’s because it is. In a reply on Carman’s thread Podnews editor James Cridland pointed out that $220 million USD of profit amounts to only fifteen percent of the total podcast ad revenue for just the United States in 2021. 

In addition to the revenue number, Spotify teased some details of their upcoming audiobook offerings that’ll put them in a market mostly dominated by Amazon’s Audible wing. In a bit of mixed messaging, much hay was made about Spotify branching out into three new businesses but they also claim they’re a music-first company. 

CEO Daniel Ek said:

“That’s the thing you just have to get about Spotify. We’ll put out these big, audacious targets.”

The irony of this being the official position of a company with a history of announcing big, audacious projects only to blow past the intended release window by months, if not cancel them, is not lost on The Download. 

The earnings call also featured a section criticizing the limitations of RSS distribution, including calling it outdated tech. This is a curious change in tack given a substantial amount of ad service on Spotify is handled through RSS by Megaphone. It remains unclear as to why Megaphone is being left out in the cold while doing a not-insignificant portion of the business that got them to their percentage of 2021 global ad revenue. 

Every podcast with ad breaks has struggled with an eternal, unanswerable question: how many ads is too many? On Monday MarketingBrew’s Alyssa Meyers published “What’s the perfect number of ads in a podcast episode?” 

Spoiler alert: Meyers’ quest involving interviews with 14 marketers doesn’t turn up a magic formula that’ll change the industry. Some questions can never be concretely answered, but there is wisdom to be found in a big-picture view of the current podcast advertising landscape. 

In general, Meyers found short-form podcasts with episodes shorter than thirty minutes featured four ad slots populated with three to six ads. Long-form podcasts had the same potential slots for ad breaks but increased the maximum threshold up to eight potential ads per episode. 

“As of the first quarter of 2022, about 5.5% of a podcast episode was made up of ads, according to podcast media planning platform Magellan AI’s quarterly benchmark report.”

Big takeaways from those interviewed include acknowledging the power of host-read over pre-recorded, fewer quality ads beat out quantity, and inevitably the best ad is the one the host knows will work with the audience they’ve cultivated. 

Finally, a quick-hits rundown of two articles we think are well worth your time that came out this week: 

Crooked Media adds speech-to-text podcast captions with Adobe partnership, by Brad Hill.

And, in our continuing mission to bring news of global podcasting: 

Podcasts more popular than ever as ‘a reliable source of information,’ study shows by The Brussels Times.

The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis.

Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable.

Evo Terra edited today's episode. Special thanks to our media host, Omny Studio.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.