"Growth" and scale are interesting concerns. Companies, cities, languages, etc that aren't "growing" are considered to be in crisis. You could have a little gig that produces and sells 100 gadgets a month. At $100 per, it's enough to quit your day job. In fact, you're considering hiring some help. Two years later, you're still selling 100 per month and can't figure out what's the problem. Maybe you need to shut it all down.
A podcast with 10,000 listeners? Wow! Who'd have ever thought our little Joey would attract so much interest? Two years later, Joseph Productions is struggling to keep the doors open with only 500,000 listeners.
Back in the day, people found a website by word of mouth and bookmarked it. 100 page views a week was awesome. 1000 a month was maybe even better than all that money spent stuffing mailboxes with flyers. This internet thing has a lot of potential.
Today? If you can't break into the front page of a Google search, what's the point?
An automaker that sells $1 billion of product is in deep trouble because growth is flat. A city that hosts 2 million convention visitors a year is "struggling" and needs a new Chief of Tourism. A town with a population of 10,000 with clean streets and no crime is at a dead end because they don't have a Walmart and can't attract new businesses.
>Money killed (or is in the process of killing) podcasting.
I see a whole lot of podcasts out there. They're mostly either something that someone does on the side either for fun or as part of their jobs or they're ad supported. (Honestly, I'm often a bit surprised that modest advertising supports obviously sizable staffs--even if I'm sure no one is getting rich.)
You’re not wrong. For me, the ads read by the podcasters themselves killed it for me. I really find the idea of “monetizing” every last thing extremely distasteful.
Unfortunately, this is the case. As someone who graduated uni in 1995, I pine (lol) for the days where the internet was largely Usenet, IRC, and email listservs followed by the early days of the web. Social media and especially social media apps on mobile devices completely ruined it.
That can’t possibly be. His audience, like so many other niche groups that gather around conspiracy theories, sure must be the smartest people. They are on to something we, sheeple, haven’t seen yet.
It's also possible to streamline adding the RSS feed by using custom url schemes (at least on iOS). A url like podcast://example.rss will open in Apple Podcasts and other podcast apps offer their own url schemes. This can make it as simple as clicking on a link to subscribe to private feeds.
I still do it to this day. I love being able to go between apps/devices/OSes and subscribe and unsubscribe to any feed at will. Discovery is a bit different, relying on recommendations from friends or referrals from creators I follow. I highly recommended it!
You see quite a bit of mutual backscratching on podcasts as well with some podcasts running guest episodes from other podcasts and so forth. I'm subscribed to far more podcasts than I regularly listen to. Honestly, I don't see discovery as a particular problem. (Standing out from so much material out there can be challenging--but that's got nothing to do with centralized vs. decentralized.)
A tiny sliver of people, relative to the podcast audience size of today, did that. The people who would still do it now is still a tiny sliver of the potential audience.
Heck I do it, but I do it for very few podcasts that I already know I like, mainly because discovery is so awkward.
