https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38573378
and a couple of months ago
Paying for YouTube Premium to avoid ads is some of the best money I spend each month. I wish I could do the same for Spotify podcast ads. I do pay for Spotify already to avoid ads in music, but I can't seem to avoid them for the Joe Rogan Experience.
I subscribe to YouTube Premium but to consider it a replacement to a proper podcasting app seems naive to me.
You can subscribe to any podcast (RSS/Atom) feed via the YouTube Music app.
It’s a ridiculous amount of money to spend to financially support Google’s exploitation of content creators and abusive “copyright” system, just so you can watch content they (a) already stream for free and (b) is already full of product placements, stealth marketing, sponsored segments, etc.
No way in hell I’m paying a huge premium for that.
I think it comes down to how often you use the platform. YouTube has been my primary media source for the last twelve years and ads are what paid for that. Now that I can pay $14 (USD) per month to give the people I watch a bit more, have no ads, downloads, and a few other nice little features, it was a no brainer for me. I have always gotten _way_ more mileage out of YouTube than HBO or Netflix.
But if you don't, then it's probably not worth it and having an advertisement will pay for it instead.
I mean Spotify already kind of does it with JRE. It doesn't feel right that he's got his own ads despite the very lucrative deal he got, and I'm still forced to listen to him drone on about yet another generic vpn service even though I'm paying for a subscription.
On mobile they’re not auto-skippable.
The podcasts I listen to are available on all the major platforms
I think what we might be seeing is that the walled garden approach to content is not working out. People don't want to have to subscribe to a ton of services just to get access to a few pieces of unique content. There was a recent Disney+ thing to this effect recently too
I think the podcast market got ridiculously inflated when COVID hit, with every remotely known person starting a own podcast. Many more podcasts were created, so more of them also fade away now.
For the media industry it was fantastic. It was so damn cheap because everything was taken care of by the podcaster himself. They just had to observe if it can gain momentum on its own and then randomly decide to accelerate it with some additional ad-money or exclusivity contract.
This was shortly interrupted by a "let's acquire every media in the world / let's pay Joe Rogan 200 MILLION dollars for his podcast" hype, now it's back to "let's see which ones of chicklets will make it"...
Large podcast aggregators like Spotify have no real business model, they produce way to many shows with to fewer advertisers and subscribers to cover the cost and their audience isn't nearly as loyal those of TWIT.
Partly I believe that there's simply to many podcasts available, with to low content quality.
There are so many great podcasts that when gimlet shows went to Spotify, I missed them, but listened to other shows instead.
Spotify tried to acquire the biggest whales in the podcast market, thinking that it would be a revenue stream that wouldn't require paying massive royalties to record labels, which is why they've never made a profit on the music streaming side.
They overspent, buying up celebrity podcasts and creating some of their own, all financed with super-cheap capital that lasted until 2022 when interest rates rose globally. Interest in podcasts have also fallen since the stay-at-home peak, but Spotify added a layer of enshittification by splicing in ads into podcasts dynamically.
This is a massive UX fail because podcasts are supposed to be static audio files without additional monetization. But Spotify spent so much acquiring Rogan et al, they have no choice but to saturate podcasts with ads.
They never made a sustainable business by licensing music, and thus see podcasts as free real estate they can monetize without having to bay Universal, Warner, Atlantic etc.
Antennapod:
https://antennapod.org/download/
Available on Google Play and F-Droid. I switched to it many years ago anticipating this exact Google product shutdown, and I've been very happy with it :)
Any good self hosted podcast streaming options, or other options that allow shared listening?
Otherwise we end up with either a bloated YouTube app or an even more confusing "Youtube Podcasts" app (then YouTube music, YouTube videos, and YouTube whatever google decides to abandon next).
Would be a good time for Apple to maybe advertise Apple Podcasts some more.
Edit: Also why isnt this migration just done for you? So your data is there if/when you decide to try youtube podcasts.
I seriously wonder if anyone would really _PAY_ for the user experience of YT Music.
It is one of the weirdest media apps I've used in a long time. Never fully fit for purpose, always "okay, somehow works".
> https://www.theverge.com/23891397/google-podcasts-youtube-sp...
So far it seems to be where Google Media apps migrate their users to when they decide to retire a media service. ANY kind of media service...
I haven't decided where to migrate to, but it's definitely NOT Youtube Music.
Seems to be the way the big tech music apps are going though.
I started using google podcasts because beyondPod started acting weird. Guess I'm going back because there's absolutely* no way I'm moving to youtube music given their ads.
Your reputation has fallen among many developers for a lack of long-term commitment to anything.
Could you please get your executives in a room and figure out everything else that needs to sunset in the next two years? It’s fine for a product to run its course but the endless paper cuts of sunsetting announcements is getting old.
Once you figure out what needs to get cut, just make a big reset announcement and commit to supporting everything else for a decade.
It will take a couple years for us to believe you but better late than never.
Until then, we have to assume that everything is on the chopping block or at risk of 300% price increases.
You can do better.
- cloud? You’re far better at aws than gcp
- email? Got my life-long gmail account blocked for no reason. I’m using icloud+ and custom domain now. I have a dummy gmail account just in case
- drive? I don’t trust my gmail account so, I cannot trust drive either
- search? Guilty. I’m still using it, but less and less
- youtube? Annoying af with ads. I don’t bother with blockers
- phones? Nexus 5 was great. It lasted me 4 good years. Nowadays if I want good quality I go to apple
Despite the numbers, I'm always surprised when someone still uses G search... it's drowned in ads and exploitative results. Kagi lets you modify the weights of individual sites or even block them, so you can filter out blogspam and clickbait sites instantly. Best of all, it even has a leaderboard for most-blocked and most-promoted domains so you can literally just go down the list of some of the worst sites and block them before you ever see them in a search result.
Google has created a self fulfilling prophecy.
I need to migrate my email from gmail. It's going to be long and arduous. Suggestions on providers?
Before you ask: No, I do not want to host my own mail.
Pity. I liked Podcasts.
The upside is that Android can come with a ‘native’ podcast player. Just like iOS comes with a native player.
A big downside with shutting it down is that it reinforces the idea that Google products are eventually killed so don’t rely on them.
Please don't take this as an argument against monorepo. It is a discussion point there, but even if you view this as largely negative, I assert a lot of these negatives come with the size of Google.
But really, do you have a choice? Sooner or later someone finds a security bug in the code and you actually have to dig out the code and deploy an update.
The way the Google monorepo works, there's actually more cost in keeping things running than you would think.
You have to keep up-to-date with all of the library and platform upgrades and occasional migrations that are happening internally that your product is built on.
