‘Free’ Podcasting

Manton Reece:

Nir Zicherman has a post on Medium about how podcast hosting should be free. Nir is the co-founder of Anchor, a company with $14 million in venture-capital funding. […]

Anchor seems to be going for the YouTube model. They want a huge number of people to use their platform. But the concentration of so much media in one place is one of the problems with today’s web. Massive social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have too much power over writers, photographers, and video creators. We do not want that for podcasts.

The other problem with centralized services is that when they go away, they take all their hosted content with them. YouTube is not going anywhere, and in theory, Anchor or some other company could become the YouTube of podcasting and stay around, effectively, forever. But it would be terrible for the podcast ecosystem to give one company the sort of control YouTube has over video. Even worse, I think it’s far more likely that a company attempting to become the YouTube of podcasting would get big enough to host a ton of content but never reach critical mass and then disappear when their funding dries up. (I worry a lot about Medium in this regard.)

Jason Snell:

A lot of people have made a lot of money on YouTube, but a lot of YouTube creators could probably also warn you about the dangers of building a business off of a single provider that gives you hosting for free in return for a share of ad revenue.

★ Wednesday, 25 July 2018