A very strange thing happened on our free Podcast Webinar last night (next one in three weeks). I was tlaking with Charlie from www.crosdrivenradio.com and he mentioned how he had a ton of blackberry users who were downloading his podcast. I ran to my libsyn.com stats and checked. The last time I checked iTunes accounted for about 70% of my downloads. Now it was showing 52.6%. It appears iTunes is losing their stake as THE place to find and listen to podcast. Here is why:
Blackberry has a listing for podcasts, and apparently making it easy to find podcasts
More and more apps for smartphones enable people to get podcasts on their phone without synchronizing with their computer (cutting iPods, iTunes, and computers out of the picture.
They've made it hard to do things such as subscribe in iTunes. What once was a one click subscription is now three. (They take you to the cloud on their way to iTunes).
I may need to check again, but I didn't even see a SUBSCRIBE option on my wife's iPad.
Oh yea, Apple makes no money off of Podcasting. If they were smart, they'd come up with a fun easy way to sell your podcast in iTunes and then take 30% of the revenue. In reality, they probably DID make money off of podcasting from all the podcasters going there to check reviews, copy their link, etc and they buying some music.
Is this a good thing? I think so. I like Apple and their products, but when one company has too much control over a market it leaves the door open for bad things. I will still continue to tell people to list their podcast in iTunes FIRST, but we may be returning to the days where you have to list your podcast in many different locations to help it be found.
What percentage of your downloads come from iTunes?
