automattic wordpress buys podcast pocket casts

Wallet Casts initially went for sale in January right after its board associated with public media associates voted to do so. This started monetizing by way of a program called Wallet Casts Plus, which charges customers a monthly membership fee for functions like desktop application access and a stand alone Apple Watch application, in 2019. It’s been well-received, particularly from websites like The Verge, because it’s offered across platforms. Wallet Casts launched this year and sold in order to NPR and a group of some other public media organizations eight years afterwards. com and Wallet Casts, making it simpler to distribute and pay attention to podcasts. “We will certainly explore building serious integrations with Wp. “As element of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to offer the features needed to take pleasure in your favorite podcasts (or find something new), ” the article states. The blog write-up announcing the buy didn’t offer a lot in the way of an examine, but it did tease potential future integrations. com and lately purchased Tumblr, announced today that it is acquired Pocket Casts, the well-regarded podcasting app. Automattic is uniquely positioned to play a much longer game, continuing to help the open Web grow, adding features atop protocols, and eventually, possibly, helping a much larger, true network solve the second problem for podcasts: monetization.Pocket Casts includes a new owner. And while those companies may attract huge numbers to their listening platforms, they’re stuck with strategies catering to quarterly reports.

The platforms that are putting “podcasts” (note: if you can’t use RSS to subscribe, it’s not a podcast) behind walled gardens can’t do this.

How great would it be, as a podcast listener, to be able to follow a “conversation” from one specific episode of a podcast to another specific episode of an entirely different podcast even if you didn’t follow the 2nd podcast? Imagine if WordPress could then use a highly-invested user-base to create a way for one podcast producer to notify another podcast producer that their most recent episode actually discusses things from the receiver’s podcast. WordPress should build tools to help with managing a podcast’s RSS feed, tagging episodes, transcribing episodes, and even scanning both the content on the WordPress site and any sites linked on an episode’s correlated “blog post” to better identify context of an episode. Most every podcast has an associated website of some kind. Use the service to force other podcast players to adhere to the use of web protocols. Automattic should aim to make that service so good and Pocket Cast’s discoverabilty and curation UX so delightful as a result that other podcast players seek to use the service as well. WordPress, a platform that already runs 40% of all webpages in the world, should leverage its power to build a discoverability and curation service for Pocket Casts to consume to help people interested in a given subject find new, relevant podcasts. It’s a problem that’s basically the inverse of the one web pages had. It’s the finding of podcasts that’s hard. Podcasting has dozens if not hundreds of “Readers.” It’s easy to subscribe to any podcast about which you already know. If what Pocket Casts offers for curation and discoverability is in the upper echelons of the podcast world, then the podcast world is in a dire state.

It’s odd b/c I’m a very frequent user of Pocket Casts, and I was under the impression that Pocket Casts makes absolutely no effort toward curation and discoverability. I found it odd that every piece I read about Pocket Casts last week mentioned that it was a well-liked app partly due to its discoverability and curation features. What made people love Google Reader was the ability to “subscribe” to those resources they found useful in case the same site published more they found interesting. Further helping the web’s popularity explode was the ability to search for something that interested a user and usually discover at least one resource relevant to their interest (Discovery). What helped the Web grow so massively was the users’ ability to follow links from sites that already interested them to discover other sites relevant to their interests (Curation). It got me thinking about what I’d recommend to Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, if I were running the Pocket Casts product strategy. Meanwhile I also read this piece about Google Reader and how much many of its enthusiasts miss it (myself included).Which caused me to eventually find and read this newsletter item on the same merger.

Read this piece on the news that Automattic, owners and operaters of the WordPress empire, bought Pocket Casts.

Automattic wordpress buys podcast pocket casts