Podcasting Q&A

Breaking down the changes to Apple Podcasts

December 26, 2023 Buzzsprout
Podcasting Q&A
Breaking down the changes to Apple Podcasts
Show Notes Transcript

Apple recently sent an email to every podcaster on their platform letting them know about some changes that are coming in the near future.

In this episode, we'll break down the three big pieces of news and how it affects you as a podcaster.

Need some help with your podcast? Join the Buzzsprout Podcast Community on Facebook to get the help you need from podcasters just like you.

Travis:

Today on five minute Monday, we'll talk about the upcoming changes to apple podcasts and what they mean for you. welcome to five minute Monday where we bring you the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing. Now, apple recently send out an email to every podcast or in their platform letting them know about some changes that are coming out later this year, later in 2019 so I wanted to walk through these announcements and break down how it impacts you as a podcaster. Now, the first thing you had announced is that iTunes is going away. So apple is splitting up iTunes and there will now be three standalone apps, apple podcasts, apple TV, and apple music. Now this doesn't really affect you as a podcast or a, it should make viewing podcasts and finding podcasts on Mac books a little bit easier, but that's about it. Most people listen on mobile devices anyways, and so it's not really going to affect how many people are listening to your podcast. The only thing that will really do is for people that don't listen to podcasts that might stumble on to the app. That's, that's going to be about the net benefit. Now, the number two announcement, the second thing we announced definitely affects you. It's search enhancements, and I'm going to read this a verbatim from their email. They said apple podcast will allow listeners to discover shows based on audio transcripts, topics and people, and that's actually really important because right now to to the best of our understanding, the only text, the only metadata that searchable inside of apple podcasts is the podcast title, the episode title, the author, or the host and description fields. So by expanding the amount of text that is searchable by taking the audio content of your podcast and turning it into written content, apple can now sift through all of your episodes and match the perfect podcast, the perfect episode to somebody's search to what they're trying to find. And this should make searching for new podcasts, discovering new podcasts a lot easier. Right now it's kind of a crap shoot, right? There's no real good way of knowing if a podcast that you stumble onto or discover is worth your time or if it's not, or if it's going to talk about what you're interested in or not. And so by expanding the amount of texts that apple can search, hopefully that search function will become much more mature in the same way that Google and youtube have only gotten better over time. Now that they have their own quirks for sure. But by expanding the amount of texts that is available to be searched, this should help with discoverability, which is great as a podcast for you. That is fantastic news. Now we're not sure exactly how apple plans on incorporating this data or how they plan on generating it, but as they tell us more, we will definitely keep you updated. Know the number three thing that they announced is changes to categories. So right now if you go into apple podcast, they have organized podcasts under different categories and if when you were setting up your podcast, you should have chosen the categories and subcategories that were good for your podcasts that were appropriate for your podcast. So apple is taking all of the data from the last 10 plus years of podcasts and changing the categories to better reflect the current landscape. So for instance, they're adding a true crime podcast category, which you might think will does. True crime is like half of all podcasts I've ever heard of. Well until until now, there hasn't been a true crime category. So they're just updating how they're organizing podcasts inside of their app, but it doesn't really effect searchability. Findability. If you already did a pretty good job of categorizing yourself, choosing a category and subcategory that fit your show, then you might be in a category that's changing. And so you just need to revisit it in re updated it. Now if you host with bas sprout, we're going to update the categories in your podcast settings to align with Apple's new categories when those changes go into effect. So, so you don't have to worry about trying to do all this research to figure out what you got to do. We will, uh, update Buzzsprout your bus about dashboard accordingly. Now overall, these changes are going to help independent podcasters. Apple continues to be a positive influence in the podcast community, and I'm personally in just really excited about the future of podcasting, especially if we continue to move in the direction that apple is moving. That is it for today. If you're new here, make sure to subscribe to the channel. If you're watching this on youtube or subscribe to the five minute Monday's podcast and your favorite app to squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. Thanks for listening and as always, keep podcasting.