Apple was once THE place for podcasts. They’ve officially BLOWN it.

Podcasts were an extremely fringy thing in 2005 before Steve Jobs announced that iTunes would support them. For the first time, it was easy for early adopters to find their favourite shows and to discover new ones. That move is memoralized right there in the name: “pod” from “iPod” and “cast” from “broadcast.”

Apple and iTunes (both on the web and through the app) was the go-to spot for podcasts until about mid-2021 when more people started getting their podcasts from Spotify. In October, YouTube passed iTunes as a source for podcasts. Apple’s share of serving up podcasts has been on a downward trajectory ever since.

As of this week, YouTube’s share of the podcast market is slightly north of 30%. Spotify had a big dip a couple of years ago but has rebounded to about 21%. Apple? Struggling to keep above 10%, dropping from about 30% in 2019.

What went wrong?

1. Apple didn’t start to monetize podcasts until 2021 when they launched podcast subscriptions. The company also doesn’t sell podcast ads. In other words, podcasts don’t make any money for Apple, so podcasts didn’t get a lot of attention.
2. As popular as iPhones are, phones with Android are much more plentiful. For the longest time, those phones didn’t support iTunes in a way that gave access to Apple Podcasts.
3. No one could access Apple Podcasts through a webpage until just this week. Oops.
4. YouTube offers video podcasts. Spotify is considering that.

There is some ambiguity in all this. Apple tallies podcasts as “downloads.” Until about a year ago, when you downloaded an episode, your device also automatically downloaded the show’s back catalogue. Did you listen to all those old podcasts? Maybe not, but they were reported as consumed. That may inflate iTunes’ share. Meanwhile, YouTube and Spotify log “listeners,” not “downloads.”

Hey, Tim Cook! What are you going to do about this?