Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 188, published December 4, 2018.
Apple’s analytics: One year later. Seventeen months ago, at its annual developer conference WWDC, Apple announced that it would finally be launching something many in the podcast industry had desired for a long time: better podcast analytics. Or, more accurately, better audience analytics from the historically impartial steward of the podcast ecosystem that’s still believed to facilitate the majority of all podcast listening. (For now, anyway.)
“It may look obscure,” tweeted Gimlet’s Matt Lieber at the time, “But this is the biggest thing to happen to the podcast business since Serial first went nuclear.”
Apple’s new in-episode analytics rolled out that December, six months after the initial announcement. At multiple points during those opening months, I tried to report on how the new data was impacting the podcast business. But those early inquiries were premature and…
