A Few Thoughts On The New Apple Podcast Pages And What They Might Mean To Podcasters

I don't know if you noticed, but Apple introduced a new podcast page. Basically, what happens is instead of when you look up a podcast at Apple, that page that sends you to the page that looks like itunes, then you have to click the button to open up itunes. That has been replaced now with a page that has your podcast on it and nice little things like play buttons. This is really, really cool. Basically, any of those old links now will go to these new pages. If you are playing on a browser that is not Safari on an iOS device, if it's Safari on an iOS device, then it's going to take you right to. It's going to take you right to the podcast app with that, which is actually probably a good thing. But if you're on another device, it gives you the chance to click play right there in itunes. Now, this brings up some interesting implications. This brings up some interesting ideas. There are a couple of things that it doesn't do that are kind of intriguing, and I want to chat about that first. Number one, when you have a podcast inside of the traditional desktop itunes, there is a podcast website. And if you open up itunes and you click a thing, you can click on the podcast website, it opens up the podcast website at the time of this recording that is not there. It does not open up the podcast website, which is odd because every podcast episode has an individual page that does have a link to the website. This is interesting. Not sure why Apple has done it this way. Are they still refining it? Are they still fixing it? Are they worried about SEO people who are going to try to do too much for the podcast pages? I'm not quite sure how putting a link on a podcast podcast page is bad when you put them on the individual pages, I'm really not quite sure. But the fact of the matter is it's there. We have to deal with it. The other thing that's really interesting is that there is no play for a video podcast page. So you have an audio podcast, there's a play button, you have a video podcast, there's not a play button. Why Apple's doing this I'm not quite sure about either. Now, you can link to your video file as the webpage for that episode, and a lot of people do that by default, and then it'll link to it. But again, not quite sure why Apple has done that. So a couple of ideas, a couple of implications, and then we'll go. For those of you who are listening to this on the podcast, definitely go out, check it out, play with it. Let me know, interact. ThePodcastReport.com Twitter ThePodcastReport.com Facebook the PodcastReport.com Instagram. If you're watching this on Facebook, as I record this live, I would love your comments. I see John, I see Mario. I'm sure I'll see some others in a second and maybe we'll take that at the end. But let's talk about the strategies for this and let's talk about the questions for this. Question number one. Does a click from an Apple page register on your itunes charts and on your itunes links? You know, Apple obviously can't track what's happening inside of Google Podcast or what's happening inside of Stitcher or what's happening inside of those other places. But if it is@apple.com and they click play, are they tracking that? That is an interesting idea. Strategically speaking, if you're looking to go up the charts, sending everybody to the Apple page, knowing that the Apple people will pull out the podcast app, but the Android people will click play, and then those eight, nine Microsoft phone users left will click play as well. That gets interesting. Is this the universal page for a podcast that we have been thinking about, that we have been looking for? That's question number one. Question number two is these are found in search. These are part of the search process. And does this make show notes more important? Does this make show notes more viable? If you put really good content in there, will Apple pick that up and will you be found? Because gosh darn it, really good content@apple.com is going to rank higher in the search engines than really good content, you know, at the podcastreport.com or, you know, your random podcast dot com. So we're at an interesting place there on the video side of things. What's happening? Is something coming? I don't know. Is Apple going to give us an embeddable player? I don't know. It's one of the questions that Mario asked in the chat room. We've seen embeddable players for Apple Music, so we know they've got them and we've actually seen an embeddable player for one podcast. Don't know if it was a test or if it was a market from Apple, but the technology exists and so there. Would an embeddable player on your website help you track inside of the Apple stats? I think podcasters, I know podcasters have been thinking for a long time, have been wondering for a long time, what' strategy. It's really confusing to say, well, if you want to listen on Apple, go here. If you want to listen on Android, go here. And if you want to listen on Microsoft, go here. In theory, we could send them to this Apple page and then on that Apple page they could, you know, the majority of them are going to be Apple. They could play it, or they are. The majority of them are Apple. They could open up itunes and click subscribe. Or if they're on an iPhone, it just automatically brings to the podcast app. And if they're not Apple, they could click Play. This is interesting. There is no universal page yet. James Kridlin over at POD News is trying to do it. That's kind of an interesting play. But is this one strategically? Because how cool would it be to have your rankings at Apple, including the people who clicked play on an Android device or on again, one of the four or five Microsoft devices left out there. Interesting thoughts. Second thing is, of course on the video podcast world, I've chatted about this in previous episodes here, the podcast report the Apple desktop itunes, which of course there's all sorts of rumors that that's going to go away and that that's going to die and they're going to introduce a podcast app with the new version of macOS. But that is the only place right now that makes a distinguish between the video podcast and the audio podcast. That doesn't happen on the podcast app, on the Apple TV, on the iPhone or the iPad. So is video going to become part of the infrastructure? Why did they leave that out? What do. What do. We don't know. Gets to be really, really interesting stuff. So I intend on tracking and sending some people to the podcast page. I'm going to go pretty meta. And this episode I'm going to have to, I'm going to write some fairly extensive notes. I'll talk about Kridlin's thing over at POD News. I'll do some other things. The notes aren't hyperlinked, which is a little bit frustrating. But I will do something that can be found and then inside of it, I will promote it on social and we'll go from there and we'll see what happens. Mario asks inside of chat, you know, when does a video podcast make more sense than building a YouTube channel? Well, the universality of this gets really, really interesting and the problems at YouTube get really, really interesting. So I don't know, this might be the beginning of the process. So a few thoughts. Not entirely done. They've out for a week. The implications are fascinating. All my clients and for my clients who are watching this, you know, that we're working on it, we're trying to figure it out, but I think we're at an interesting place. If you have any thoughts, I'd love you to reach out and tell me. If you're doing the Facebook thing, great. If not, like I said at the beginning of this, you can hit me on all the social places. We're in an interesting place with this thing and Apple's been promising it for quite some time. Now that it's out, the NDAs are gone and this has been years in the making, people. I think this is an interesting thing. So we'll be tracking this here at the podcast report. Stay subscribed to the podcast report. Don't just hope that you'll catch me when I'm on Facebook. Definitely follow me on the platform of your choice. ThePodcastReport.com Apple ThePodcastReport.com Google ThePodcastReport.com Spotify or even maybe Pandora. What do you think? Maybe Pandora will start introducing other people as well. Thank you so much. We'll get this thing up and we'll consider the implications together. Thanks for listening, everyone. Bye.