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How about Mark Cuban’s Fireside, which launched with much fanfare at Podcast Movement last summer? Not a flamethrower. Embers?ĭeveloping a large following is hard and expensive, yet the apps keep coming. You don’t hear much about NPR One anymore, but that may be changing as NPR works to build habits beyond Apple and Spotify. It was recently purchased by Automattic, owner of the website publishing platform WordPress. The excellent Pocket Casts app was largely abandoned by its investors NPR, WNYC, Chicago Public Media, and BBC Studios. Developing a large following is hard and expensive, yet the apps keep coming. Platforms including Libsyn and Buzzsprout report less than 0.25% (rounding up) of podcast listening derived from Facebook. Facebook jumped into the audio fray in June of last year and the results are mind-blowingly unexceptional. iHeart, with all its massive promotional might, also has a modest share of podcasting listening. Today, depending on the platform providing the data, it has under 5% of listening ( Omny)( Buzzsprout). Perhaps one of the surprise disappointments has been Google Podcasts. Recently, Acast announced a shuttering of their app too.
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TuneIn, which over time has raised $171 million from top venture capital firms (including Google), inexplicably favored live audio, ignoring the trend to on-demand.
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Pandora bungled its foray into podcasting several years ago. Not just third-party app makers that have had a tough go of it, but big company apps such as Stitcher that failed to build significant market share and limp along. The graveyard is loaded with apps that never caught on.