Dave Jones from the Podcast Index

There's a tension there.

I have a problem with audience surveys.

Audience surveys about podcasting in my mind are just fundamentally incoherent.

If you take a representative slice of the population and ask them, for instance, do they think they have enough memory in their computer, there's gonna be a large fraction of the respondents who think memory means hard drive space, and I know this because I've been in tech support for a very long time.

They say, "Do I have enough memory?" And what they're talking about is their hard drive.

So they're gonna be answering based off this fundamental misunderstanding of what you just asked them, and you can control for that by asking follow-up questions about their computer that would tease out whether or not that question was misunderstood.

And I'm telling you that is unreliable because sufficiently complicated technology lends itself to misunderstandings that are recalcitrant in the minds of people who are flooded with these terms on a daily basis, but do not understand the intricacy about the way that they actually work.

So if you have a population slice who actually understands deeply, uh, how RSS distribution works, then by definition you no longer have a representative slice of the general population.

You're now biased towards a certain type of answer.

And so a couple of years ago when the first surveys started coming out where a majority of respondents were saying that they listen to their podcasts on YouTube, at that time I took a few charts off various platforms of the top 25 podcasts, and I showed on our show how only about three of those top 25 even published on YouTube at all.

So the findings of those surveys, they could not be correct just based on the hard numbers of the way that we saw this.

And so now surveys are showing people getting, are getting their podcasts from Netflix, [laughs] and I'm like, "This is impossible." To me, this is the same category of question, like asking how many roaches are in New York City.

It's a fundamentally unanswerable question because the way RSS podcasting works, it's sufficiently complicated enough to where you cannot control for it.

But that narrative that people are getting their podcasts from YouTube persisted so hard that it changed the industry.

Like, pushing YouTube to adopt podcasting in, in my opinion, created the current video push we see right now.

I believe all of this was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of these audience surveys.

They got misinterpreted and have now really, I think, warped the industry.

I'm not saying that video is a bad thing, I'm not.

But it has cost a lot of people a lot of money, and we're really not seeing a ton of adoption of this stuff.

And I think the reason I'm bringing all that up is because, yes, YouTube and other platforms, yeah, they hide, you're right, they hide the complexity, they make the stuff easy, but we also don't know that in podcasting, that is what everyone necessarily wants.

And I would apply that to live too.

I love that tag, but it may end up just being something that 5% of podcasting actually ever wants or needs to have, even though I consider it technically awesome.

But it just may not be that it ever has much more reach th- than just a small slice, and that's okay.

I think it's got a wider reach, but I just don't think we've properly marketed it.

So I'll give you an example.