Apple Podcast is one of the podcast applications that I always use besides Pocket Cast. This application is quite attractive, simple and easy for me to control my favorite content and everything that I have downloaded. Unfortunately, Apple Podcast is not the most perfect platform because a podcast publisher lost $9 million which is about more than RM42 million because of the Apple Podcast update.
This publisher is the Audioboom Group which is the fifth largest podcast publisher in the United States. According to them, since iOS 17 Apple Podcast has been updated with a podcast channel that users follow to download episodes for offline listening with a small amount compared to the previous version of Apple Podcast. This lack of downloads has caused a huge loss for them. Out of a total of 38 million listeners, Audioboom only received 130 million downloads.
No action was taken as it was just a minor update to the platform. In my opinion, the fault here is with Audioboom itself which relies on the amount of downloads for revenue generation compared to other methods such as advertising.