Antennapod: Do you mind if I place an Ad in Einschlafen Podcast for AntennaPod?

[tobybaier]

Hi folks,

I've decided to add Ads to Einschlafen Podcast, but only on Spotify, mainly to raise awareness that Spotify is not paying Podcasters for their content (see mik.fm/spotify for an explanation in german). I'd like to place an Ad for AntennaPod. It "may" sound like you paid for it, but obviously you won't. Here's the text I'd like to record:

Diese Episode wird präsentiert von: AntennaPod. AntennaPod ist eine App für Android Smartphones, die Euch absolute Freiheit gibt beim Hören von Podcasts. Durch die Anbindung an alle großen Suchmaschinen inklusive Fyyd findet man schnell was man braucht, kann direkt Kapitelmarken innerhalb einer Episode anspringen (das ist praktisch wenn man zum Beispiel nur den Rilke hören will oder gerade ein uninteressantes Kapitel hat), und einen Sleep Timer gibt es natürlich auch! AntennaPod ist nicht nur kostenlos sondern auch Open Source, Ihr findet es unter antennapod.org oder im Google Play Store.

Is that okay with everyone? I hope so :) Thanks for the continuous development!

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[ByteHamster]

Hi Toby,

thank you very much for your offer!

I've decided to add Ads to Einschlafen Podcast, but only on Spotify, mainly to raise awareness that Spotify is not paying Podcasters for their content

To me, that idea sounds great! I am not a fan of Spotify trying to take an open and distributed ecosystem and turning it into it a walled garden. So from me, you get a clear "Go". I really want to hear what @keunes thinks, though.

I am not sure about your target audience (must admit that I am not listening to your podcast) but from my experience, the word "Open-Source" is confusing to average users. Maybe something like "developed by volunteers from all over the world" would be easier to understand and still let tech-savvy users know that it is open-source.

By the way, we are currently really close to publishing version 2.0.0 with some nice new features. It will get a polished user interface and a new icon. It will also get support for chapter images, which might also be interesting for podcasters like you.

Greetings from Karlsruhe :)
Hans-Peter

[keunes]

Hi @tobybaier,

Thanks indeed very much for this generous offer and for checking in with us :) It's a great idea to do this advertising specifically on a closed platform.

Without knowing your target audience, I think I'd agree with Hans-Peter's suggestion (though I think 'volunteers' is sufficient here, where they come from I feel is less relevant). Also I was thinking that in Germany it might be appreciated that the app respects one's privacy. So then the sentence could be something like "AntennaPod ist von Freiwilligen entwickelt, und damit daher nicht nur kostenlos und werbefrei sondern auch datenschutzfreundlich. Ihr findet ..." (thank you Google for polishing up my rosty German)
Anyway it's your podcast and your ad, so feel free to do with the suggestions what you want :)

Then another question: would you record the ad yourself, or would you be interested in having another voice doing the ad?

Best,
Keunes

[tobybaier]

Awesome, thanks for the suggestion. I'm planning to record the ad myself, didn't. think about looking for other speakers. Nice idea though, if anyone of you is up to sending me a little audio file, doesn't need to be the full text, I'd be happy to add that.

[keunes]

I'm far from being fluent enough in German to do this. But I could ask a German colleague or family member if they'd be willing to give it a shot :)

[ByteHamster]

I just found something that might lead to problems.

https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/spotify-for-podcasters-platform-terms/

You acknowledge and accept that Authorized User Content may only contain advertising sold to advertisers against your entire network of content providers, including Other Services. You may not include (a) advertising and/or sponsorship messages targeted against the Service,
[...]
You acknowledge that advertising and/or sponsorship [...] for any competitive music or audio streaming services, is not permitted.

[keunes]

Strictly speaking it follows the requirements:

You acknowledge and accept that Authorized User Content may only contain advertising sold to advertisers against your entire network of content providers, including Other Services.

Given that it's not paid advertising, one could argue this clause doesn't apply

You may not include (a) advertising and/or sponsorship messages targeted against the Service,

The message doesn't speak bad or goes against the service, but simply promotes an application (granted, servicing a related domain)

You acknowledge that advertising and/or sponsorship [...] for any competitive music or audio streaming services, is not permitted.

AntennaPod does not offer streaming services

But yes, if they want they can cause trouble.

[tobybaier]

They won't, and it's my trouble :) I'm in close contact with Spotify, they know about my concerns (basicly what I've written on mik.fm/spotify). Still that's a good catch, thanks for pointing that out! My Spotify contact has actually confirmed to me that I can place ads for Spotify only, so I'd need to revisit that point.

If anything, I have paid AntennaPod, back in 2012 when Daniel made a fork for the single purpose podcatcher :D my Android knowledge was to low for that.

[ByteHamster]

They won't

That's good :)

I speak German (native) but my webcam is too crappy to record a proper ad. It is probably best if you speak yourself. This also shows that AntennaPod is not just another ad on Spotify but something you personally support. In the meantime, I listened to a few episodes of your podcast and noticed that you recommend AntennaPod quite a lot already. Thank you very much for that!

If anything, I have paid AntennaPod, back in 2012 when Daniel made a fork for the single purpose podcatcher :D

Is the app still published? I have not seen any AntennaPodSP apps in the wild, yet, and am thinking about removing SP support to make the code of the main app easier to read/maintain.

[tobybaier]

It is! And at least for Einschlafen it still is very successful!

My download statistics which are outside of Spotify are public: http://podseed.org/logs/logs.php?podcast=einschlafen and the AntennaPodSP is ranked 4 with over 10k downloads in the last month. You can also go back in history on that stats page and see how it evolved. That's probably because Einschlafen is a podcast that has a bit unique fan base, with quite a few listening only to this podcast and not to many others. Cannot prove quantitavely, but that's what I hear and see.

On the other hand, I don't see any new SPs being built and published. So if you can at least keep the trigger to automatically subscribe to the feed of an installed SP to a newly installed AntennaPod, that's probably enough.

[ByteHamster]

On the other hand, I don't see any new SPs being built and published. So if you can at least keep the trigger to automatically subscribe to the feed of an installed SP to a newly installed AntennaPod, that's probably enough.

Thanks a lot for the statistics! We will definitely keep the trigger :)

[keunes]

On a related note, @ByteHamster: I saw that the stats page lists AntennaPod twice ("AntennaPod Android" and "AntennaPod Android smartphone"). Could it be that this would be fixed if everybody would update to a version that includes #4272, or might there be another 'gap'?

[ByteHamster]

I don't know where this comes from. AntennaPod always either sent AntennaPod/x.x.x or a completely unrelated string that, when looking at it, can not be attributed to AntennaPod (fixed in 2.0.0).

@fstern or @tobybaier Do you know why AntennaPod appears twice in podseed's list?

[ByteHamster]

I'm closing this issue because there is nothing left to do. Thanks again, Toby, for promoting AntennaPod :)

[tobybaier]

sure, doesn't need to be an open issue. The "ad" will appear tomorrow evening on Spotify. If you want to, I can also send you the direct link to the MP3 if you're interested without having to use Spotify ;)

[ByteHamster]

That would be great, thanks! Then I don't have to register an account.

[tobybaier]

Exclusive sneak peak: http://einschlafen-podcast.de/spotify/ep0474s.mp3 (for your ears only! The episode will actually publish tonight at 9:30pm) ;)

[ByteHamster]

Awesome! Sounds great :)

[tobybaier]

Uhm, did you test something on Monday? http://podseed.org/logs/logs.php?podcast=einschlafen&start=2020-09-21&end=2020-09-21

[keunes]

The hits seem to be taken on two episodes: 469 and 473. Also there are two peaks since 1 Sept.

The first peak on 9 Sept is caused by 'Podcasts iOS' with a count of 6.5k (while AntennaPod is at its usual 480), and episode 473 has a total count of 14k.

The second peak on 21 Sept is caused by AntennaPod with a count of 44.9k (Podcasts iOS back at its usual 2k), and episode 469 has a total count of 44.9k (thus it's fair to assume that AP is more or less fully responsible for this).

[keunes]

Byte-Hamster says he didn't do anything special on Monday.
A bit of a wild thought, but could it be that you ended up in the iTunes recommandations for Germany, that we have a lot of German (F-Droid) users, that they subscribed to your podcast, and that AP (auto-)downloaded episode 469 first? A bit far-fetched, probably. But the peak in iOS earlier on is also interesting - would you have (another) explanation for that one?

[ByteHamster]

On Sunday, we released the blog post that we have a new logo. On Monday afternoon (19:07), I uploaded 2.0.0 to Google Play but it was only approved today and only rolled out to 800 users. To me, both things do not sound like they could cause such a massive spike.

Do you log the IP addresses? Did all the requests come from one address of from different ones?

[fstern]

Hi,

I'll have a look at the logfiles from Monday - we don't log IP adresses but MD5 hashes, so this should be trivial to find out.

Best,

Falk

On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 12:26:17AM -0700, H. Lehmann wrote:

On Sunday, we released the blog post that we have a new logo. On Monday
afternoon (19:07), I uploaded 2.0.0 to Google Play but it was only approved
today and only rolled out to 800 users. To me, both things do not sound like
they could cause such a massive spike.

Do you log the IP addresses? Did all the requests come from one address of from
different ones?

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[keunes]

Hi @fstern
Did you have a chance to look at this? We'd be curious to your findings :)