Facebook Podcasts: The Discover Pods Writers Weigh In
The new Netflix of podcasting? Facebook. Or, at least, it wants to be.
As reported on by Ashley Carman of The Verge, Facebook has launched podcast support to compete with Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Like most other podcatchers–including Facebook’s biggest competitors, Apple Podcasts and Spotify–Facebook will provide access via the podcast’s host. Similar to the popular Headliner app, Facebook will also allow short clips to be pulled from episodes for easy shares on the platform.
With its release now underway, we spoke with our Discover Pods team via email and Slack to get their thoughts on Facebook joining the podcast space.
Our general consensus? Facebook bad.
Wil Williams: So, my first thought is: absolutely not, I hate it. I watched the digital media space suffer the cold, awful death of “pivot to video,” largely because of Facebook. I watched Zuck lie to literal Government officials in a trial. And I watched people tweet about how Facebook’s terms of service allow the company to make derivative works of your podcast. Summarily: Taako’s good out here.
Tal Minear: My main thought is that I want Facebook to have less of my data, not more. In my opinion, they don’t seem to be doing anything new or exciting that warrants having them more involved in my life. And yeah, I don’t want them making derivative works of my shows either. (Does that part remind anyone of the Anchor controversy?)
Wil Williams: Yes! The Anchor controversy! This is that times ten. At least Anchor didn’t say, “Oh and also we can write fanfic about your podcast and use it to market ourselves.”
(Editor’s note: The tweets that sparked this Anchor controversy have since been deleted.)
Gavin Gaddis: Speaking of Anchor: I’m extremely wary about this, if only because the big content farms on Facebook likely will make RSS feeds just to steal content from podcasts now.
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Cole Burkhardt: Yeah, honestly, I quit Facebook months ago, and this certainly isn’t enough to draw me back in.
Eddie Feeley: I agree with Tal, Facebook getting its fingers into more stuff sucks. That being said, a thing that jumped out to me was them including the abilities for users to bookmark, favorite, share and comment on podcasts through the app. It sucks that this will all be through Facebook, but giving users different ways to interact with the podcast through the app they are listening to the podcast through could help with discoverability (or just completely bury indie shows that don’t have Facebook’s love). It’s not so much a compliment to Facebook as it is a testament to how weird the current in-app discoverable for shows is across all platforms, or how much it kind of stinks that shows currently rely on Apple reviews and ratings.
James J. Griffin: This is a Clubhouse clone from Facebook for the purposes of data harvesting so they can “sell ads senator.” Clubhouse is a big whiff in its own right and why anyone wants it clamped onto the Facebook ecosystem is beyond me. Facebook is fairly explicit about their business model, and, this furthers it. They need to know everything about their user base to target ads. This helps that goal. They have no other goal beyond that and it shows in just how derivative this clone is. Fine. But for anyone serious, hard pass. There will be all sorts of collateral damage beyond good Facebook’s ecosystem for indie producers and the like. But the more you can get your audience, no matter the audience, away from their advertising first monolithic ecosystem, the better.
Caroline Mincks: I’m mostly just weary of Clubhouse and anything like Clubhouse tbh.
Gavin Gaddis: Clubhouse set back the concept of chill voice chat rooms outside of Discord by years.
Wil Williams: How do you mean?
Gavin Gaddis: The Startup-ness of it all. As we’ve seen, they basically fell off a cliff in popularity once the sheen of having Zuckerberg drop in occasionally faded. On other services it’s a cool feature, but it feels like a feature that’ll be quietly discontinued because they don’t know what to do with it.
Elena Fernández Collins: I have nothing else pertinent to say that others haven’t already. I trust Facebook about as far as I can throw a piano, which means that podcasters and podcast audiences should approach this with extreme wariness.
I’d also like to remind everyone that if you are able to divest from Facebook, you should, but that everyone should remember that it is also just not possible to do so for many. FB’s ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp means that it’s one of the only ways that long-distance families can stay in touch easily. So I don’t want to see anyone asking why they haven’t deleted Facebook yet!
Gavin Gaddis: It’s impossible to discuss Facebook as a podcatcher, in my mind, without acknowledging the fact Facebook is also the company that lied about its video metrics to a monstrous degree. There are people who used to have gainful employment in media that’re out begging for freelance scraps due to the infamous “pivot to video” inspired by, you guessed it, Facebook’s inflated viewcounts. Why in the ever-loving hell should I, or anyone else, trust Facebook?
I’m curious to see if the widely-shared belief that Facebook podcasts magically unlocks the niche of people whose only internet access is Facebook comes true. They’re used to a glut of content freebooted from the rest of the internet, podcasts are going to have an upward hill to climb if they don’t have a Rogan-esque cult of personality driving new people to try.
I do like the ability to clip audio and share it easily (which is likely using Instagram tech). It’s an idea that makes perfect sense on paper but it’ll only work in the real world if it’s implemented on a big enough app that tons of people can actually use it. I know of two podcatchers with the ability and both require the person receiving the clip to download said app. The people who own Instagram have the tech to generate easily-sharable audiograms. The future of sharing podcasts is in easily-digestible video content that’s as easy to share as TikToks, and Facebook might’ve threaded that needle. That’s the one positive thing I have for them.
As far as the industry at large is concerned this feels like a net neutral. Podcasts are likely getting freebooted on Facebook so at least this means people can have their shows on the platform that’s stealing them regularly as-is. On the flip side: now content farms can pull an Anchor and just make spoof RSS feeds and yoink content. It’s not like Facebook has a history of being aggressively hands-off with content moderation or anything.
That’s the point where I would put an upside-down emoji to communicate frustration with how cartoonishly bad Facebook is if it were journalistically-acceptable to use emoji in a post like this.
Wil Williams: I wonder if they’re going to keep acting like the Limetown show they made never happened while also promoting podcasts like Limetown or likely inspired by Limetown lol
Eddie Feeley: can’t wait for the fruit-town audio universe
Wil Williams: luckily I think we can bet on Pineapple Street Media to sit this one out
Gavin Gaddis: Well Shipworm proudly calls Limetown a Peacock show. It’d be hilarious to see Facebook plant their flag in being proud of that one. “We brought back French Stewart, dang it!”
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