In Big Boon For Creators And Advertisers, Apple Will Provide Some Podcast Analytics

From Grace Helbig to Tyler Oakley to, most recently, vloggers David Dobrik and Jason Nash, countless YouTubers have thrown their hats into the podcasting ring in a bid to expand their burgeoning media empires. And now, an update by Apple — which accounts for the vast majority of listening via its Podcast app — could make these ventures vastly more lucrative.

An updated version of the Apple podcast app will soon give creators basic analytics, Recode reports, including the individual episodes that listeners are consuming as well as the parts of an episode that are being skipped or causing listeners to exit a stream. Until now, Apple has provided virtually no analytics aside from download counts. The company announced the update at its developer conference last week, and said that more information about analytics would be available later this year.

Matthew Lieber, the president of leading podcast studio Gimlet Media

, said that the announcement “may look obscure, but this is the biggest thing to happen to the podcast business since Serial first went nuclear.”

In addition to giving creators a better sense of how audiences are interacting with their work, the update is bound to be a game-changer for advertisers. However, Recode notes that Apple won’t be providing information about individual listener demographics — as occurs on platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Given that Apple isn’t an ad company and that privacy is a huge part of its ethos, all data will be aggregated and anonymized.

A more robust advertising model could make podcasts a more enticing proposition for digital influencers, who — given that the business is still relatively nascent — have cashed in by selling visual versions of their shows to subscription platforms like Fullscreen.