I've had an account with podcasts on it, mine and clients, for nearly a decade. But the past few months it's been such a struggle to get in and see the data. I don't use a Mac, never have, but it looks like they've made it harder to do that.
Curious if anyone else is having an issue like this AND what workaround you're using the get access easily again. Thanks.
Someone asked this in a FB group and I loved the answers so much I wanted to ask it here. Below is my reply but I am most curious about your experiences")
I started my main podcast in 2017 and it's changed so much since then. I actually sunsetted it in 2022 but it's still growing and changing. Why, because cheesy as this sounds, this is my opus. I always thought I'd write a book about my time living overseas but once I found podcasting, I fell in love. And the things I would have said and talked about in that book are now in these episodes. And there's so much that my guests said that I never would have thought to mention let alone not know about. (I know I can still write a book but recording conversations is so much more fun for me!)
How it's changed over time:
-at first:
learning how to use different types of recording and editing equipment. Letting go of what I thought the pod was about and letting it unfold naturally.
-pure connection joy:
following the conversations where they went. Adding on more themed episodes and when I met someone super interesting,asking them on the pod without hesitation.
-winding down:
I ran out of ideas for the pod. I mean, this took many conversations and years of working on the pod. About 8 years. I did one final season that was really intimate to me and my otherness and then stopped. I always have a creative project I'm working on but this one felt done.
-cleaning up:
stopping the podcast did not stop me working on it. Now that I wasn't producing more eps, I started to clean up all the odds and ends that I never had time to tidy up while producing so much so fast. Even now, a few years after ending it,I'm still updating the meta data so more people can find it. These convos are a library and I want people to get these resources when they need them.
Their AI bot said that to change currencies on my invoices (from USD to Euro) is possible only if I unsubscribe and then resubscribe. I asked if this clears my chats and it said no. I trust nothing, lol.
Has anyone else done this? I'd love to know your experiences. Thanks.
Saw this bit in Podnews today.
"There has been a significant rise in downloads from web browsers again in April. Buzzsprout report 21.3% of their downloads came from web browsers in the month - up from 13% in March, and up from 8.7% year-on-year. Transistor, similarly, reports 21.4% of their downloads come from web browsers; up from 15.5% last month, and 5.7% a year ago. (AI scrapers often pretend they’re web browsers, which means that they’re difficult to block; and website owners everywhere are battling significant additional traffic)."
My browser downloads have been up the past few months. I figured that it was due to more Americans wanting to move abroad and/or because of the optimization clean up I'm doing.
And I know the answers to my own question of " How in the world do we know if more traction on our pods is from actual humans?" BUT I'm asking anyway. Because the old advice of doing a listener survey, getting comments from listeners and so on can also be done by AI bots. I mean, why in the world would anyone be doing that I don't know but I'm feeling a fundamental shift in distrust in any digital measurement.
With that in mind, my question is NOT " how do we know if there are humans listening or bots botting" but " what are you doing to humanize your podcast so that listeners know you're you and not AI?
Or are you a barefoot person?
I'm experimenting with different ones to see what's right. My slippers are definitely not!