I recently was very concerned when I saw a video from a company call Glycast.com It stated, "“It’s a new approach to podcast advertising. This is how it works. You give us your podcast feed, and we give you a new one to distribute to your audience. ”"
I could tell by the video that the person was more of a podcast listener and not an actual podcaster. I didn't think he was out to hurt podcasters. But I could see where there was a chance for people to get their RSS feed hijacked with now way to get it back if Glycast went out of business. This video explains it all.
So my first reaction was to tell everyone the house was on fire, and to be careful. My second reaction was to contact the company and get their side of the story. I was BLOWN AWAY when I got this response.
My name is José Pablo Fernández, I live in London, I started coding when I was 7 years old, I also started my first business around that time. I worked for Google some years ago. For the past 4 years I been running a startup I co-founded, first as CTO and then as CEO: Carousel Apps. This company is launching Glycast. I co-founded Hear a Blog, a podcasting-related product, some years ago, and we got selected and Seedcamp Paris finalists. In my video for investors I talk more about my background: https://carouselapps.wistia.com/medias/pv06qw6ap5
We have the core tech for Glycast but not everything, so, we'll build whatever is required for both parties to be happy. We want both parties to be happy, so, if you are not and you want to leave us, we won't stop you. If you require us setting up a redirect of your feed to another system, we'll implement that feature and everybody will have it.
I'm thinking of actually recommending people of using Feedburner, so as to have a setup such as this:
main rss -> glycast -> feedburner -> audience
You give the feedburner RSS to your audience and while Glycast is there, then you have ads, if one day you want to move away, then you just switch your Feedburner account to read directly from your main rss like this:
main rss -> feedburner -> audience
and voila. You don't even need the redirect. Nobody will notice any difference at all.
Depending on what systems people are using we may also develop plug ins. For example, we can have a WordPress plug in that makes your feed look like if it was serve from Glycast, with the ads, but on your feed on your own server. That shouldn't be that hard to implement.
About who is on your show? Do you mean about which ads are played and which ones aren't? I'd love to implement something like that. It'll probably be something like this: if you don't approve any ads, then all ads are approved, if you approve enough ads to take care of your inventory, then only those ads will appear. If there are not enough ads, we'll send an email with an alert. Those ads pay for our hosting and bandwidth so we can't run without ads for long periods of time, but I don't want any podcaster ever to be unhappy about the ads they are getting.
About how much money, I don't know yet. The market will define this over time. I could look at the current expenditure in podcasts but since our model is quite different, it doesn't really apply. When you buy ads in a podcast today you are most likely buying that spot forever, while with Glycast, the spot keeps passing around from advertiser to advertiser over time. Eventually, I think we'll have a bidding system, similar to Google's Adsense, so that the pricing adjusts over time automatically.
About the video. I'm not here to harm anyone. I'm here to make a product to help podcasters and advertisers connect, be more efficient. I'm building whatever podcasters will need to be happy. I understand your worry and your desire to warn your audience that might not understand RSS distribution and make a bad decision now that will cost them a chunk of their audience later on. That's not something I want to do and I wouldn't be happy with any company holding an audience hostage like tha