Podcasting is built on genuinely open pieces. An audio file on a web server, a feed listing the files, a program that checks the feed and fetches what is new. No permission required at any step, no company in the middle, no terms of service.
And essentially nobody finds a programme any way other than through Apple’s directory.
That is the shape worth noticing, because it recurs. The format is open in the parts that do not determine who wins. Anyone can publish, which means publishing is not scarce and therefore not valuable. What is scarce is being discovered, and discovery runs through one catalogue that one company curates according to criteria it does not publish.
Apple has not done anything objectionable with this. It also has not had to, and the absence of a problem so far is not the same as the absence of exposure. Anyone whose show disappeared from that listing would find out very quickly how open the format really is.
The advertising side has a different problem, and it is one I have complained about before in another context. Nobody can say how many people listened.
What a publisher can count is downloads, and a download is a request from a piece of software running on a schedule. It tells you that a subscription exists. It does not tell you whether the file was played, or how far in, or whether it sat unplayed on a device for six weeks before being deleted along with forty others.
An advertiser buying radio gets an audience estimate built on a methodology they can argue with. An advertiser buying banners gets impressions and clicks. An advertiser buying a podcast slot gets a number that sounds like an audience and is really a count of automated fetches, and the good publishers know this and are uncomfortable quoting it.
That gap is a harder ceiling than audience size. Money follows measurement, not attention, and it will go to the worse medium with the better numbers every time.
Fixing it requires reporting back what happened during playback, which means the player has to phone home, which means the open format acquires a component that is not open. There may be no way to have both, and I suspect the medium settles for staying small and honest rather than large and instrumented.