Podcasts have a property that's unusual for digital media: technically they rest on an open standard. A podcast is essentially nothing more than an RSS feed with audio files in it.

That means anyone can publish and anyone can listen using any app they like. No gatekeeper, no platform in between. It's the reason the medium became so varied.

And it's precisely the property that's now disappearing step by step.

How the model worked

Someone producing a podcast puts the audio files somewhere and publishes a feed. Directories and apps read that feed. Listeners subscribe and receive new episodes automatically.

The crucial point: the relationship exists between producer and listener. No platform can block access, throttle reach, or suddenly demand a commission.

Compare that with social networks, where an algorithm change can halve a publisher's reach overnight. Podcasts structurally didn't have that risk.

What's changing

Several developments are running in parallel and all point the same way.

Exclusive content. Large platforms buy productions and make them available only in their own app. The feed vanishes and the podcast becomes a product tied to a subscription.

Video platforms. A growing share of the audience now consumes podcasts as video. The medium migrates into environments where algorithmic recommendation determines reach — precisely the dependency that previously didn't exist.

Advertising infrastructure. Dynamic ad insertion requires infrastructure small producers don't run themselves. So they use service providers, and monetisation concentrates.

Measurement. Advertisers want to know who's listening. Open feeds don't deliver that data. Platforms do. That's a strong economic incentive to move into closed systems.

Why it matters for listeners

Practically: anyone following several podcasts increasingly needs several apps or several subscriptions. The convenience of having everything in one place disappears — the same pattern as with film and television streaming.

Less obviously: in closed systems an algorithm decides what you see. You then hear not what you subscribed to but what's recommended. That changes which content gets made at all, because producers optimise for the algorithm.

And the archival dimension is lost. An open feed remains accessible as long as somebody hosts the files. What sits exclusively on a platform disappears when the platform removes it, which has already happened at several providers.

Why it matters for producers

The short-term maths looks good for podcast makers. Platforms pay decently, video reach is attractive, professional monetisation yields higher revenue.

The long-term maths is more complicated. Anyone who builds an audience through a platform doesn't own that relationship. If the platform changes its terms, there's no exit.

This exact pattern has repeated itself in other media sectors: platform attracts with good terms, publishers migrate, dependency forms, terms deteriorate. There's no reason to assume it runs differently here.

What's still open

There is also a discovery problem that neither model has solved well. Open feeds are excellent at delivering episodes to people who already subscribe and quite poor at helping anyone find something new. Closed platforms are better at recommendation and worse at everything else.

Which is why word of mouth still drives an outsized share of podcast audience growth — a host mentioning another show, a listener sending a link to a friend. That is a fragile mechanism to build a medium on, and it is a large part of why the platforms' pitch has been persuasive to producers who simply want to be found.

I don't want to sound too gloomy, because the open ecosystem is by no means dead.

The overwhelming majority of podcasts worldwide still run on open feeds. Independent apps exist and work. There are initiatives actively developing the standard, including efforts to bring payment functions and better metadata directly into the feed.

And there's an economic counterweight: exclusivity limits reach, and several large providers have scaled back their exclusivity strategies because the numbers didn't add up.

What you can do yourself

It is worth noting who loses most if the open model erodes, because it is not the shows you have heard of.

Large productions with recognisable hosts will be fine in any scenario. They have negotiating power, they can move between platforms, and somebody will always pay for them.

The shows at risk are the small and specific ones. A podcast about medieval architecture with four thousand devoted listeners is viable on an open feed, because hosting costs are trivial and the audience finds it through directories and word of mouth. That same show does not survive a shift to a system where visibility depends on algorithmic recommendation tuned for scale, and it certainly does not survive needing to be commissioned by anybody.

That long tail is where most of the genuine variety in the medium lives. It is also the part that generates no headlines when it disappears, because each individual loss is small and nobody is tracking the total.

Small-scale, but it genuinely has an effect.

Use an app that supports open feeds rather than listening exclusively inside a closed ecosystem.

Support podcasts you genuinely like directly where there's a way to. Direct support is the only revenue route that doesn't depend on a platform.

And when subscribing, occasionally check whether the feed exists outside the app you happen to be in.

That won't rescue a medium single-handedly. But open systems generally survive not through regulation but because enough people keep using them.