Apple Podcasts: A Minor Tweak With Big Implications
The iOS 16.2 and iPad OS 16.2 update that started rolling out on Tuesday brings one minor, almost imperceptible change to the Apple Podcasts app: the “+” button at the top-right of every podcast page now says “+ Follow.”
That’s a slight enough change to the interface that I assumed it had been there for a while without my noticing it until I saw that James Cridland noted it this morning in his Podnews industry newsletter.
It’s more than a cosmetic change. “Follow” mirrors Spotify’s terminology and distinguishes from “Subscribe,” which is the term Apple Podcasts uses for paid subscriptions.
Apple was years behind the rest of the podcast business in experimenting with a paid model but put big development and marketing resources into it in 2022.
Apple Podcasts is not quite yet the monetization force for creators that Patreon and Substack are, but it’s such a dominant audio platform — 40-something percent of all podcast listens — that Apple has a good chance of willing paid subscriptions into at least importance and maybe dominance.