We wanted to offer more value to users without ads

Years ago, when we first launched this app, it was as basic as a podcast app could possibly be. It had none of the features that a modern podcast app is supposed to have. We made the conscious decision not to monetize the app with ads. We wanted to offer more value to users first. We felt lucky (and still do) for every single install.

It’s rare for an app not to use in-app ads, and it got noticed! It organically became an early key marketing point. The strategy became to keep ads out of the app for as long as possible, and so we have.

We decided to try something different than the boring pay-to-remove-ads (aka freemium) model that dominates mobile platforms. We’d add some premium-tier features and ask people to pay for those (like our multi-device, multi-platform, real-time cloud backups).

As the app improved over time and we launched native versions for iOS and the web, podcasting also became a lot more popular. That’s a good thing! We have always wanted to make podcasting as easy and accessible to as many people as possible.

But it also broke our marketing strategy because most of the new users aren’t RSS wizards who understand how podcasting works under the hood. It’s not obvious or easy to explain to users that the audio ads they hear in a podcast are coming from the podcaster (or their hosts) and are not coming from our app.

This past year, we’ve received a fair share of negative reviews accusing us of false advertising. Our Android app rating was a stunning 4.9 at one point a few years ago, and now it has dropped to 4.4. This is despite the app being many orders of magnitude better than it was at launch.

So we’re having to rethink a few things

We’ve been scrubbing all our marketing of the “no ads” language. It has been long gone from the app stores for quite a while now, but we’re still finding a few stray web pages and updating them. We don’t want users to feel like they’ve been duped into installing our app because they didn’t read the fine print.

Being fully transparent, we are going to have to implement some kind of ad strategy. Economic reality is something that we can’t ignore. That’s not to say you’re going to start seeing ads in the app tomorrow. We are going to be very careful and conscientious about how we do advertising and how we roll it out to our users.

The app store game is pretty simple: an app with a lower rating is going to get fewer installs, earn less money, and have fewer resources to put back into development. So, in order to keep building at a good pace, we need both better ratings, more installs, and yes, more revenue. That’s ultimately what both we and our users want – to polish out all the rough edges of the app (of which there are many) and then continue breaking new ground on features like video podcasting and an amazing podcasting 2.0 experience.

And finally, thanks to everyone who has supported our small 3 person team and helped us get this far. There’s still a long (but fun) journey in front of us.

Alex, Jason & Matt