Recommendation media is the new standard for content distribution. Here’s why friend graphs can‘t compete in an algorithmic world. — Last week, Meta announced that the Facebook newsfeed would be shifting towards an algorithmic, recommendation-based model of content distribution. This announcement marked the most recent example of a major platform to formally make this shift, while other major platforms, including Meta’s Instagram, have been headed in this direction for a…

Standards, like RSS for podcasts, have enabled emerging technologies to spread far and wide in the information age by making it easy for them to plug into existing ecosystems. But the blessing of standardization eventually comes at a cost, and innovation suffers as a result. As an example, this is why the podcast format has remained mostly stagnant over its 20 year history. — Technical standards are awesome. Standards help teams save time and money by giving them a common language for how their products can interact with other products, eliminating the need to build each component within a market or re-define how systems communicate with each other. For example, a team building a…

Over the past few years, Anchor has helped millions of people all over the world share their voices far and wide, including some of podcasting’s biggest creators. As a result of so many more people podcasting, the space has rapidly changed. …

The open RSS standard has provided immense value to the growth of the podcasting ecosystem over the past few decades. …

After speaking with countless podcasters in the community, we’re setting a new standard for podcasting with a Terms of Service that is simpler, easier to understand, and better reflects our mission of empowering creators everywhere. — Anchor is built for creators. The mission that drives every decision we make is to democratize audio by giving everyone, regardless of experience level or financial means, easy and powerful tools to make a podcast and share their voice.

How the Anchor product team approaches traditionally complex audio functionality and makes it fun and easy to use. — Since we launched Anchor 2.0 earlier this year, one of the most common questions we’ve gotten from creators has been “Why can’t I edit audio before adding it to my station?” Editing indeed has always seemed like an obvious (and much-needed) feature that should exist alongside all of our other…

Brought to you by Anchor — It shouldn’t come as a surprise that at Anchor, a company focused on building audio products for everyone, we think and talk a lot about the current state of audio: Why are podcasts so popular right now? What is the future of radio? How can the creation and distribution of…

This essay is best consumed by listening to it. Tap the play button to start. Can’t see the player? Tap here to launch it in a new window. Or read on to consume it the old fashioned way… Thanks to the internet and smartphones, digital audio is more popular…

Interested in learning about onboarding? After you read this post, join @mayafish and me at our next Product Secrets meetup on August 12th, 2014. Tom Wahlin, lead product designer at Cover, will be sharing some best practices and learnings that led Cover to the fantastic onboarding experience they have today. …