Art19.com Reviews

From their LinkedIn page, https://www.linkedin.com/company/art19-inc- , "Broadcast radio is about to be transformed by mobile internet connectivity. It is the last bastion of media to experience a digital migration. Pandora and Spotify are leading the charge in music. ART19 is a next generation platform for talk radio and podcasts."

All the links I found pointing to art19.com were from sites that I know to have podcast or other streaming audio and/or video news-like content. I first encountered the link on recode.net, which has quite a bit of "talk radio" content.

From their website, http://www.art19.com/ , they help sites with measuring not only if a user downloaded a podcast, but listened to it. (I am curious about how they do that.) They also change what ads are delivered with (or in?) the podcast stream so that they ads are targeted to the person downloading it. They could only do that if they are tracking the downloader's interests (or buying that sort of data from other tools that track users). I bit of a negative there, perhaps.

They also insert new, current ads in older podcasts (aka "back catalog") as they are downloaded. Also from their site, "ART19’s WarpFeed technology provides near real-time RSS ad insertion, unlocking regional and international advertising as well as monetization of back catalogs." I actually think that's a plus. If I am listening to an old podcast, it's almost annoying to hear an ad about something that's been long over or no longer relevant.

I see one potential problem here. I mostly listen to most podcasts on my phone. I download them via WiFi to keep them from using my (expensive) data plan bytes. So long as the new ads from Art19 are inserted when the podcast is downloaded (while I am getting the podcast over WiFi) and not when I listen to it (which might use up my data plan), this is probably a plus. Technically, if they were audo-only ads, I probably wouldn't notice a few extra bytes, but if they were video ads, I would not be a happy camper.

I believe this technology is mostly targeted at podcast-like content that viewers are streaming "live" rather than "tape-delayed" like I do with podcasts. If you look at recode.net's extensive video and podcast venue (click the links in their banner), they allow both streaming and downloading. It seems like measuring if a podcast was actually watched would be pretty doable with a streamed podcast. I have no idea how they could do it with a downloaded podcast (unless there is some way to embed a "message home" in the podcast itself).