Too Long; Didn't Read
Advertisers are planning to spend more than $800 million on podcasts in 2020. The main metric of success for most of podcasting history has been the one thing the RSS infrastructure allows: how many times the file was downloaded. The act of downloading a podcast still passes some data, and whoever hosts the file can log a download’s date and time, the podcatcher used, the IP address (which also reveals rough location), and typically, the type of device. The change has provoked considerable debate, sometimes combative, within the podcasting industry.