Podsights presents Open Downloads for Podcasts - here's what we think about it

Only a few days ago, we at Podigee released our new analytics.

One of the points we made was to challenge the centralization imposed by the IAB certification.

Don’t get me wrong - I believe that a standard is a good thing, and the IAB 2.0 guidelines are pretty solid. Yet they lack a lot of detail.

Because of that we published a whitepaper that makes our analytics transparent and fills in the gaps that are in the IAB 2.0 guidelines.

Today, Podnews published a piece of news from Podsights, about a new initiative called “oDL”, or Open Downloads, which makes me personally very happy. It shows that there are other people like us who are open-minded and challenge the status quo for the benefit of everyone.

Here are the key points of their post:

• “IAB v2.0 didn’t go far enough as it relies on wording around “Best Practices.” […] a spec shouldn’t have best practices.”
• “Two hosting providers, both who are IAB v2.0 certified, could have up to a 10% difference in download counts”
• “IAB v2.0 is expensive. $45k for a hosting provider to become certified. […] this hurdle creates an undue burden on smaller companies.”
• a free for everyone solution is needed
• oDL should be community owned

Read more about it here: https://podsights.com/blog/open-downloads/