Podcast Alley

» see podcastalley.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Chris McIntyre started Podcast Alley in 2004, when the total number of podcasts in the world was a number a person could plausibly have counted. The site did two things. It kept a directory, which is the part that sounds important and was not, and it ran a monthly Top 10 decided by listener votes, which is the part that sounds trivial and was the entire product.

In September 2005 PodShow bought it. PodShow was Adam Curry's company, the one that had taken $8.85 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia a month earlier to be the network layer of a medium almost nobody was listening to yet. PodShow renamed itself Mevio in 2008. Podcast Alley stayed up under that ownership for nine more years, outlasting most of what got bought in 2005.

Mevio went dark in April 2014. Creators got about ten days to move their feeds off before the hosting went away, and mevio.com itself was gone around 16 April. Podcast Alley should have died there, in the same week, as one line in somebody else's wind-down. It did not. The directory and the vote kept serving for another six months after the parent company stopped existing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the vote worked ~

You went to the site and you voted for a show, once a month, and the standings reset. That is the whole mechanism. What made it matter is that in 2005 there was no other number. Apple published no chart worth reading, and download counts were self-reported by the people being counted. A ranked list that a human could see meant a podcast could be described as popular in a way that survived contact with a sales conversation.

So podcasters asked. The end-of-episode plea to go and vote became a format convention of that whole era, the audio equivalent of asking people to smash the subscribe button, and it ran for years because it worked. What the chart actually measured was which hosts were most willing to beg. Everyone involved understood that, and the chart kept running on those terms until the site stopped.

~ the seed list ~

McIntyre's own account of the early years, still sitting on the domain, claims he partnered with Apple while they were working out what podcasting was and gave them the initial directory of shows they used to launch the podcast section of iTunes. Take it as his telling rather than a verified transaction. But if it is close to right, the independent directory that iTunes made redundant had handed iTunes the list it opened with, and Podcast Alley spent its second decade losing to a product it helped stock.

~ what the captures show about the ending ~

There is no shutdown post, so the date comes from the crawl record. On 28 October 2014 the front page is still titled PodcastAlley.com, still describing itself as the podcast lovers portal with the Top 10 as voted on by the listeners, running around 29 kilobytes. On 5 November 2014 the same address returns a page titled Podcast Alley, Your Place for Podcasting News and Featured Podcasts, and there is no directory and no vote in it.

Underneath that eight-day window the collapse is already visible. Through the second half of 2014 the captures are speckled with Cloudflare 522s, which is what an edge returns when it can reach the name but not the server behind it. The origin had been failing intermittently since July. Something had to go in front of a domain whose machine was on its way out, and what went up instead is still there today.

~ the headline feed ~

What the address carries today, and has carried since that November, is an automated scrape of podcast headlines from elsewhere. The current version still introduces itself by saying that Podcast Alley, founded in 2004, was the leading destination for podcast news and the top directory for podcast discovery. Note the tense. The page making that claim is a list of links to articles on other people's sites, refreshed by a script, with no directory behind it and nothing to vote on.

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