Yahoo Podcasts

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

~ the last words ~

podcasting reached turkey late and thinly. in 2005 the word described an american hobby with an ipod somewhere in the middle of it, and an ipod here was an import price you discussed rather than a device you owned. yahoo opened its directory in october of that year and closed it before i had any real reason to go looking inside.

the product itself was sensible, which is part of what makes the ending odd. podcasts.yahoo.com launched on 10 october 2005 as a searchable directory of feeds, with listener ratings and reviews attached to each show and a player that ran inside the page so you could hear an episode without subscribing to anything first. this was three months after apple put podcast support into itunes, and the assumption almost everywhere was that directory plus player was going to be a real business.

it was not, or at least not one yahoo wanted to be in. by 2007 the company was under pressure to cut and it was working steadily through the properties that did not pay for themselves. yahoo photos and yahoo auctions both went in may of that year, and bill pay was announced in july. on 26 september a line appeared at the top of the podcasts homepage: "yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the podcasts site on oct. 31, 2007." no reason was given, then or afterward.

the archive brackets it exactly. the directory was still serving a full ten kilobyte homepage on 1 october 2007, and by 6 november the address answered with a redirect. it never came back, and yahoo never built another one.

~ the record ~

~ what it got right ~

the thing worth noticing about yahoo podcasts is how little of it was wrong. a directory you can search, a subscribe button, ratings from listeners and playback in the browser is a description of nearly every podcast app built since, and it was shipping in 2005. what it lacked was any reason to come back to yahoo specifically, because the feeds were open and any other directory in the world could list exactly the same shows.

~ the two years afterward ~

podcasting kept growing straight through the closure and for a decade past it. yahoo left the category in october 2007 and never returned. the pattern then repeated with a different logo more than once: facebook closed its podcast product in 2022 after barely a year of running it, and google shut down its podcasts app in 2024 and pushed listeners into youtube music. the medium survived every one of them, which is the ordinary result when the thing being distributed is an open feed and the distributor is only a portal.

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