Why I Stopped Using Stitcher

[Update: We have negotiated a way to get back on Stitcher. They are now streaming directly from our podcast feed and are showing no ads over our content. My original post follows.]

Stitcher is an extremely convenient mobile app that allows you to subscribe and listen to your favorite podcasts by streaming them (i.e. without having to “sync” them). Over the past few months, I’ve encountered many listeners who have appreciated consuming my shows in this way, and I’ve used the Stitcher app myself a bunch of times. Unfortunately, I can no longer support this service.

Since I learned about Stitcher, I always just assumed that the service taps into the content directly using a podcast’s RSS feed (similar to how Downcast, which is a spectacularly great app, does it). I started to suspect that this was not the case when I noticed differences in audio quality between an “official” episode of one of my podcasts and the Stitcher version of the episode. They were clearly compressing the audio of the show in some way. Compressing makes it easier to listen to the show if you’re streaming it over a mobile data connection, but I wondered what the implications were for show producers such as myself.

I recently had the chance to learn about these implications through a blog post by Nerdist podcast host Chris Hardwick. His post is long and detailed, but it comes down to this: Stitcher essentially creates a copy of each one of your episodes, compresses the audio to facilitate streaming, then serves up that copy via their servers. They also sell in-app adds on this content.

As a podcast host/producer, there are two important implications for this:

1) People are downloading episodes in a way that prevents us from keeping track of these downloads. Whenever we are lucky enough to have a sponsor, that sponsor typically pays us based on how many downloads we have. No Stitcher downloads/streams counted towards these totals.

2) Stitcher sells advertising on top of our content, essentially making money off of our “free” labor. This is a bit unjust on its face, but moreover, as Hardwick points out, this can become complicated when Stitcher’s sponsors conflict with our own.

Earlier today, I requested that both of my shows (The /Filmcast and The Tobolowsky Files) be removed from Stitcher. The representative I spoke with was incredibly accommodating and professional and as of now, both podcasts have been removed.

I know many of you listen to our show using Stitcher and I am deeply sorry for any inconvenience this change may cause your routine. That being said, if you listened to our show via Stitcher, it means we didn’t get to track your downloads and any revenue generated from your downloads went straight to Stitcher (Stitcher has an ad partnership program but why would I enlist in that when I can just sell advertising on my own?). While being de-listed from Stitcher nominally takes away from our exposure, it will maximize our ability to monetize  our podcast and thus, will hopefully increase our overall longevity.

In my interactions with the Stitcher representative today, I learned that Stitcher apparently now has a way to tap into original podcast feeds, thus allowing us to keep track of downloads. Obviously this method comes with a number of disadvantages for the listener; most importantly, audio with large file sizes is difficult to stream and can end up costing a ton of data. Nonetheless, we may want to take them up on this option one day.

I’m not ready to do that right now. The problem is that for many months, Stitcher scraped our content, streamed it from their own servers, and sold ads on top of it. I find it objectionable and baffling that any company would think this is acceptable behavior, especially a company that purports to support a community of DIY bootstrappers that is the podcasting community. As a result, even if Stitcher has improved their ways, they’ve already destroyed a lot of trust in my mind. It may be possible for them to rebuild it, but that will take a long, long time.

The Best (and Worst) Tweets of 2011

This past year cemented Twitter as a service that has definitely changed the way we think about communication. I enjoyed the following retrospectives about the best (and worst) tweets of 2011:

Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon has a nice overall list of the best and worst tweets of the year.

Time magazine also has their own best and worst tweets list, most of them with a political slant.

The Wall Street Journal has a list of the best celebrity tweets of 2011.

Warming Glow has compiled some pretty amazing tidbits from the world of television.

Mashable has a list of 2011’s shocking social media disasters.

[And these are not really tweets, but New York magazine has some of the best quotes of the year]

On the Uselessness of New Year’s Resolutions

Merlin Mann wrote this piece on new year’s resolutions (via Marco) almost a year ago but it’s still advice that I hold dear. Essentially, Mann argues against making huge, sweeping resolutions, in favor of smaller, more systematic decisions that are reasonable and achievable. The latter is a more mature way to go that will probably end up leading to more change:

Don’t set yourself up for failure by demanding things that you’ve never come close to achieving before. I realize this is antithetical to most self-improvement bullshit, but that’s exactly the point. If you were already a viking, you wouldn’t need to build a big boat. Start with where you are right now. Not with where you wish you’d been.

I have the will and the time to start a workout regimen but I’ve recently been beset by some pretty significant injuries that prevent this. Therefore, one of my new year’s resolution is to walk 5 miles, 4 days per week. It’s simultaneously small but ambitious. I’ll be using the Runkeeper app on my iPhone to monitor my routine and you can keep up with me here. Here’s hoping that 2012 will be a more healthy year than the last one.

My Favorite Longreads of 2011

I spend a lot of time reading, whether on the internet or on my Kindle through Instapaper. The latter is an activity I heartily recommend for anyone.

This year, a myriad of compelling, informative, moving longform content was published online, available for free. Here are some of the pieces I found the most interesting. As some of these cover some pretty dark territory, I certainly didn’t “enjoy” reading them all, but if they’re on this list, I found them to be works worthy of your attention. Many of them have significantly changed how I think about the topics they cover, which I believe to be a sign of any well-written content:

How 480 Characters Unraveled My Career – Nir Rosen’s apologia explains how a few careless tweets destroyed everything he’d been working towards for years.

Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun – Maria Bustillos breaks out her forensic grammarian hat over at The Awl.

Leaving in a Huff – Eric D. Snider reconstructs the Moviefone meltdown with hilarity and truth.

The Sad Beautiful Fact That We’re Going to Miss Almost Everything – Linda Holmes presents the ultimate conundrum of following pop culture.

Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? – Anthony Grafton not only presents a sobering portrait of American education, but also points to flaws in how we write and conceive of it.

Sweet Emulsion – Scott Tobias explains why we should care that the days of film are numbered.

The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox – A gripping Rolling Stone feature on how young Amanda Knox unwittingly wandered into the midst of an international scandal.

The Hellish Experience of Making a Bad Horror Film – Leigh Whannell describes the nightmare that was making Dead Silence. Glad to see he has a sense of humor about it!

Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door – A Vanity Fair piece on the horrors of domestic sex trafficking.

A Day at the Park – Shawn Taylor movingly describes the emotional struggles of a black father in America.

Parents of a Certain Age – Lisa Miller explores the idea of parents getting pregnant for the first time when they’re in their 50s. Arguments for both sides are presented but Miller definitely has a specific position on the subject. I found her explanation behind it to be thought-provoking.

The Shame of College Sports – Taylor Branch provides a sprawling look at the injustice of college athletics and the travesty that is the NCAA.

Homosexuality and the Bible

No article I’ve read has been able to articulate my views as effectively as Walter Wink’s recent(?) essay on how we should interpret references to homosexuality in the Bible:

The crux of the matter, it seems to me, is simply that the Bible has no sexual ethic. There is no Biblical sex ethic. Instead, it exhibits a variety of sexual mores, some of which changed over the thousand year span of biblical history. Mores are unreflective customs accepted by a given community. Many of the practices that the Bible prohibits, we allow, and many that it allows, we prohibit. The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, or culture, or period.

Three Stories on Marriage

NPR has produced a lot of coverage about the institution of marriage this month. First up, a broad sociological study on how marriage is becoming obsolete. Among the findings, this shocking statistic:

Half a century ago, nearly 60 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds were married. Today, it’s just 20 percent. But the Pew report finds fewer married people across all age groups.

We’ve also learned that unemployment increases the risk of violence and lowers the possibility of divorce:

Simultaneously, a new paper in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy shows that as unemployment rises, the divorce rate goes down: For every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate, the divorce rate goes down by 1 percent.

Weekend Edition elaborates on these findings. One of the interesting and unfortunate implications of this:

[Social scientists] worry that, you know, we have this, now, inequality in marriage. And is that then is going to exacerbate inequality in the next generation? As the next college-educated Americans have children, bring them up in these very, you know, nuclear family homes, their children, studies would suggest, have a greater chance of themselves going on to college and then being high achievers. Whereas children raised in homes where the parents are not married, while there may be many happy such relationships and the children will be just fine, on average, they have much poorer outcomes. They’re less likely to go to college. And so there’s a concern that you’re going to exacerbate this inequality.

It’s fascinating (and maybe a little frightening?) that we’ll soon have a generation for whom marriage is obsolete.

Thoughts on Gift-Giving

Matthew Iglesias at Slate offers a cool, microeconomic perspective of gift-giving:

The problem with presents is that you’re never going to do a better job of satisfying the gift-recipient’s preferences than she could do herself. But preference sets aren’t fixed. If someone had handed me $10, I never would have spent it buying the Cults album, for the simple reason that I hadn’t heard of the band. When it was given to me, I immediately checked it out and loved it. When you step outside the circle of things you know for sure your gift-getter likes, you risk creating a massive deadweight loss. (You give her a ticket to Las Vegas, without knowing that she hates gambling.) But with the greater risk comes a greater potential reward. You may introduce the recipient to something marvelous she would otherwise have never encountered. Giving stuff rather than cash is a way of saying you know better than the recipient what she really wants. The riskier the present, the more likely it is to generate significant benefit. (So, not a sweater.)

Meanwhile, David Bry has a screed over at The Awl against gift-giving at all:

Why do we buy each other gifts? Why do we go to the trouble? So everyone can have to fake more excitement and gratitude than they actually feel upon opening them? “Oh, thanks for this book I told you I wanted that I could have just as easily bought for myself! Thanks for these gloves, this blouse, this bottle of wine. I’m so glad to have this pile of stuff to pack into the car or check at the baggage claim when I could have just bought it on my own time nearer to my own home, or even had it delivered directly to my door. Here, I got you something, too.” It’s like we’ve all entered into this mutual pact that makes everybody’s lives a little bit worse.

As for me? I think there’s nothing like a thoughtful, valuable-but-not-too-expensive gift. But most of the time, gift-giving does tend to be a socially and psychologically burdensome task. Caveat emptor. Especially if you’re giving it to someone else.