First off, it's important to realize they mean audio only podcasts. [1]<p>My opinion is that monetization is killing podcasts the way it killed a free and open internet. Everyone wants to wall off and exploit listeners for profit, or to make $ and quit their jobs. That's not the spirit of the internet with a free exchange of ideas.<p>My other concern is that eyeballs are worth, I have heard, 4x the revenue VS ears only. It makes sense, as it's far easy to manipulate people and exploit the cult of personality when you own someone's eyeballs.<p>I personally have friends that have become dumb as bricks after giving their eyeballs to YouTube podcasts and channels where they are easily manipulated with 3 second snapshots of legitimate quotes and scientific papers. They think everything is on the up and up because the claims come from scientific journals, and they saw it with their own eyes. They don't understand its taken out of context or the facts stretched in service of a narrative. They would NEVER dream of going to the source document and reading it.<p>A good example, and one of the better ones that I actually don't mind the fringe conspiracy fantasy elements of is Ben Davidson of suspicious observers and space weather news.<p>But his business model is destructive and detrimental to society. Just go to the youtube page, and watch a video. Seems pretty legit, except there is no way to adequetly fact check the science behind it because he often uses one paper and cherrypicks what he likes and then matter of factly states that other parts of the same paper are flat out wrong. Lol.<p>There are no links to show notes or scientific papers. You have to pause the video, and scour the internet to hopefully get first hand sourcing of claims. And many papers are firewalled, so the guy can say just about anything he wants and people take it as gospel truth because he shows a paragraph from a peer reviewed journal.<p>Instead of providing relevant links, it's just 47 links to all his monetization in the shownotes.<p>It's infotainment, not science.<p>But also a perfect example of how audio podcasts are dying because content creators are moving to video "podcasts", which this article doesn't recognize.<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1615043223709442049?t=1fdsEKnzjd8lXo_NlbHVdA&s=19" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1615043223709442049?t=1fdsE...</a>