Jeremy Cherfas
Nice to see older episodes still being found and still being appreciated. Chris is right, I should do more like this. And I wonder whether there will be an uptick in the downloads.e
Jeremy, this seemed a little long for Loqi to handle, and seemed worth keeping for later, so my response is below:
I understand your situation and have been following some of the discussion about content ownership and reposting. I'm all about giving credit where it's due, and bend over backwards (as far as I'm technically able) to do so. (Wait until you see some of the chicanery I'm trying to pull of for simple bookmark posts...)
It's for that reason that I provided a direct link to the podcast itself in the post as well as a blockquote synopsis in an effort to advertise on your show's behalf. Embedding the mp3 directly on my page was done as a means of helping people easily "sample" the podcast to get them hooked, in which case they would need to subscribe directly to the source. (I also did it to make it easier for me to relisten to it later if I like.) I'm still trying to get Twitter Player Cards to work properly so that could be an additional avenue for sampling on POSSE copies.
Additionally, by embedding the mp3 (I could have scraped it and then hosted it myself, but really, what's the point of that? unless I really wanted to steal it and run advertising against it for myself), your hosting server gets pinged for the "listen" or for any potential downloads because it's being served directly from your site (and not mine), which presumably most podcasters are tracking for advertising purposes. (YouTube and other video hosters do this for embedded videos.)
What I did was not much different than what Huffduffer is doing in bookmarking audio from your podcast on its site. Huffduffer isn't hosting a separate audio file itself, it's hosting a pointer to your file on its site and also syndicating it via RSS and/or Apple iTunes to others who will ultimately stream it or download it directly from your server. In fact, given this, I'm just acting like a mini-Apple iTunes without as much functionality, but I'm only advertising your podcast and not hundreds of thousands of others.
If you did have sponsors, you would presumably also give them airtime in your podcast which would then be heard as well, and tracked by your own server as a stream start or download. I suspect if you had visual advertising on your site, I could/might also embed that so you get a ping for the page load on my site as well. :)
If you're not aware or need it for clients, WordPress gives you the ability to customize your site's ability to provide oEmbeds, so with/for advertisers, you could add text, media, and even a visual advertisement to the pages for your audio podcasts. Other WordPress sites (or sites that consume oEmbed data) that include your URL in their pages then re-render it as a "player card" which presumably pings your server with a "hit" thus giving you credit for the work. Here's an example of an oEmbed for another WordPress site at the top of this post: http://boffosocko.com/2016/08/29/my-first-pull-request/ See videos for potentially setting this up at: https://wordpress.tv/?s=oembed. This type of set up isn't far removed from publishers who embedded advertising directly into their RSS feeds so that those consuming content via RSS weren't taking a free ride.
Perhaps I'm mistaken about the process, and you may be far more knowledgeable than I given your experience in the space, but I'm pretty sure that by embedding and not copying and hosting it myself, you should be able to garner the lion's share of the credit while I'm just serving as free advertising on your behalf.
As an alternate example, things are somewhat different in Marty's case of creating a separate piece of audio and copying and embedding it into his podcast as aaronpk's music didn't register a ping of any sort (other than possibly a webmention which only happened once), so aaronpk couldn't have monetized his audio the way you could have with a sponsored podcast.
Chris Aldrich, Feb 22 2017 on stream.boffosocko.com