WordPress + Anchor.fm = It’s a little broken

When I heard about this in March of 2021 I thought that this was too good to be true? How could this partnership last? here is are two services that want you to consumer content on their websites/apps. How are they willing to split their revenue? Well it looks like it’s starting to fall apart a little bit.

What should happen?

Well here is how this was working. You would write your post on WordPress.com and then publish it. You had to publish it for Anchor.fm to see it, so once it was published you would log into your Anchor account and click on Episodes at the top.

If there were new episodes to be converted they would show up in the list.

You would then hit the Create episode and go through those motions and then when it published it would launch into your post on your blog on WordPress.com and add a handy little Spotify icon at the top that people could click on to take you to your Anchor.fm podcast!

What happens now?

Well, the first parts are all good and normal, but when you create the podcast there is no addition to the Spotify button at all. It is as if WordPress.com and Spotify felt that was a bridge too far

What happens next?

I’ve searched for some solution to this, but haven’t found any help. So right now we will continue to turn our written articles into podcasts on Anchor.fm, but there will not be a link from the article back to the “show” on Anchor. That way our massive single digit audience can still listen to our good work.

No tears here

It seemed like a weird partnership and idea and we will continue to take advantage of it, but really there is a lot that gets lost – especially with our particular type of content. For example when we write reviews and talk about the user interface, it is almost always accompanied with an image to illustrate this. Those images obviously don’t come across in an audio only podcast. The same is true when we post a YouTube video – it is never played because, well, how would it?

If this whole partnership completely collapses (which it could) I don’t think too many people will be too torn up about the whole ordeal.