Luminary had a tough entry into the world and faced much backlash. But now, the podcast startup is fixing one of the biggest issues faced by the podcast creators with the platform—lack of show notes.
As of now, the company is working on updating the iOS, Android and web app for allowing creators to reference various sources in their show notes through links. The co-founder of this $100 million startup wrote in a blog post announcing the features and said that there is work underway for clickable links and more.
“As we developed our platforms, we made decisions about Luminary’s user interface and the way we presented information from the public RSS feed that affected show and episode notes and links. Our goal was to create a consistent, secure user experience. We now fully understand the ramifications of those decisions and we apologize for our short-sightedness. Looking back, we should have expanded notes and enabled links on iOS and Android from the start,” wrote Joe Purzycki, co-founder of Luminary.
When it comes to the show notes update, the web app will initially require the listeners to manually copy and paste the links into the URL bars in order to access them. Also, the links don’t seem to appear live in the iOS player yet. Co-founder Purzycki said that they were working on making clickable links available in the future.
While the subscription model might fetch money for the creators of Luminary originals, most podcast creators solely rely on the advertisement and sponsorship money to run their shows. When Luminary removed their show notes it essentially hurt the profits of many podcast shows and resulted in their quitting of the platform.
One of the other pains of Luminary in the recent past was the fact that it was found using a proxy server when users requested show downloads. This caused trouble for both users and the creators as well. The team managed to deal with this issue and resolve it successfully. Nevertheless, issues such as these make Luminary appear unfriendly towards creators.
Luminary seems to be recognizing the flaws in its model and refining them gradually. Adding show notes back is a major reform that may put Luminary back on track and attract the creators that previously quit the platform.
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