The Future of Podcasting
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Maybe the author's right that what works for current users won't work for the masses. I don't know. But I do know that I will not listen to more ads (that's why I stopped listening to radio and I suspect I'm not the only one), and I will not go to the trouble of using more than a single app.
I don't think this is a good idea in the long run, but I could certainly see it happening in the not-too-distant future. I think we're already moving toward a future where we get the unbundled cable service we thought we wanted in the form of a dozen separate streaming video apps, and I don't doubt that streaming music services are going to push for ever-greater numbers of exclusive premieres, back catalogs and even original content. The question isn't whether producers will try this with podcasts, the question is how many producers will try it--and how successful it will be.
There definitely doesn't seem to be a ton of money in podcasting right now. Many of the heavy hitters in that world regularly ask for donations from listeners.
They want a cut and will work really hard to take it. L
While that's an extremely niche website, I would happily subscribe to NPR, for example, in return for ad-free podcast feeds.
I mourn the death of the RSS reader and really really want RSS to continue to be an open model for distributing podcasts. But that being said, a business that handled premium subscription sales and also ad-sales for a publisher could do the unenviable work of inserting ads and distributing multiple feeds for free or premium users.
Hey there small business man...
Here's my problem with this idea:
I, like many people, listen to a lot of different podcasts. Dozens, in my case. I have a podcatcher app that puts them all in one place. That makes it easy and convenient for me. Some of the shows I only listen to maybe once per month when there's a guest on that I enjoy, or if I run out of new episodes of everything else. If each show required its own app for me to listen, I'd only listen to the ones I really, really enjoy and support, and the rest I'll do without or bootleg. So, in a sense, the individual app per show idea would be limiting the potential audience.
I'm already seeing this happen with Libsyn custom mobile apps[0]. There are a number of shows I listen to that have paywalls for old episodes which can only be accessed through subscription plans available in individual apps. $1.99 or $2.99 may not seem like much by itself, but if it's 10 or 20 shows you're listening to this becomes an unjustifiable bill.
The only viable alternative I see is the further growth of podcast networks, where multiple shows are available for one price. But, currently, this model is still too small and fragmented. Until the Netflix or Hulu of podcasts comes out, I'll be left to pick and choose which deserve my support enough to justify buying into their distinct "ecosystem".
Edit: I see that my points here were addressed in the paragraphs following the one I quoted, but I'm still not buying the idea that siloing is the best way to monetize podcasts.
Most of the podcasts I listen to aren't timely so listening to them a year after they "air" isn't a big deal. I'm not sure if I am in the majority there though.
My suspicion is that podcasts are going to borrow from the music industry in the form of podcasts being something they give away in hopes of making money through merchandise, events, additional media such as books or subscriber-only episodes, or more likely, broadcaster access in the form of communities. (Off of the top of my head I can think of four entrepreneurial podcasts that have their own membership communities: Startups For the Rest of Us, Tropical MBA, Entrepreneur on Fire, and Chris Ducker. I imagine there is a lot of audience overlap but not membership community overlap and maybe a different method would be to have a single entrepreneurial podcast membership community that shows can join for a portion of the subscription fees. A smaller piece of a bigger pie...)
And like music some people will still create them out of a labor of love.
I primarily listen to podcasts from stand-up comedians, and this exactly what most of them do now, and I agree that it may be the best (or at least more realistic and palatable) option for everyone involved.
My favorite podcasts are the "comic hang" type. They're basically an hour or two of funny people being funny, and producing these podcasts seem to benefit the hosts and guests in a few possible ways:
1. As an avenue to gain fans who will attend live shows or buy albums and other merch (which are in turn promoted on the show)
2. As a platform to publicly work out new stand-up material in a conversational setting (giving us "civilians" a glimpse inside their creative process -- probably my favorite part)
3. As a direct revenue stream through donations/subscriptions/advertisments/sponsorships
I've been listening to comedy podcasts since probably 2007, and, unfortunately, I've seen more than a few take a nosedive in quality when point 3 becomes the priority.
One of my favorite podcasts is Song Exploder. Artists talk about how they create a specific song, including the thought process, context, and history behind specific sounds and segments that make up the song, and then the song is played in full at the end. It covers quite a variety of genres.
I don't object to any genre wholesale, but there's only a couple that I really like listening to. But the story and creative process that is broken down in Song Exploder is completely agnostic from the genre it was produced under and is interesting enough for me to drop any other podcast I'm playing to listen regardless of the genre.
Every show or network shouldn't have an app. Users need a simple consistent user interface.
"Their funding model is strictly listener supported, and it's working. The premise being that keeping outside influences away from content development gives listeners untainted news, opinion and entertainment... they refer to it as a "value-for-value" proposition -- listen to the show, if you get something worthwhile from it make a donation. This model should change the face of podcasting.
More and more independent podcasters will probably take note of this new model, and they should. Open, unsullied content creation and delivery should be the goal of everyone in the media -- a free exchange of ideas, opinions and content is the cornerstone of a free internet and a free society.
Podcasting has always been a medium searching for a successful funding model. Curry was a pioneer in getting podcasters to band together to try and attract funding from advertisers and sponsors. Curry started a couple of companies to support this model -- he would probably be the first to admit that the main-stream media model is not the best one for podcasting... but his constant tinkering and experimentation with the medium he created is starting to pay off. Curry and Dvorak may be the first "professional" podcasters to make a living doing a show that is truly independent, insightful and listener supported."
[1] http://www.noagendashow.com/
[2] http://www.examiner.com/article/no-agenda-makes-podcasting-r...
I like the show, the model seems to work although the newsletter is constantly pushing people for more donations. Their wording makes it seem like they are on the edge of being sustainable all the time. This could be true of course.
If you take the time to listen to them longer , > 10 podcasts or so your start to pick up on the type of thinking they have, it really can be refreshing and No Agenda should certainly be part of a healthy news diet, as they call it.
By the way, strange to see nobody mention TWIT, I enjoy it every week, they seem to do very well. Also, the Jupiter Broadcasting network (Linux Action Show, Linux Unplugged, Unfilter, etc) is an absolute joy to listen to. Very motivated team that exists by doing ads and using patreon. They prefer not to use ads and gladly take donation but I think they hit a nice balance.
My app of choice is Pocket Casts, works very well.
Oh, I also used to be a fan of Linux Outlaws, they had a fan made foss app that integrated with Indenti.ca (foss twitter clone based on status.net), you could automagically chat using a hashtag unique to the current episode. That was a nice experience and worth using the app for.
They are being successful though and that's really cool to see narrow programming do well for a specific audience.
When I talk to non-listeners about podcasts, I hear two things:
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1. "I don't know how to listen to podcasts."
2. "I don't know what to listen to."
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There are many great podcatching apps out there, and for those of us who "get it" and are motivated to listen to podcasts, it seems like Pocket Casts, Overcast, even the default Podcast app for iOS are easy to use and understand. Yet apparently they aren't.
Discovery is another issue altogether. NPR One, Pandora, Stitcher, et al have tried to do some level of podcast recommendation, but the lack of thorough metadata and text transcripts make it difficult to apply the kind of algorithm that works for blogs or music.
What makes it easy for the average non-techie to use a browser to read blogs, an app like Spotify for music, or their Facebook app, but not to use a podcatcher app?
Is it simple lack of familiarity? Or do we need an entirely new approach? I wish I knew the answer.
That boggles my mind, at least in the case of Pocket Casts, with which I have experience. It has a "Discover" section, which makes it fairly easy to find at least a few that should interest anyone, and I find the best way for me to find new podcasts are recommendations by hosts of other podcasts (or better yet, where a segment of the podcast in question is replayed). Once you're in the ecosystem, I think the available interesting (to you) podcasts increases exponentially over time, as you listen to more podcasts and get more recommendations.
I imagine people complaining about being unable to find anything to listen to are more likely having problems committing a small portion of time to actually try something new, which is not a new problem.
Podcasts aren't addictive(and i like podcasts). Lectures are boring by nature, and demand tons of focus(something we we may have more than the average guy). And even in fields that could be addictive(and don't demand great focus), like comedy, the quality is terrible - most comedy podcasts don't even come close to professional comedians doing standup.
Here's one idea: build a podcasts comedy site that curates only consistently great podcasts, and enables extremely easy sharing including sharing of very short segments.
Make the transition from the using the site to using it while driving easy and habit forming.
I think doing that you can get users "addicted". And once they are, they'll get your app, they might listen to other podcasts, etc.
Speak for yourself.
A podcatcher is like wget running recursively; it downloads a lot of stuff and organises it logically, but doesn't help the user in determining where best to allocate their limited time in consuming that data.
I can quickly assess whether it's worth my time reading a blog post by scan-reading for key points. Is it a fluff piece or technical? Does it just aggregate other information or present first-hand experience?
But with a podcast I can only assess its value by downloading it, making time to listen and then giving it my attention for several minutes even when playing on double-speed and jumping forward. I have probably prematurely stopped and deleted about 90% of the podcasts that I've ever downloaded.
Not even the best podcast app can help with such subjective assessment, unfortunately, and I just don't have the time to invest in searching for good podcasts so I tend to ignore them all.
Transcripts will happen at some point, but it's arguably less useful than user recommendations and signals from what people are actually playing.
I think the average non-techie was probably scared off in the past. It was legitimately hard work when podcasting began. And the word still conjures up a geeky pastime, not a serious form of media. But with modern smartphone apps, it's become pretty darn easy - no need to faff with RSS or sync with iTunes on PC. And it's growing fast for that reason, as well as the improved content that comes with the audience.
Nice! "Game School" is a great podcast.
For example, much like <itunes:explicit> is not part of any RSS spec, a publisher could choose to include a tag like <castanet:monetize>yes</castanet:monetize>, which would tell the Cast-a-net app that the publisher of that podcast would like ads to be inserted. The publisher would then need to setup an account with Cast-a-net to share the ad revenue, verify ownership, etc.
There is a significant chicken and egg problem, of course. The player needs to have enough users for the publishers to consider setting up an account to be worthwhile. The ad experience also can't get so obnoxious that users move to other apps. This approach allows publishers to gain monetization and metrics without ceding ownership and control to the platform.
By the way, my player, Cast-a-net, doesn't yet offer this feature. I've been working on making the UI good enough to attract real users first, then hoping it can grow to be something worthy of specific attention from video podcast producers.
(edit: as was pointed out in a reply, Marco is very anti-ads, so I swapped the example tags. I had only meant to use Overcast as an example of a popular independent player that doesn't want to become a walled garden for just a subset of the total podcast universe.)
I worked with Blubrry to create a new donate tag:
http://create.blubrry.com/resources/powerpress/advanced-tool...
If the feed supports this tag, a simple donate link appears in SkipCast and when tapped, takes you directly to the donate page. This tag can be supported by any Podcast client.
To me this is a clear win-win situation, though the feature depends heavily on adoption of simple, easy to use and deploy donation services, and of course the user supplying the tag.
One good example of the donate model working is the Crate and Crowbar podcast (PC Gaming). They created a Patreon and literally shut it down after a few months. The reason: they got hundreds in weekly, recurring donations and simply didn't need that much money.
Donations can work, and could be a huge boon to smaller, independent Podcasters. This could in turn ensure a healthy ecosystem that's more resilient to monolithic entities.
I think there is a lot of potential for funding the production of great content via donations. I think the "right" way to fund a particular piece of content depends largely on the content itself. For example, PBS funds NewsHour largely through donations and sponsorships, but NBC funds Nightly News via advertising. Both are valid choices, and I believe everyone is better off when publishers are free to decide how to monetize, and viewers/listeners are free to decide what they want to give their money and attention to.
I'd love to support the <rawvoice:donate> tag in Cast-a-net, but unfortunately AppleTV doesn't have a web view, so a link to a Patreon page wouldn't really work. I may try to set up something like a <castanet:acceptdonations> tag that uses in-app purchases, though. I think both users and publishers might like that better than the first monetization options being advertising.
As long as the apps don't start doing stupid stuff like unskippable commercials.
The whole point is that other players are free to completely ignore the tag.
I suppose if the podcast creator didn't want other players to be able to access the feed, they could set up some flavor of authentication. Requests from the preferred player app would include a key, and all other requests would get a 403. I don't really see what advantage that approach would have over a completely closed platform, though.
To wit: In order to monetize, a lot of what is appealing about Blogging/Podcasting would be diminished - paying is the opposite of free content, commercials interrupt the listening, and authenticity corrupted by advertising perogatives.
Or, in other words, a lot of what the "Mommy Blog" sector seemed to try and keep under the surface: http://josidenise.com/dear-mommy-blogger/
Just like in music, there will be a few case studies with large revenues, and thousands barely making anything, if not actually going into the red for their troubles.
Hats off to that guy for succinctly summarizing why we can't have nice things.
Some podcasts upload to youtube, and then get monetization through youtube's ads. That has a lot of downsides obviously, but it somehow seems better than some proprietary app.
And whatever model works, I think that there will still be many free podcasts run on donations, audible ads, or just for the love of it. I don't think anyone starts podcasting to make money. And if they do they must be crazy. Although I do appreciate some unusually good podcasts that are made by professionals and absolutely need funding to keep producing content.
The biggest problem above everything else is discovery. As a user I don't often hear of new good podcasts. I don't see unusually good podcast episodes promoted on reddit or HN, or normal channels where I find content. I'm (perhaps irrationally) cautious of investing time in new podcasts. Maybe that's just me, but it does seem like the most popular podcasts are by established celebrities or radio shows - not random joes.
There a few podcast networks that have their own software but if you want good data on your listeners you're basically stuck between Blubrry & Libsyn and they're both severely outdated platforms. And you pretty much have to use iTunes.
I've been toying around with building my own open platform for podcast hosting/analytics for a while since I could use it for my own podcast and I have friends who would use it.
We built https://www.podigee.com/en as a podcast hosting platform, batteries included. You just need to upload an audio file, add the relevant metadata, and we will take care of everything else (improving and encoding the audio into different formats, generating a blog with a correct RSS feed, delivering your audio through a nice, embeddable player from our CDN, connecting with social media accounts, etc.).
The platform itself is mostly built with Ruby on Rails + AngularJS, the CDN is a highly-optimized nginx with some clever Lua scripts.
We provide world-class, personalized support to free and paid accounts. The business model is based on paying for a given amount of minutes of audio per month, no matter how big your back catalog is.
We have been doing it mostly in our free time, but have a good bunch of paying (and happy!) customers. We even help you with getting your feed on iTunes without the hustle.
Sorry for the (probably annoying) marketing speech, but it's something we've been doing out of passion and mostly in our free time. Happy to answer any of your questions!
It's still a platform that someone has to live on and may be hard to switch off. My idea is to give the podcaster ownership of everything by allowing them to self-host.
Then you'll have to convert your audio files into different formats, bake images and chapter marks into them, make sure your RSS feed doesn't grow too big... Did I mention serving audio files to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time?
You can do all that, sure. But it's not something everyone WANTS to do. I am a software engineer and have a blog myself, and I pay a company to host it and maintain it for me, because I don't want to waste my time on keeping it running, although it's the kind of thing I do for a living. I just want to spend my reduced amount time on providing real value. And that's the whole value proposition of SaaS.
And an open platform could still be built to do all of that.
I'm not saying SaaS has no value, I'm saying that people who don't want to be behind a closed platform have no option. Why be obtuse about it?
Note that I don't understand how a podcast is different from a radio show that somebody recorded on a computer, so maybe I'm missing key functionality.
Which is why podcasters don't have any good statistics.
I recommend listening to the Startup podcast, they do a great job of explaining how the industry works :)
You can barely track how many people download, let alone listen, when they stop, etc. All the things advertisers want to know.
Well, F them.
Since the audio data is coming from servers that are under our control, we can get interesting data like the amount of bits that have been downloaded / streamed by a specific client. It's not perfectly accurate, but there is some tricks you can do just by matching the user agent + ip + the bits requested. You can for sure get a better picture than just knowing that someone has downloaded an episode.
And yes, advertisers want to know everything, but at the same time, are clicks on banners an accurate way of knowing if people are really interested in your ads? Can you say that people really watch all the TV ads and do not go to the toilet instead? These are tough problems to solve, yet there are some approximations that should be good enough.
There are lots of Podcasts on SoundCloud.
It's still a hard thing to integrate an RSS feed into a modern website...RSS is only really popular with podcasts and hasn't had much development in a while. Working with XML sucks.
Libsyn and Blubrry manage this part for you (having an RSS feed that is also a site's content and does tracking) but you're limited to hosting on their sites, wordpress or needing a developer.
There's a lot of room for improvement here.
Why won't direct advertising scale? Direct advertising opens up the long tail of companies. Small Business X can't spend money on branding but can spend money on acquiring paying customers.
In fact, direct advertising has become so popular thanks to things like AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc. that companies need to find new places to address their target audiences and podcasts might just be a great place to do that. The stuff with coupon codes, special URLs, etc. are pretty trivial to set up and a company like Midroll is going to coordinate between you and the podcast so you can line up that stuff well ahead of time.
There was also this:
"The not-so-secret reality about podcast ads, though, are that advertisers are quite concentrated: a FiveThirtyEight intern heroically listened to the top 100 shows on the iTunes chart and counted 186 ads; 35 percent of them were from five companies. More tellingly, nearly all of the ads were of the direct marketing variety."
I did not read the 538 article on this, but it makes a lot of sense for a company to carpet bomb their advertising. So if you're listening to all the top 100 podcasts in a one-week period, you might have an advertiser hitting a lot of those podcasts in a one-week period. However, if you listened to the same 100 podcasts three weeks later, you might hear another set. Presumably, the companies finding routine success are the ones who you hear all the time.
On the carpet-bombing strategy, if you deploy in relative isolation, you should be able to measure the real effect of the advertising and not just the people who came through a URL or used a coupon code. If I normally sell $100 per week and the week I advertise I sell $200, I don't have to rely on campaign tracking to assume attribution. Wait a few weeks and advertise again and see if the effect holds up.
Why would a consumer install such a program, when AntennaPod exists?
And it's only on Stitcher because that's Midroll's service and only Midroll ads pay well enough (this is hypothetical-future).
And they only pay well enough because of all the tracking in Stitcher.
http://www.vice.com/read/we-talked-to-podcasters-uhh-yeah-du...
This made me realize that Midroll/Earwolf already tried this to an extent last year with Howl.fm. It was an iPhone exclusive app/service that launched with a ton of exclusive podcast series, some old comedy albums, and the thing that really showed how little they cared about their listeners-- Earwolf was taking down all the old episodes of their podcasts and putting it behind the Howl paywall.
Many people might not be familiar with Earwolf, but in the comedy world it's huge. improv4humans is hosted by a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade and it's basically like sitting in on a master class in long-form improv. Comedy Bang Bang has recurring characters that date back years and people love going back and listening to hear how they evolve by "yes and"ing their way through conversations. They don't get dated like maybe a tech podcast might, so taking them down just to help bolster some cash-grab podcast subscription service was just so insulting, and to make it only available on iPhones showed how out of touch they were.
Largely, it seemed to be paranoia of users sharing files (Earwolf was also unsympathetic to the concept of downloading shows locally for listening offline), which seems to be missing the big picture.
...I'm not a typical user (I don't own a smartphone, and I don't plan to), so their attitude was fairly disappointing.
Oh, well. It was nice while it lasted. Maybe I'll end up breaking out the old rig I built back in the early 2000's to timeshift public radio shows to MP3s.
George Hrab leaves his 400+ episode Geologic catalog open, but pushes a subscription fee: be a "geologist" to get a weekly email and access to other subscriber-only material.
I've been posting my thoughts as I listen and really like when the host is on the platform and I can react to their posts. Only challenge for me is that I listen to a lot of my episodes while driving and can't scroll through posts.
An ad platform is something we've talked about, but I'd need to see a huge upswing in usage before building that out.
My imagined future involves serving podcasts with different ads each time you download the episode. Maybe a subscription to ad-free versions. There's no need for a separate player for subscriptions, Rss feeds can already be password protected.
If anyone is working on the above, hit me up - I'd love to talk.
I agree with a lot of what Ben says (and his podcast is the highlight of my commute these days). What is fascinating is that the space has been the domain of direct response advertisers for a while, and only a handful. I was familiar with all of the ones mentioned, but was absolutely shocked that they were such a large percentage of the mix.
Either podcasting ads are so nascent that only a handful of people are in on it, or there are performance challenges (whether it be attribution or overall poor performance). What I'd love to see is the # of advertisers to made a solid go of it and had dismal experiences despite having success in other channels. That would be very telling.
The conversion tracking piece is a big missing chunk of the equation. I could see ads embed audio tags that any reader could parse, but I fear the tracking restricted to individual platforms. That puts all of the control on the sell-side of the equation, and also conveniently impossible to audit or compare numbers against. I'd LOVE to see DoubleClick/Turn/etc. get into the game with some tracking solutions here. They are the industry standard and would integrate well into existing ad stacks. Anyone who provides good tracking solutions might consider them for possible acquisitions.
Beyond that, I think that podcasts make a lot of sense with the shift to native ads. Many people feel they have a relationship with the podcaster because it is in fact a real live person that you listen to because you like them. In speaking with Midroll for our own forays into podcast ads, it looks like you provide a list of bullets on your offering, and the podcaster works to craft the ad in their voice to make it more natural.
That is a win for both the advertiser and the listener. The more natural format likely boosts receptiveness (and thus performance) for the advertiser, and the listener gets something that isn't horribly disruptive to the listening experience as good podcasters (like Roman Mars on 99pi) make them fun and have found that people stick around to even listen to the post rolls because he's so good at them.
Anyway, that's my $.02. I think the space is nascent, and I hope that the inevitable power struggle between publishers and platforms doesn't kill it as it could be really powerful when done right. Advertisers have some challenges but that hasn't stopped them from testing before. I'm frankly just shocked at the lack of overall advertiser volume.
This can drive subscriptions to the podcast
That might actually make a workable business ...
So the least worst alternative is for each publisher to have their own app for listening to their podcasts and drive folks to download said app by using star power and marketing. To get there we will see some podcasts bribed with huge gobs of cash.
Ok - seems plausible but frankly as a podcast listener I prefer the Facebook solution, and am unconvinced by his arguments that most people wont
That's not exactly true. Marc Maron always encourages his listeners to use his offer code (often "wtf") to get discounts. Surely they have data on that.
Having said that, I'm sure it still leaves a lot mystery to those who are looking at the data.
i distribute my podcast (well, it's a video show, but still podcasty) via YouTube in part because I can actually get view/retention/source/subcriber stats + use links/annotations + I can also feed it into itunes. I even made a little jekyll repo that helps you make landing page & video/audio feeds: https://github.com/nealrs/Jekyll-YouTube-Show
Your post beat this one in time but this one won the luck of the draw. Sorry about that. We're hoping to change the duplicate detector in a way that gives the original submitter credit more often, but for the time being there's still a lot of randomness in which post gets traction. For now, the way to mitigate that is to submit many good stories; it evens out in the long run.