Podcasters are seeing encouraging numbers
wired.com
wired.com
> the few listeners who do skip ads continue to remain engaged with the episode, rather than dropping off at the first sign of an interruption.
I'd bet that this is because fast-forwarding through podcast ads is pretty trivial. If podcast apps tried to do anything to make the midroll ads unskippable, you'd probably see a different pattern. (Here I'm thinking of things like online video ads and the TV networks' fight against the TiVo 30-second skip button.)
For my part, I often skip through ads that I know have no relevance to me, but listen to ones that might have relevance. It also helps that many podcasts bring their own humor to the ads rather than just reading the ad copy verbatim, so there's still some entertainment value even if I know I'm not going to buy what they're selling.
WTF with Marc Maron: always plays a guitar riff after the ad, which is easy to hear when skipping
MBMBAM: has a “shoutout” section (listeners sending messages to each other) immediately after the ads, so if you skip into it you don’t really care if you miss a minute or two.
Edit: The Greatest Generation (Star Trek podcast) is on the same network and has a somewhat similar format, except they don't do the ads until they're almost done. They talk about the episode, then do sponsor ads and shoutouts, then they do one of two options: "Drunk Shimoda" segment followed by ads for other podcasts, or vice versa. I assume this is to prevent over-zealous ad skipping but really it doesn't take much effort.
The NoSleep Podcast is the only one I've heard that dresses these ads up a bit. Even then, I still pay for the season pass so I don't have to listen to them.
He makes reading the ads so entertaining they become a part of the podcast -- a very entertaining part! Nobody skips that.
Though to be fair, sometimes he shits on the product he's "advertising" so hard that they pull their sponsorship. Oh well. The brands that stay reap the benefits -- his version of Dollar Shave Club, MeUndies, ZipRecruiter, or HelixSleep are totally contagious.
My new strategy is just to subscribe to one or two. Usually ones with seasons and not weekly / monthly and one common topic which helps me stay attached to it.
The ones I enjoyed most in the last weeks are:
My best find this year, interviews with prisoners in San Quentin Prison produced by prisoners: https://www.earhustlesq.com/
Currently listening to this one and it feels like House of Cards as a podcast: http://www.slate.com/articles/slate_plus/watergate.html
The famous: https://serialpodcast.org/season-one
My biggest issue are the ads, they are very generic and it seems the same types of companies dominate the space. Primarily services like zip recruiter, blue apron, and other subscription types. Also, the ad reads are very hit or miss when done by the podcast presenters.
I think there is big business for a pod casting platform that can get the ad model right (personalized ads, professionally read) along with suggestions and curation of suggested podcasts.
Most of the time though, I do skip through them.
> I think there is big business for a pod casting platform that can get the ad model right
No thanks. That means I'm being monitored beyond just counting my download of an MP3. I'm happy that the ads are about as personalized as the ads in a magazine.
Podcasts are right in your earholes whether you're making a coffee or not. After the 4th Blue Apron ad you might start skipping
"Hardcore History" by Dan Carlin is such an example and I wish it was easier to find other such podcasts of similar quality.
- "The Daily" by the NYT - High Quality, but it is skewed towards "liberal ideas".
- "Who? Weekly" - This is a weird one for this crowd, but it's 2 people who are deep into celebrity culture and it's fun to get outside of my depth.
- "Limited Resources" - MTG podcast with great in depth coverage of the limited format
- "S-Town" - Fun narrative podcast, that opened some ethical questions by the end, but I think would def make this crowd cry.
Another underrated show is Masters of Scale[0] I know it's a little more techie based which might be too much for people trying to escape that reality while listening to podcasts but I've found it very informative and I highly recommend it.
These are all A+ Podcasts.
Our American Stories is really good http://www.ouramericannetwork.org
Art of Maniless https://www.artofmanliness.com/category/podcast/
SOFREP Radio https://sofrep.com/radio/
Also Twit TV has a bunch of good ones, video/audio formats. https://www.twit.tv/shows?shows_active=1
Both supports opml file that saves your subscriptions to the cloud. So you can sync on your devices.
Podcast addict supports youtube links also, both support video podcasts.
And why not use Itunes? Itunes likes to download all your podcast feeds, and can eat lots of disk space if you have many subscriptions, use a dedicated podcast app/program.
* History of Rome: A narrative history of Rome from foundation to fall of the western empire
* Revolutions: A long series of various revolutions around the world (American, French, Haitian, etc. etc.)
* The British History Podcast: Chronological history of the British Isles, very detailed, hundreds of episodes in and the Normans have not showed up yet.
* When Diplomacy Fails: Covers various political/military events throughout history. Currently doing a deep dive on the Korean war.
* The China History Podcast: Episodes on all topics from Chinese history from ancient times to the Mao era
* The History of Byzantium: Picks up where History of Rome ended and continues the story until (theoretically) the fall of Byzantium.
* The History of England: Similar to British History, but moves at a far faster pace, currently in the reign of Henry VIII
There are of course many many more, but these are probably some of my favorites.
Shameless Plug: I create a podcast on the First World War called History of the Great War. I think it is pretty good, at least the more recent episodes.
Thanks for the other podcasts, by the way!
I've dabbled a bit in the "History of Japan" podcast but since I encountered some episodes that weren't accurate (although they weren't strictly about history), I've lost trust and stopped listening. Apart from that, the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" podcast is ok, albeit a bit too comedic at times for my taste.
* Norman Centuries - A Norman History Podcast by Lars Brownworth
* 12 Byzantine Rulers- The History of The Byzantine Empire
* The History of Rome
Maybe it's just the scope or ambition of the projects but things like a season Serial Podcast or the Byzantine/Norman podcasts I mentioned here are more like miniseries.
There's a few ads in the earliest episodes, but otherwise they keep it to the occasional "Hey ya freeloaders, go rate us on iTunes" at the start of the show.
Its basically free promotion of your show, just release it in mp3 as a podcast and let it trend.
Example, Joe Rogan has his 3 hour daily video show, but he also broadcasts his show in audio only. His mp3 podcast version is one of the most popular podcasts out.
We have a very tiny beta right now with < 100 users, but if you like podcasts you might like it! (you can sign up at https://banter.fm OR just email me, steve @ banter.fm)
As it stands my knee-jerk reaction when I clicked was "aw it's just a podcast app - I already got one of those"
Good luck though!
When you have a small podcast, you can just do it for the love of it and not worry about money. If it gets big, you can get a small percentage of your listeners to give you money. The number of contributors should continue to rise for many years as more people discover how great podcasts can be.
It's totally viable to have 10% of listeners voluntarily pay while 90% of listeners freeload. And there needn't be any NPR guilt trip about it because they're not blowing millions on office space and executives.
Any successful podcast can be a very financially successful business for a small number of people.
JRE.. skip the first 5-7 minutes until you pass the "Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night all day!" and you are set as well. Same with Tim Ferriss.. but there it's about 4 minutes
But mostly I listen to the ads.. they are usually less than a minute anyway (especially since I listen to everything at 1.5 speed... some at 2.0)
1. As the article mentioned, there is a lot of growth with advertising here. Until that starts to taper off the "big" players in the podcast market (either creators or networks) will be hesitant to sign those types of deals. When they keep getting more advertising dollars it seems silly to move over to a Spotify like system.
2. Smaller players (often independent creators) are less organized and harder to get into that sort of system. This was not a problem for Spotify, or other streaming services, because the music industry had a well established Artist -> Label setup that does not exist for huge swaths of the podcast market.
I see your point about onboarding. I wonder if one of them could just ingest all the podcasts on the internet, strip out ads and collect revenue for them, and then offer them a way to claim the revenue and/or opt-out.
They have rates between $5500-$6500 per read and do three ads per episode. I doubt they would make $21000 per episode on Spotify.
The CPMs for podcast are currently much higher than any other type of media besides video.
They were both charging those rates before the "podcast boom".
But accidental tech is a 2 hour podcast, in which time they run 3 ads, but Spotify probably runs at least 12.
IMO the biggest challenge is not going to be finding the money to pay them, but negotiating with musicians who may not be happy dividing up the pie.
If he was a true believer, he'd have realized Medium isn't the long-form content he was looking for. He didn't fully commit to Odeo, and that's why he gave up when Apple made its move. I still remember thinking "Fuck!" when I saw that "Try our new thing twttr" banner at the top of Odeo. I liked where they were headed.
Twitter + Podcasts are all you need. No one really wants to read long-form text on a computer.
Medium.com should have been Odeo 2.0
It's just so much richer to listen to a monologue, or socratic debate, in most cases. @ev should pivot Medium into being the biggest podcast publisher in the world, by sponsoring every high quality podcast and building a better version of patreon for podcasters. There's a lot of amazing people that should be podcasting and are not.
LOL I would obviously prefer reading long form text on a book, but do you really prefer audio to digital text? Story telling is one thing, but for most of what I'm reading I think a low-bandwidth, search-free environment (audio) is a bad match.