Is the podcast bubble bursting? | Hacker News Reader

Is the podcast bubble bursting?

cjr.org

113 pointsohjeez138 comments

Podcasts are enjoying a renaissance possibly due to the legitimization of the medium by semi-famous people, and due to some proper distribution outlets finally appearing. Possibly even some vanguard entities such as Joe Rogan and This American Life.

It's an alternative to Radio, and an alternative to YouTube for celebs who don't want the production hassle.

Also, you need enough momentum to convince advertisers as well.

It was a slow and bumpy ride but I think that all the pieces are now in place and so we'll see a lift.

My belief is that this is going to be more or less permanent a secular shift, not a pop, because the nature if it is just not very pop-sugar or hype-ish. NPR listeners are not faddish.

Obviously, content is still going to be important, and you can't just slap up BuzzFeed crap. NPR has a loyal following. Joe Rogan makes basically the perfect pop-culture podcast. Celebs have star power and invite other celebs for their love-ins. There's some popular specific podcasts on things like the 'Roman Empire'.

I don't think it will be a huge boon and I don't see any massive companies or takeovers, but it's a real shift.

I don't see podcasts as an alternative to radio, but just the new radio. Like how Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu are just the new tv. Perhaps this is because I have always listened to a lot of NPR podcasts, such as This American Life, which are also broadcast on NPR radio stations. Of course, I also listen to a lot of other podcasts, some by people who mainly do podcasts, and quite a few others affiliated with some publication.

But it's, in a sense, a lot more open. There are a lot of people who couldn't get radio shows out there making podcasts (Chapo Trap House is an obvious example of something that's a phenomenon but probably wouldn't be put on broadcast radio) or else smaller radio stations getting far bigger reach.

The reason I believe it's an overlapping substitute at least is because I listen to NPR 100% on podcast. I haven't tuned into a live NPR broadcast in years. I don't think I'm the only one.

But I agree it's kind of a new format, with new behaviours, much like Netflix.

My favorite show was always Prairie Home Companion, which they could never get on podcast anyway. But I stopped listening to it after Garrison Keillor left anyway.

You should give it another go. I think Chris Thile is doing a great job carrying the show forward. They still do all the radio skit acts, but they've mixed in more live music.

The name of the show has changed to Live From Here for anyone interested.

I'm with sibling comment, give it another go. Thile carries his weight, and frankly I thought Keillor was getting old, cranky, and past his expiration date. The music is better, Thile can actually sing (in contrast to the previous host), and the skits are just as funny as always.

And though a bit niche, if you enjoy world-class mandolin playing, you'll do far worse than Chris Thile. Man, mandolin or not, if you just enjoy good musicianship, give it a listen.

I haven't tuned into a live NPR broadcast in years. I don't think I'm the only one.

Even stuff that has to be listened to live, such as "Live from Here" (what used to be Prairie Home Companion), I connect the phone to a BT speaker and use the local NPR-affiliate app. Once in a great while I'll turn on NPR in the car, which is the only use I have for an FM receiver these days.

>>> legitimization of the medium by semi-famous people

Cultural disconnect due to generation gap at play here too.

It's the difference between say, Adam22 and LenaThePlug talking to XXXTentacion about growing up in Lauderdale, FL and getting discovered via Instagram. Basically, an ex-pro skateboarder and webcam performer chilling with a rapper and his crew in the comfort of their own garage.

Versus Terry Gross asking Jonah Hill about his new 90s nostalgia film in the Fresh Air studio. The former represents a germane, bottom-up emerging sensibility. While the latter is the same commodification of "indie" culture we have seen a thousand times before.

Just for the record, Adam22 was a BMXer

>Podcasts are enjoying a renaissance possibly due to the legitimization of the medium by semi-famous people, and due to some proper distribution outlets finally appearing.

Or it could be a simpler explanation: people are commuting more. It's something that you can "fire and forget" if driving, and doesn't rely on the data plan if you go through a tunnel.

Are people commuting more? If anything there has been a revival of urban areas and millenials have prioritized cities over things like owning a car. Podcasts are easier than radio for mass transit commutes, so maybe that's part of it?

Radio is actually more accessible on the commute than podcasts; in fact, it's the only place many people even have a radio!

I think the commute may be the last bastion of radio.

I listen to podcasts in the car but there's definitely some friction involved. You have to add episodes you want to listen to to a playlist and skipping to the end of an episode or picking a different one is all sort of fiddly when you're driving. In my experience, trying to control the whole thing by voice just doesn't work.

So there's something to be said for just leaving the radio on your station of choice and listening to that.

anecdotally, at least, I've seen a huge increase in podcast listening, and conversations about podcasts, by people who don't drive or commute much (in The Netherlands). It's become an actual thing, I'd say, and among people who aren't typical 'techies'.

I think it's basically Netflix/Spotify for radio. Most of these people moved away from television to Netflix, spend most of their time listening to Spotify or, less and less, Soundcloud, and may or may not have gotten into YouTube, but clearly want something audio-only to put on in the background, listen to before bed, and definitely commute with, just not by car (because on the tram/train/bus you need to be able to pause, just as you now expect to be able to with shows and music).

I agree. I actually think it's the reverse - the rise of podcasts signals the end of the decades-long fad of 3 minute soundbite discussions via talking heads on primetime news outlets. Regardless of political persuasion, people just want to hear long form in-depth discussion, and podcasts are well suited for that.

Like so many things today, this mostly seems to be about the podcasting as a business bubble bursting. Which does indeed (unsurprisingly) describe a lot of podcasts with higher production values that are the product of professional producers and editors. Others are effectively subsidized by other aspects of the creator's "product" but not all.

Again, as with many types of content, there's so much of it that it's hard to monetize. Squarespace can only keep so many podcasts afloat.

As a clickbait business bubble. Possibly its more a side effect of the overall clickbait bubble, not specifically spoken word podcast vs written text.

I would not think clickbait journalism would be a natural fit for podcasts in that the barrier to entry is much higher than clicking on a ribald hyperlink.

I don't know where you get the idea that the podcasts that they're talking about are "clickbait."

Really? There's no shortage of outrage/clickbait on traditional radio. You've pretty much just described talk radio. I'm sure there's some of that in podcasts with political commentators. But podcasts as a whole seem to skew toward a fairly different demographic.

Could the business/hosting aspect of it going down damage the content aspect of the ecosystem in any significant way is the question, as I believe was the case to some degree with Google Reader?

Business and hosting (distribution really) are two very different things.

To the degree podcasting declines as a viable standalone revenue stream, certainly podcasts that depend on people collecting salaries are going to go away. That's certainly not all podcasts, or even most, but it probably describes a lot of the better known ones.

It seems as if podcasting apps and sites are already pretty distributed. I think there are a lot of differences with RSS although I'd argue that directly consuming RSS was always a pretty niche activity. I suspect the decline of portals and the rise of social media had more to do with how blogging as we originally thought about it declined than Google pulling the plug on Reader.

I hope podcasting keeps growing. It's unique in some important ways, from other "new media" mediums.

It's decentralized & private. No one owns podcasting. Being protocol-centric rather than service-centric (eg youtube) has left it relatively free (as in speech). Being subscriber-centric has made the medium resistant to clickbait and spam and encouraged quality... Some of these are qualities remind me of the web circa 1998 or blogging circa 2004.

That doesn't mean there aren't problems. Discovery is poor, for example.

Turning popular into profitable... that's always been tough for online content. Same goes for youtube, blogging, etc.

Personally, I'm hoping it evolves into a youtube alternative.

It's interesting how podcasting has evolved as this very decentralized medium. At least part of it is that hosting and serving audio is a lot cheaper than video. Not that my occasional podcast has a huge number of listeners but my S3 bill is trivial.

But, yeah, podcasting looks a lot like blogging--especially earlier on. Very easy to get into but hard to discover and hard to directly monetize. Those who keep doing it are mostly doing so because 1.) It's a fun hobby and/or 2.) It supports and is subsidized by some other activity. Which is often the case with a lot of things including writing technical books for example.

Alrighty, I'll bite, what's your podcast?

Cloudy Chat. Just tech-related interviews I do now and then. (Unfortunately I haven't added anything new for a while.)

Back in 2005 (when iTunes added podcasting), a group of high school drama friends and I used to do a weekly video podcast with a similar format to Screensavers on TechTV. I did a segment on a different "emerging" web technology each week (WordPress, FaceBook, Asp.Net, etc), one friend did one on the latest gadgets, another do something about Macs/iDevices. It lasted about 3 months before we all got burned out.

It was fun, and I wish it could have lasted, but after a few months our viewership was still under 100 per episode, and we all had to go jobs and/or school still.

> "Also, podcasting doesn’t really have an established way of measuring success that advertisers can get comfortable with, apart from just tracking raw downloads."

What's wrong with tracking raw downloads? This seems like a great way to measure a podcast's success since the number of downloads probably tracks pretty closely to the number of listeners (sure, I might download an episode or two of a new podcast to try it out, but I generally only download later episodes of podcasts I actually listen to).

As an aside, I think that podcasts are to radio what netflix is to television, in that netflix is able to profit off of shows with niche audiences. With users pulling content rather than producers pushing content, you end up with a lot more niche content. In the past month alone, I've listened to podcasts about:

* Analysis of supreme court decisions (First Mondays)

* A history of the watergate scandal (Slow Burn)

* A history of the English Revolution (Revolutions)

* Political interviews (various podcasts)

* Improvisational comedy (Improv4Humans)

* Random historical figures with a comedic twist (The Dollop)

Some of what I listen to is meant for a mass audience, but some of it is targeting a pretty specific audience, which I think is awesome. Personally, I love finding podcasts that get into the nitty-gritty details of whatever the subject is. I almost don't care about what the subject is, as long as the presenter is passionate about it.

There's nothing wrong with tracking raw downloads, but for investors who are used to social media in which you 1) target specific people based on their interests with ad-like content that is generated to resemble those interests 2) track every conversion event those specific people do in your funnel, it's a far cry. And of course, those two criteria above are why social media became such a huge business, because that's more efficient than a radio ad, or a download count. I'd argue that these examples of great content are great precisely because the creators can't track their audiences very well. Their audiences have a vote every time they download.

> What's wrong with tracking raw downloads? This seems like a great way to measure a podcast's success since the number of downloads probably tracks pretty closely to the number of listeners

As a podcast host... not really. We'll sometimes see our ambient download numbers swell while a batch of new listeners catch up on the backlog, then it'll die down while they wait for the next episode. So it's up and down all the time, with very little signal amongst the noise. Except for launch-day for a new episode, then it spikes up nice and high.

And raw downloads of podcasts is still way more accurate than how TV viewership is measured. As far as I can tell advertisers still love to spend money on TV commercials.

>What's wrong with tracking raw downloads?

I think that there might be some who would want to pay based on how many people use the promo code of a podcast rather than the number of downloads or who would like number of plays not downloads. And if I, as a user, download the episode twice does that count as two downloads?

I seem to recall some discussion on the accidental tech podcast that some advertisers would like more analytics such as if the downloader listened to the episode all the way through or if they skipped the ads or something like that but podcast apps are not currently offering that.

> What's wrong with tracking raw downloads? This seems like a great way to measure a podcast's success since the number of downloads probably tracks pretty closely to the number of listeners…

I mean, that's one assumption you could make. Another equally-valid assumption is that 50% of downloads are listened to (depending on your definition of "listened to").

The metric is surely different for different shows — I'd hypothesize that most Hardcore History downloads are listened to, but for many shows this is likely guest-dependent.

Without data, we can only guess.

The advertisers have better data though as they usually switch promo codes quite often. Also, as with most advertising, you only see the effect of the aggregate campaign.

There's no way to whether or not YOUR ad was consumed by the audience. As a company who places an ad on a podcast this puts you in a very difficult position when justifying ROI of the ad buy.

The reason podcasts offer you a deal to use their codes is so advertisers can track the effectiveness of the ads. Raw download is a good indicator but affiliate links are much better.

I'm spending more time than ever listening to podcasts, most of which are monetized either by advertisements, subscription or Patreon. Podcasting appears to be a medium that actually benefits the smaller players over the bigger ones.

Not sure what the growth rate is, but The top Patreon podcast makes just over $100k /mo (although, most don't list income). Assuming that's consistent that's only enough to pay 10-20 people, ignoring health insurance, taxes, 401k, Patreon's cut, or any operating costs.

I've always heard ads were the most reliable approach, though.

https://www.patreon.com/explore/podcasts

I think the business model for ad-supported podcasts is tough -- people can only buy so much underwear and so many stamps.com subscriptions. That is probably bad news for podcasts with high production values that are part of major for-profit organizations (like the Slate one), unless they're primarily prestige projects (which is how I perceive some of the New York Times ones). However, the medium will still have podcasts based on radio shows (including from stations like NPR or Sputnik which are government-supported and not run for profit, and so will continue doing it even if they're not making money) and smaller, independent podcasts whose more devoted fanbases support them directly through means like Patreon.

Minor correction. Government funding is a pretty small part of NPR revenues. (Corporation for Public Broadcasting is about 2% although there are additional government funding sources.)

I agree with your broader point though. Podcasting that isn't just a hobby or a side endeavor that supports the businesses that actually bring in the money is a tough business model. Not saying that there aren't popular/quality (not necessarily the same thing) ones that can pull it off well enough to eek out a continued existence, but it's tough and isn't going to get any easier.

Sorry, you're quite right on that point. I was thinking more that they're not run with a profit motive, which I think is still fair to say. Other government-chartered radio stations, like Sputnik or BBC, are, I think, more fully government-funded.

The BBC is halfway between government funded and private, because the money is from a licence to (originally) receive TV signals, and fairly directly from that.

This is different from (UK) motor vehicle duty, where the income and the expenses have nothing much to do with each other, and more like the requirement for all (UK) motorists to have insurance.

On the other hand, the UK government gets upset every so often about BBC coverage of its policies and reacts by threatening it with a lower licence fee, so it’s not not government funded either.

> I think the business model for ad-supported podcasts is tough -- people can only buy so much underwear and so many stamps.com subscriptions.

There are other options for advertising that seem to make more sense to me.

For example, the acquired.fm podcast is sponsored by VCs and investment banks, and their ads consist of a 30 second soundbite interview with one of the advertiser's employees.

risky.biz has a bit longer sponsor interviews, but with sponsors likely relevant to the target audience.

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe advertises for an education video subscription service.

Software Defined Talk advertises for a monitoring company.

And so on.

Yes, it takes work, but it seems to work, more or less. Some of these are hobby projects, but I think risky.biz is the producer's main income.

Smart Passive Income podcast provides in depth reviews on products and advocates multiple benefits and gets affiliate links which drive people who want to use the product getting a recommendation and sales pitch from someone they already trust. Trust is the single most important commodity from a podcaster and those who use it well monetize it while providing a service to the listeners.

I'm curious what you mean by high production values. I do notice podcasts thanking their audio engineer, though I'm not entirely sure what is involved. I assume some amount of editing goes on, but is it that expensive to edit an hour of conversational audio?

It can be, but it starts before that -- if you're serious you're renting a studio, and more expensive shows will have writers, music, archival research, interviews, etc. You can just have two guys talking on laptop mics, but if you want a professional-sounding product as you might hear on the radio, there's more than that going on.

To be fair, even professionally produced shows will have interviews done over the telephone, Skype, etc.

But, yeah, you get into professional production values and a lot of incremental gear and work gets involved--arguably for pretty incrementally diminishing returns. Whenever I'm involved in some way with video for some company event or web clip, I'm always a bit taken back by the amount of equipment that's set up to record a few minutes of talking head footage.

Having done a lot of "audio engineer" type of work for my own podcast, I can say that there is a lot to it, and it varies depending on the sound the podcast is aiming for.

For example, if you listen to NPR interviews, you'll notice that questions and answers are articulate and succinct, with very few "ums" and "ahs " and such. This is because an editor removes most of the extra sounds, lengthy pauses, stammering, intakes of breath, etc.

There is also capturing the audio in decent quality. Having good microphones and equipment is just the first step. If recording indoors, one must account for room noise and echo. If outdoors, one must consider wind and background noise. Experienced audio engineers will be sure to record 1+ minutes of the ambient sound at the recording location, so they can use this if they need to insert any pauses. If recording multiple people, one must ensure they are all captured at a similar volume, especially if the recordings are all mixed together at capture time (if captured on separate mics/tracks this is easier to deal with). Some people also have a lot of "mouth noise" that is amplified by the mic, so you can hear clicks and squirts of saliva as they speak. It can be kinda gross, and there are tricks to working around this.

Editing the audio for content is also a substantial task. It takes skill to know what to leave in and what to remove, particularly if one wishes to be true to the speakers' intentions. Real conversation, if you listen to it, is messy. Lots of thought-switching mid-sentence, lengthy digressions, and things like that. Those are hard to listen to in a podcast, so a podcast that wishes to remain successful will need a skilled editor to smooth it all out. Often a 2 hour interview will become 25 minutes of usable audio. And it's especially tricky if recording with background noise, which will often betray the editing locations if one doesn't know how to mask them (usually with aforementioned ambient recording).

"Sound design" is another facet; if your podcast has music, audio clips, sound effects, etc., somebody needs to put them in the right place, set the volume levels correctly (some art, some science), fade in/out, etc.

So, yes, proper audio engineering takes some skill and makes a big difference in production quality.

Really comprehensive answer. Thank you. User name definitely checks out.

Casey Liss (host of Accidental Tech Podcast, among others) has a small writeup about that work at https://www.caseyliss.com/2014/11/22/how-i-make-podcasts

I don't think the bubble is bursting at all. If anything its maturing. It's not working for large companies. But I now listen to podcasts more than I read books and I learn more that way as well. Most of these podcasts come from small independent sources. Human conversation was how stories were spread for thousands of years, until the printing press. Now we have the technology to share information through conversation, but with the same reach as written language. Among my group of friends, talking about what podcasts we've read has become very similar to the old conversations we had about boost. The best podcasts are in depth often niche discussions similar to books. The don't require the production level of TV, which is great because a lot of great podcasts don't have a large enough audience to support that cost. They require time, and expertise to produce, not much money.

>They require time, and expertise to produce, not much money.

At some point though, time and expertise are money. I'll do an interview-style/conversational podcast as a hobby or as one of the many little side things I do for my day job. But you start talking about multi-day production efforts and that's not something I'm just going to do for free.

Conversational podcasts about some niche topic and Radiolab both have their place. But there are real costs associated with production values.

Podcasts with high production value are generally inferior to podcasts with low production value, I've found. When the person talking is interesting the podcast is good -- but when they need to add bells and whistles and sound effects I find I get annoyed.

Agreed and I think the high production podcasts are definitely hitting a bit of a bubble. But my favorite podcasts are ones that always have different guests and I think that category has a lot of growing to do. The expertise required for the guests is only the one they already have. For example a nutritionist just has to come on and talk about nutrtion. Something they do for daily anyway.

For me personally, producing a 20-25 minute interview/conversation podcast on some topic hits the sweet spot for my own podcasts. It's not a lot of work to record, some light editing/automated intro/outro/posting, get a transcription done, post that with some show notes on a blog. Done. It's no more than a few hours of actual work.

Frankly, the biggest job is scheduling the guests which is one reason I tend to do the recordings mostly at events.

Radiolab is a bit too far in the other direction. I can't stand listening to it.

Radiolab can indeed be a bit polarizing. I mostly like it but know at least a couple of people who are put off by the various audio cute-siness or whatever the right word is.

It is better now than it used to be. In the early days the effects they would add were so heavy handed. I used to feel like every 2-3 seconds some audio effect clip was playing.

Seriously, who wants to listen to a Buzzfeed podcast? Podcasts are _amazing_ channels for independent makers, comedians, etc.

I think some of the Slate stuff, like Slow Burn, has been pretty popular (IMO it was OK to listen to but by no means must-hear, but hey)

I'm not surprised that mainstream media companies like Buzzfeed and Slate are having a hard go of it in podcasting. I also don't see it as a problem, or even a worrying sign.

I listen to podcasts specifically because the mainstream have been chronically bad at keeping me engaged. I think the same is true for most my podcast-listening friends. The podcasting I love is a quintessentially amateur endeavor - my favorites are ones like Singing Bones or Uncanny Japan that have low production values, irregular release schedules, and hosts whose deep love for and fascination with the subject matter saturate every episode. I'm never going to get that from Buzzfeed or Slate, or even NPR.

Arguably the most popular podcast was Serial.

Is anyone dynamically stitching in ads yet? Seems like a business waiting to happen, content creators follow some guidelines and use a specific tool to put their show together and then an ad distribution company distributes the podcast and pastes in targeted ads based upon the downloader's profile at download time.

As things are currently done, it seems like you have just incrementally more information than radio does, probably smaller body of listeners, and it's run very similar to radio. It's radio with downsides and fairly limited upside. A lot of the content doesn't have an age, there are 2 year old comedy podcasts that are still funny, splice in new ads and it's like syndicated TV instead of radio; plus that potentially lets them monetize their body of work and not just the newest stuff which might lead to better sustainability, their affiliate code doesn't work 16months later and then the marketer doesn't know how they got the lead and the podcasts doesn't get paid.. The pod catchers and players can provide a ton of analytical data too, no reason to not know if your ad was skipped or not. Just seems like a bit more technology is needed and it could really boom. Likewise, if you have this targeted ad stitching stuff working, you could easily have ad-free subscriptions and pay the content creator directly.

I cut our cord and basically stopped listening to radio because of the ads, tons of ads and ads that have little or no value to me. Lately, it kind of pains me to say it, but some of the targeted ads on Facebook and some other places are shockingly well targeted. Like they're hitting me up with things I'm actually interested in. I dislike being marketed to all the time but I hate these ads a lot less and I've actually bought some stuff because of it. It's pretty advanced, whereas podcasts still seem to be mostly doing it the old radio way with different distribution.

I'm not 100% on how it was done as I tend to use a range of ways to get podcasts, but I've had location specific ads on some podcasts and I'm pretty sure I've had ones referencing something that hadn't happened at the time the podcast went out too

Yes, there are programmatic ad networks for podcasts. For example: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/08/acast-programmatic-ads/

Programmatic refers to the automated bidding and placement of ads in real time auctions done over a DSP. It can be done for audio but would take the listener out of the experience as the ad is built prior to the recording.

Native advertising is when the creative is in the same manner of the content. On a website, the ad would have the same formatting as the other articles on the page. In audio, it's currently being done by having the host read a loose script with keywords/phrases and tie in their personal experience with the product--making it seem like its part of the program.

The ads currently narrated by the podcasters are gold.

If I was an advertiser I would want that more than anything.

The ads are generally very well suited/targeted to the audience, and they are strongly legitimized by the podcaster.

When Joe Rogan hustles 'monthly razors' he makes it very personal, talks about his own use, emotionally slams the 'dumb alternatives'. It's 10x better than a pre-recorded spot.

It's much closer to sponsorship than ads, and it's worth it.

The issue is really one of scale ... but given the advertiser doesn't have to do anything but write a few sentences of copy and then pick some podcasts and negotiate a price ... I think the scale issue is not so bad.

I think it's a business evolution thing. You can see live reads from TV shows in the 50s (and radio). Later on you see "presenting sponsors," which I'm now seeing more and more in podcasts. As it becomes more of a commodity I can see it moving to pluggable ads.

I like the podcasts are niche. I heard someone point out the other day that companies investing big in podcasts are putting their money in talent and content and usually have poorer encoding, metadata, and shownotes compared to the smaller podcasts.

These type of ads aren't anything new, popular talk-radio hosts have done personalized ad spots for decades.

Ads where the presenter speaks them and says how they have personally enjoyed the product make me suspicious. Is it really true that you enjoyed the razors or the meal kits more than any of the competition? Or are you giving it false legitimy for the sake of money? Unfortunately I feel it detracts from the professionalism and journalistic independence of the shows.

"make me suspicious. " That's fine but they don't make most other people suspicious. Is the point.

I heard Marco Arment say the mp3 file format is simple enough you can splice in ads without having to re-encode and he was seeing companies doing this. This was in the context of him implementing file seek and play percentage in his podcast player--both get gnarly with VBR and ads that vary in length.

Gimlet says: "We resell old ad spots. Our ads are recorded separately and are modular, so we can take out old ads and put in new ads whenever we want." in a thread about how country specific ads have been noticed https://www.reddit.com/r/gimlet/comments/71abgp/anyone_else_...

there certainly are, I re-listened to an episode of a podcast last night with an ad targeted at my state.

My partner fell asleep the night before during and I wanted to point out the ad that hilariously missed its target audience and it was a different ad the second time we streamed it.

A fine article and then you get to the last sentence of the fifth paragraph and you can't help but to ask was that necessary?

He also embedded this tweet:

"The BuzzFeed "pivot" away from podcasts makes sense when you remember that BuzzFeed lives and dies as a business on detailed analytics. Web content has them. Video has them. Podcasts still don't."

In my opionion this is exactly what BuzzFeed lacks and what a lot of podcasts allow.

To the author's point, I suppose one can make a strong case that too many podcasts are merely low or zero-information commentary.

But, yeah, why the author decided to relate that statement to race, I can only guess. What did that add, journalistically, to the overall piece, which wasn't really about race?

Perhaps, as the Internet diversifies, the podcast scene hasn't diversified accordingly. It was definitely a jarring sentence, but the observation is not inaccurate and worth considering.

It’s not possible that the author’s assertion is based on any observation. It is a pure exposure of prejudicial assumption, and for me personally, wholly false.

The companies cited in this article that are walking back podcasting efforts mostly repackaged existing content in audio form, and it was obvious. Or worse, they had talking heads in a conversational format going on about the week's news topics.

These two show formats are at best boring, but usually terrible.

The ones that were podcasts first (or radio shows) like Gimlet Media, This American Life and its spinoffs continue to excel and provide the most engaging media experience.

In all fairness, I find there are plenty of interesting 2 or 3 person "talking head" podcasts if the people involved are engaging, it doesn't go on and on, and you're interested in the subject matter. That's not to say people will pay for it but it's a perfectly viable format so long as you're not expecting to make a living off it.

Pod Save is doing a great job with this, but other ones like the Ezra Klein one are usually...tedious and you can tell when the host just loves the sound of their own voice.

Like many other things--such as many conference presentations--a lot of podcasts would benefit from being trimmed from an hour or more to 20-30 minutes. If you listen to most professionally-produced hour-length segments on radio or podcast, even those are usually broken into multiple segments in some shape or form. An hour-long straight conversation is way too long IMO.

NPR is, there are mixed feelings. I think they take themselves and their ideas too seriously.

For all the world NPR (Radiolab, Hidden Brain) are like one of those friendly Christian persons who assumes you're one of their co-religionists. "Join our band of Enlightened Citizens" said the exquisitely specific subspecies of American - it's not the worst thing in the world but it is uncomfortably "Aren't we all Brothers in Christ, Brother!". Ironic but they are parochial, their version of world events is a sort of intellectual McMansion. They are bits glued on, there's a few zero pitch roofs in there somewhere and nobody paying attention expects it to last.

I don't have sympathy for the other team either but only one has enough gravitas to deliver those sermons. I don't hate either belief system but I do wish they'd take something out of Joe Rogan's book. Nobody watching or listening to him is under the impression Joe is delivering 100% serious gospel truths to us. Dan Carlin will often tell me of his beliefs, but I'm never made to feel it's anything other than his strongly held opinion which could be mistaken. The 'pro' media - even their conversations are really monologues.

I'm not as allergic to Planet Money and I suspect that show is more popular than the others because it stays on point and is shorter - so the evangelism becomes more like Thought for the Day if it slips in.

I suppose for those who wanted to make millions of dollars selling podcasts to advertisers, the bubble may well be bursting. For those who make podcasts because they have something to communicate and believe it's the right medium, I don't think the "bubble bursting" analogy is accurate.

Internet commerce didn't go away when the first dot-com bubble burst.

Is there a podcast bubble?

Is it more likely that there is an ad supported content platform bubble? People who support their podcast with Patreon seem to be doing quite well.

Survivor's or availability bias? I question whether, in general, donations have proven a particularly sustainable way for people to be compensated for creating content, whether podcasts, video, writing, or code.

Maybe podcasts made for the sole purpose of advertising. Podcasts made by interesting people talking about exciting topics like JRE aren’t going anywhere.

> In the case of podcasting, there are a lot of shows consisting of armchair pundits (mostly white men) talking about something they saw or read, without adding much insight.

Is the slight against white men really needed? Why drag this into the topic?

It's supposed to make you sound educated to include those little jabs.

The author uses this statement to discredit the media... and yet the author himself... hmmm... I guess I should stop reading now.

I stopped reading at that point. The article is bad enough, but this unnecessary statement makes the author look really bad.

Fortunately I didn't even read the article :)

I used to listen a lot 10-13 years ago, but whenever I listen now to a podcast, I find the information density really low. There's just a lot of social blabber about nothing. Though me and my gf listen a lot to lectures (TTC, etc.), audiobooks, etc. I find more polished content, much more enjoyable, than off the cuff talk.

It may have to do with patience and free time. :) A lot of the time podcasts take a lot of time to get to some point, and it's often times something that I already know from other channels that are easier to consume, like tweets, or whatever.

There is a lot of rubbish out there - I probably spend as much time looking for gold as I do listening.

History podcasts are pretty good, in my opinion. I currently listen to Revolutions, The History of Byzantium and The History of the Twentieth Century, and they're all quite well scripted, no babler at all.

Thanks for the recommendadtion.

Not bursting, maturing. I do not like activities that are, in essence, a waste of time as well as boring. This covers most modern as well as classical music, and most political, chat, talk and sports channels. I drive around, I exercise and that time is also boring, so I listen to podcasts and audio books as I bike, drive or exercise - 3-4 hours a day. Since I am a scientist, I listen to technical podcasts in all manner of scientific and technical topics that are geared to the post graduate mind. There are quite a few. http://www.microbe.tv/, http://omegataupodcast.net/, https://twit.tv/, http://www.mysteryshows.com/ - all the radio show of the 30's and 40's All the Sherlock Holmes novels are available as podcasts, as well as the audio streams of most modern movies and detective novels. Red October, David Bourne and so on. All available from free online sources as well as torrents and the local library. Most radios can play an audio CD, or I can copy it to an MP3 player.

I think a huge drawback for podcasting is that the same sponsors sponsor ever single show.

If I hear one more ZipRecruiter, Squarespace, or Mailchimp ad, I’m going to cry.

I end up skipping the ad sections 95% of the time, and only hear a fraction of the ad time.

By contrast, the Fantasy Footballers podcast has a product line which is intimately tied to the podcast, and they talk about their products in an integrated way with the content.

Which brings us to expectations...the Fantasy Footballers have what appears to be a decent business at the scale of 3 hosts, a writer, a producer and an intern. They do not have a decent Buzzfeed-scale business.

In podcasting, we can expect more native advertising building long term brands, like Tyler Cowen whose book sales and event attendance certainly benefit from his brilliant podcast.

P.s. the author mentioned short attention spans of social media, but I know many people who will binge a season of Netflix in an evening and listen to 13 hours of podcasts in a single week of commuting. There is plenty of attention.

what is Tyler Cowen's podcast ?

Conversations with Tyler.

thank you

Be careful what you wish for. I'm not sure native advertising is something we should be wanting to see a lot more of.

Gimlet [1] has been doing "not Squarespace, but obviously ads" for a while now. I think it's fine; I always know when their ads are on, and the ads aren't repetitive enough that it's worth it to skip them.

edit: Just to be clear, Gimlet runs a fuckton of Squarespace ads. They're just done differently than "read spiel n+1". The "Reply All" hosts, for example, have a more than a year-long joke running where one of them has a Squarespace site for old people-y gripes.

[1]: http://gimletmedia.com/

On the other hand the fact you could mention all of those off the top of your head means they are working–even if you are skipping most of the ad content.

I find it hard to imagine podcasting (among other things) not being hit incredibly hard by a recession. Some of the podcasts I listen to get amounts of money on Patreon that boggle the mind a bit, not ones like Chapo Trap House where it's a very large number of people giving a fiver a month but ones with a few hundred averaging over ten dollars a month.

Once you stop looking at that as ten dollars a pop and look at it as 120 a year, when money is tight, a lot of people are gonna struggle to justify it; especially when most things don't really give a whole lot of value in their Patreons.

Rule of thumb. Whenever a headline asks a question the answer is no.

It's called Betteridges's Law of Headlines and it gets quite annoying to see it invoked in every single news article thread whose headline fits the description.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

If you can't find something interesting to say about the article, then simply invoking the Law is a contentless comment.

At least from the initial paragraph, it sounds more like the companies laying off their podcast _production_ teams just had shitty content. The medium itself is hardly suffering.

I love podcasts, but they are likely to always suffer from monetization problems. No one wants to pay for them; this is similar to issues faced in news media. If the price was right, the quality issues would be fixed, or at least improved. Currently, they seem to serve as platforms for semi-famous people to advertise themselves, and build a brand. Also groups like NPR are already setup to release content as podcasts, as they can just play them over the radio.

There are a bunch of niche media sites that are seeing huge chunks of revenue coming from podcasts. E.g. the Ringer and Vox are both ramping up production significantly, doubling in the case of Vox, because the CPMs are so high. We'll see what happens when the venture capital streams propping up mattress, toothbrush, and meal kit startups dries up, but business model seems to be the least pressing issue at the moment.

I have always preferred good indie storytelling over too much studio style podcasts. Because of lower production costs they would be safer from this bursting.

I closely follow about five podcasts, but in every case I already enjoyed a host's work in a different medium. That might be an artifact of the type of show I tend to enjoy - I like finding out more about people whose work I enjoy - but it would also explain why big media companies have a hard time getting into podcasting.

No.

Agreed. And headlines like this are complete and utter clickbait.

I didnt even know there was a bubble!

Bubble has apparently lost all meaning now

A lot of my favorite podcasts are moving to premium content on patreon. Which is a little disappointing to me.

how does that work? do they keep episodes off of regular feeds and have you log in or something? or is there some kind of authentication you have to do in your podcast app?

For patreon it's trust based. Each contributor gets a mail with a link to a private rss feed they have to enter in their podcast app - and you're not supposed to share that with anyone.

I would assume the platform has some measures if it discovers a lot of downloads or requests from very different geolocations too - but that's just me speculating.

I would love to be able to pay to get ad-free versions of podcasts.

Some do this. The Savage Lovecast, for instance, has a subscriber-only feed that delivers the podcast with no ads and more content.

This is a thing actually on Breaker and Stitcher. The show I host offers this as a "premium feed."

Not a ton of interest, unsurprisingly, as most people don't experience enough inconvenience in an ad to shell out.

Are the ads really so bad? they're skippable quite easily if you are really annoyed.

Not so easy to skip if you're doing something with your hands - cooking, riding a bicycle, etc.

Somehow I found most pod-casts boring to listen too. Never understood the value.

What is your motivation to listen to them?

Sturgeon's Law: 95% of everything is crap. Probably especially when the barrier to entry is as low as it is for podcasts.

There is a tendency for podcasts in general to go on for too long IMO. But there are plenty of good ones out there. I mix up my listening a fair bit but there's no shortage of interesting content on all sorts of topics.

Entertaining and educational. What kinds of things do you like? There's probably a podcast for it. I listen to podcasts on subjects I dind't even know I liked and now am much more interested in them (medical history: SawBones; economics: Freakonomics, The Indicator, Planet Money)

But when to listen to them?

when i'm in the car, walking, or riding my bicycle.

Thats exactly the aspect of why I listen to podcasts. If you need to clean your apartment, go for a longer walk or anything else were you cant read or look at a video instead.

Thats also why I dont think that podcasts will actually vanish. As a medium they fill a corner

If you're at all interested in a new industry, there is usually a podcast focused on that vertical where notable luminaries get interviewed. Listening to a few hours of shows, while doing chores or commuting, can get you up the learning curve fairly quickly.

And the tendency to prattle can be fairly helpful. It helps illuminate the thought process of the subject in ways you wouldn't get in more formal settings, or in the few sentences of quotations that appear in a press account.

I listen while working out or while at work if I'm working on something that is not that intense.

...or when doing yard work or other chores around the house. I'll also listen when getting ready in the morning or when cooking dinner.

I am a patron of a handful of left-wing / comedy / education podcasts and all I can say is that that "scene" has been steadily growing since I got into it around 2016. Independent, patron based funding models really works for podcast content.

Chapo Trap House, fueled by over 100k $5 dollar donations, is a great example. Not all get to that level, but if you're a 1-3 person podcast making good content for your niche, it only takes a few thousand listeners supporting you with $5 a month to support the whole project. I think those podcasts are going to continue to grow in number for a while as the community grows.

There isnt even a need for large scale curative organizational involvement for these kinds of projects. I see the article mentions Slate, and NPR. While those are fine orgs, there is a real appeal to the auteur style of small scale, community driven media. Hosts go on each others shows, the listeners of the various podcasts interact with one another on twitter, and a weird kind of modular audio content network emerges out of the many moving pieces. Theres a place for large-orgs curating podcasts, doing more extensive journalism requiring resources, or providing larger content libraries for the un-initiated, but the botique podcast is something here to stay.

Just as long as Cum Town keeps going.

No, shut up, I love podcasts.

The best ones are Audio Dramas like Uncle Bertie's Botanarium and The Lost Cat podcast or The Stuff of Myth.

The Mysterious Secrets Of Uncle Bertie's Botanarium: http://rss.art19.com/the-mysterious-secrets-of-uncle-berties...

The Lost Cat: http://thelostcat.libsyn.com/rss

The Stuff of Myth: http://www.radiodramarevival.com/rdr-vault-stuff-myth-roger-...

Nobody has heard of these and they are brilliant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com