We’re Entering the Era of Big Podcasting

Has anyone here listened to the newest episode of Startup? https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/6nhr5r/our-company-has...

Listening to that has made me doubt that we're in the era of "big podcasting."

Here's a quote from Alex Blumberg:

"Just nine months earlier, we at Gimlet raised a big round of funding, 15 million dollars. The plan was to invest a lot of that into making more shows, hiring more people. We wanted that big chunk of money to last for a while: two and a half years. Meaning, we wanted to burn about 6 million a year. But at this meeting, Jim is telling us that right now in early 2018, it's looking like we're going to burn a lot more than that: 10-11 million a month."

He goes on to explain why:

"And that's because a lot of the things we assumed would happen, didn't. We assumed audiences would grow, but instead they plateaued. Our launches had not done as well as they had in the past. And some of our biggest shows, with the largest audiences, still weren't making money because we couldn't sell ads on them."

We'll know we hit big podcast when they take away the 'skip forward 15 seconds' button. Advertisers will demand this like they did with video.

I remember when the folks at TWiT were still trying to make "netcasts" happen and shared they had hit over $1 million in revenue and it feeling like the medium was going big. Pretty crazy to look at the numbers 10 years later and seeing how much further it's all come.

One of the things I like most about Podcasts is that they don't overtake my time. They are just interesting enough without being too involving. Games, TV shows and books seem able to really grip my attention and displace everything else including sleep, but podcasts not so much.

I’m a longtime podcast listener. The podcasting world did change a lot. The last two years the companies I’ve worked for both decided that it would be a great idea to release something for marketing purposes.

The reason why podcasting works was because it was its own little internet within the internet. People with great stories, content that was just different en often more specific and niece then sites and video.

We’ll see where it’s going to end up, but I do worried about the current fight of who is going to be the podcasting platform. The power for me was the sense of independence the creators had making it feel more like a labor of love then a marketing machine.

Some of my current favorites:

S-town: powerful storytelling, makes you wonder how much power the storyteller has. It’s a non fiction story about an interesting individual, explaining more would be a spoiler.

White vault: thriller show, starts off a bit clunky with the voice acting. But as a horror lover the story itself is well written and it just works so well as a podcast.

Benjamin walkers - theory of everything: it’s on a league of its own. The creator is just as historied as the brains behind the npr and gimlet podcasts. It’s interesting because you start to understand that the lines between what is truth and what is fake is so thin. I think there is even an episode over this exact subject.

The big loop: great fiction storytelling most similar to the truth podcast but it takes more tune to tell the story, the little bit of extra space give the story a much deeper dimension.

Darknet diaries: fiction podcast about hackers, gentle deep dive in the hacker world with some amazing stories. The author really does understand the world and you just feel the amount of research that goes into each episode.

Yet the user experience is a mess.

Podcasts need to be published on so many different platforms manually. Ratings and reviews appear to be non-existant outside of the Apple ecosystem. You still can't export your subscriptions from some major applications, and good luck exporting your listening history from any.

I feel like creating something 10x better is such a low hanging fruit, I'm surprised nobody has done it. Make a player that syncs across devices and platforms, exports/imports to/from other podcast apps/platforms (using scraping if necessary), aggregates and gather reviews, provides a basic recommendation system, allows subscribing to keywords (people, topics), etc. If it supports audio books, YouTube subscriptions (those channels with long talks and conversations and lectures that aren't strongly visual), and saved bookmarks/Pocket/Evernote article via text-to-speech, that's even better.

When I commute, walk, exercise, cook, wash dishes, stretch, brush my teeth, take a shower, do laundry, mow the lawn, shovel snow, stop looking at a screen and go to bed 1h before sleep, I want to hit play and be fed a customized audio diet.

Maybe selection bias, but as a long time podcast listener, ever since the medium exploded, I've noticed more and more old podcasts that predate popularity surge getting canned. Creators that regularly cast for years fail to pivot to monetization their passion into a career, get demotivated and burn out. Maybe they're losing ears to plateuing audience and ad money to competitors. Maybe they're just getting old, starting families, have busy careers. Kind of a bummer either way, patronage is good for the arts to a degree, but extrinsic motivation (money) is also less resilient than internal motivation (passion). Also I miss quirky geocities pages.

To be honest, I can't comment on if there's a "big era of podcast" ahead. But I live in a non English speaking country, and what I'm observing is that podcasts _are_ percolating the news, specially in HN, that's where I consume quality content.

I had recently, after getting tired of listening to music on my commute (A 12 minute bike ride, or a 25 minute walk) from home to work started to listen to podcast that I find normally here (My other source of content is reddit, but the quality is not the same).

What I see, is that usually what gets named is really, really good; or at least very interesting. the other thing that I like a lot is that the duration of the episodes is more or less my commute. If it were longer I'd have the possibility of listening to a couple of them, or listening to a longer episode. When I tried to consume podcasts before they were always long, and that was annoying because they demand too much attention from you, and the UX of a podcast is not the same as television.

I wont provide links but as probably is going to be asked I'll provide the episodes that got me hooked on different podcasts:

"This American Life": Episode about a guy and his years long enterprise of outrunning an antelope.

"Planet Money" and the Indian non-cash experiment.

"99% invisible" and an interview with the writer of "Invisible women" a book about gender bias in daily life (This one was so good that made me scream in anger several times in the street!)

Sorry but I don't remember much about another one, that was about a dirty cop that decided to go live in the wild because he was going to jail, and ended up living alone for more than 20 years (And hr got pardoned when he turned himself up)

Gimlet is interesting because it was a successful startup - start, get some investment, big exit for the investors and presumably founders. I suspect its shows are expensive because (for a time, still?) it's a core of former NPR people and NPR does a lot of production.

Other podcast networks like 5by5 have mostly withered to one or two successful shows, though that example is due to a shift of focus from podcasting to providing tools for aspiring podcasters (Fireside). Kind of like running the general store in a gold rush town.

Here's a great podcast by the creator of Javascript Jabber, Ruby Rogues (and ton of other popular ones) on the Future of Podcasting:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eaPmW2O5o1c (video version)

Or audio version:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/podcasting-adventures-...

The sad reality is anything that is funded through advertising is going to hit plateaus in the coming years. We've just been oversaturated with it, its become a burning pot for companies to throw money into with no ability to properly attribute it. I can't remember _ever_ buying something as a direct result of advertising.

I don't really understand how there is a future for ads in podcasts. All the UIs have +30/-15 buttons making it trivial to skip the ads. Unless my hands are full I always skip them.

What I struggle to see about this new era of podcasting is: why now?

Would someone with more insight help me to understand?

Really? I think we're exiting the era of podcasting at this point. Both my wife and I switched to audiobooks a couple of years ago. We mostly get audiobooks from our local library. What's not available there we get on Audible. If you're going to spend the time, might as well spend it on something better than instantly obsolete drivel made up on the spot.

Podcasts are great. I think Michael Lewis has really nailed the niche.