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Comment by jimberlage | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps podcasts have broader appeal, but I always thought that talk radio was a good proxy for podcasts. I’d guess that only 1 in 20 people had a talk radio show they routinely listened to growing up pre-podcasts, and a smaller subset of that was engaged enough to not miss an episode. It felt popular, but still niche within the set of reasonably popular interests.

It would surprise me a lot if the switch to the internet as a medium changed the fundamentals much here. It’s probably easier to discover new podcasts than it was to find new talk radio shows, but does that really move the needle enough to justify the VC funding in this space?

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I think so. The big shifts are:

-production costs have dropped so much so there are more options from more content

-broadcast costs have dropped so you can have 4 hour podcasts for basically the same cost as 1 hour

-audience is global instead of local, so way more listeners

-asynchronous nature makes it easier to fit into your schedule. I can’t listen to my favorite talk radio show because I’m working. But I can listen to my favorite podcast whenever.

So this should mean that there’s more people, and more money. So investment makes sense.

Howard Stern alone had 20 million listeners in 2006, which was more than 1 in 20 Americans. The biggest 4 US PM drive time talk programs anime are about 40 million, just going from Wikipedia.

Long form audio content isn’t a niche market all up. I do think it is a market that lends itself to a high degree of fragmentation because of low production and distribution cost, which makes it hard to monetize.

I think narrow appeal is the best part.

I listen to niche podcasts from all over the world in a variety of topics spaces that would never have mass appeal required for radio or television but a global asynchronous audience is enough.

> Perhaps podcasts have broader appeal, but I always thought that talk radio was a good proxy for podcasts.

I prefer audiobooks. At least audiobooks tend to have a beginning, middle and an end (and an editor!) so the content is a little more well planned vs just rando jabronis bloviating which sometimes happens in podcasts.

I can summarize most plots in a paragraph. The goal of most entertainment is to kill time and meander.

I just can't stand a podcast where it's just 2-3 (usually) men shooting the shit in front of microphones for multiple hours. There is no subject, no editing and no point. They might end up with a few 20-30 second funny clips on TikTok.

There are podcasts that are actually edited, those are the good ones. They stay on subject, boring / unfunny bits are edited out etc.

My favourite example in this is the No Such Thing As A Fish -podcast from the QI crew.

I didn't know at first it was carefully edited, but then they started releasing the outtake bits as bonus episodes and the curtain was lifted =)

There is a podcast I really loved called the Future of Coding, where they dived into cool CS papers, which now has turned into 2.5 hours of two people talking about everything that tangentially related to the topic at hand, with no editing. I really do not know who their target audience is.

I don't have 2.5 hours to dedicate to a single podcast episode, on a topic that might be quite complex, while having to suffer through jokes and poor pacing.

Some people tend to form parasocial relationships to other people.

Then they listen to those rambling podcasts to "keep up to date" about what's happening to whoever they chose to follow.

I had a colleague at work who listened to a YouTube "podcast" that was 3-4 hours per episode, they just had it on a second screed yammering away while they worked. I don't get it.

I got too much ADHD already on my own, I cannot imagine how it would be to have other people talking between themselves on a second screen while I'm trying to concentrate on work.

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