U.S. podcast listening reach new high: 47% listened one last month, +12% YoY | Hacker News Reader

U.S. podcast listening reach new high: 47% listened one last month, +12% YoY

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I wish I could get them. I can’t pay attention to them well enough to follow along if I’m doing anything else at all—so I may as well engage with audio-visual content instead. This entire huge medium is basically not usefully accessible to me.

For whatever reason, I don’t have this problem with news or talk radio in the car. Podcasts? I can’t follow the topic well enough, even if I’m just driving on a mostly-empty highway. Dunno why.

[edit] same with audio books, actually. I can’t follow along unless I’m doing nothing else.

Maybe just need to find one that interests you. A lot of them are quite poor quality.

I’ve tried some that are supposed to be very good. Still can’t follow along unless I’m doing nothing but listening. In a handful of cases I’ve listened to and enjoyed specific episodes of one podcast or another for some topic I wanted to hear enough that I was willing to just sit and listen and watch the progress bar and not do anything else, but the value that others find in podcasts seems to be that they can listen to them in time that’d otherwise be lost to mundane activities—I can’t do that, I’ll constant be moving the podcast back a few minutes because I realize I’ve not processed a word they’ve said for quite a while, pretty soon I’ve doubled the time taken to do whatever else I’m doing and have taken 90 minutes to get 20 minutes into a half-hour podcast.

[edit] probably-relatedly, I also can’t take notes and also follow what someone’s saying. If I take notes I’ll end up having written a bunch of stuff that I then have to read to figure out what was said. If someone asks me a question in the middle of note-taking I’ll typically have no clue what the context is.

News and talk radio is a lot better about packaging topics in short coherent stories. Podcasts have different incentives. They could tell you the whole story in a tidy 5 minutes, but by rambling with another voice for 15 or so you now have three times as much time to potentially monetize with your own product placement pieces in the segment.

Sometimes, but good podcasts are usually structured around some discussion or interview, which is hard to compress.

Additionally the somewhat stretched nature is good if you don't have 100% of your attention on it.

Kind of an odd take. News and talk radio is incentivized to give you the smallest amount of news possible so they can get back to the advertisers. Podcasts can actually go deep on a story over an extended period of time and number of episodes.

That depends completely on the podcast, it's weird to impugn an entire category of media because you've picked bad podcasts. Podcasts like The Economist, Slow News Cast, Sensemaker and The Inquiry have basically no wasted time whatsoever. They are punchy as any radio story, which is why I prefer this category of podcast.

I for one can't stand to listen to long rambling repetitive conversations from guys like Huberman or Rogan, which is why I don't listen to them.

I have a raft of podcasts that are specifically for those times when I want to be able to lose the thread;

- Hey Riddle Riddle: Morning talk-radio vibes, but goofier.

- The Past Times: Comedians reading old newspapers to each other. Subset of The Dollop but with much shorter-form stories.

- Houston we have a Podcast: Interviews and exposition from NASA staff about everything space and space engineering. I find you can miss chunks of this one and still keep up, sometimes.

For me, whether I can keep up sort of depends on the context. Longer-form stuff (including audiobooks) I can do when driving or deep-cleaning the house, these ones are for going through the morning routine and other times when my attention is going to be kinda scattered.

edit: formatting

There are some podcasts that will fit each listening style more than others based on their speaking style.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I treat them as kind of drift-in, drift-out background noise. When I'm washing dishes or something I'll listen to every word. But some tasks, like some parts of playing a video game or sorting out the mail or whatever, requires more attention so I'll stop listening for a bit and then drift back in when the task is done. For that reason, I don't listen to "high attention" podcasts, like stories or highly educational shows and audiobooks. Instead I listen to weekly update kind of things (weekly video game podcasts, science news podcasts, guitar Q&A show, etc) where if I zone out for a few minutes, I don't really care because they'll move on to some other topic shortly and I can tune back in.

I suspect my ADHD makes it hard to do this.

I wouldn’t worry you’re missing much. The whole reason podcasts are popular is that many people can listen to them and do something else.

If you can’t it means your brain is doing something else. For me a podcast completely arrests my thought processes in a way that radio chatter or music doesn’t.

I listen to a very, very small number of podcasts either that I find valuable enough to listen to despite the trade off. I’ll especially save them for cooking or another task which already half occupies my brain.

I take in information dramatically faster by reading. Podcasting is a perfectly viable way to get information or be entertain, but so are books and movies and shows or just looking at things and thinking.

I had this same problem too, and then I isolated it. It's the number of people speaking. I can't follow a podcast with two or more speakers. One speaker is fine. Radio news and talk radio is most often one person so it behaves that way.

It's a really different dynamic with one person compared to two or more. One person will speak continuously and stay on topic. Multiple people will stumble over each other or have delays between them, or waste time laughing or congratulating each other ("wow that's a great story" etc). It's surprising how much non-content noise there is between two people once you notice it.

There's also technical concerns: inevitably one person has a better and louder microphone and the other has scratchy lousy remote voice quality, and it's extremely jarring to bounce back and forth between those. I can only listen to podcasts where it's only one person speaking.

A lot of my Podcasts that I listen to _are_ basically news or talk-radio style shows. Just with the added benefit that I can listen on demand, pause, skip past ads, etc.

For less than obvious reasons, I can't follow audio books if they are fiction, but non fiction audio isn't a probLem. Meanwhile, I read plenty of fiction.

There is a link at the bottom of this article to the presentation by Infinite Dial; here it is: https://www.edisonresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Th...

A huge question for me is a better breakdown of the listening by age. The report has age ranges: 12-34 is a range, 35-54 is a range, 55+ is range. Am I missing something? 12-34 is a crazy range in my opinion that needs to be further broken down.

Only tangentially related but can we all just take a moment to appreciate that a fundamentally decentralized technology such as podcasts can grow to be such a huge market? Certain things about podcasts are only really possible because of their decentralized nature:

- Skippable ads (if you use a client that locks this down, just change clients)

- Being able to host in one place and have that feed get placed on any number of aggregators such as Apple/Spotify/etc.

- Being able to change hosts if you're unhappy with price/quality/etc.

In case you're wondering how podcasts are decentralized, you can thank RSS. A technology that feels forgotten in some ways has single-handedly made this all possible.

Yes! Also that many attempts to centralize podcasts have failed. At least in my experience it’s been very easy to avoid Spotify or Audible’s locked down podcast offerings.

Podcasts are an important part of my language learning stack.

There's a few intermediate French podcasts I listen to. They intentionally speak more slowly and clearly. Sometimes I'll listen to them multiple times, understanding a little more each time. Or I'll re-listen to them with the transcript. Spotify has auto-generated transcripts for some!

Other times I'll listen to native French podcasts for news and stuff. These are much harder to understand, but I'm really excited to get to the level where I can understand these, there's just so much content! Unfortunately slowing them down with Spotify doesn't work great for me.

I listen to them while I run, or in the mornings I'll go outside with my cats and stand around and drink coffee and listen to podcasts.

I found that the voice of the speaker impacts my comprehension quite a lot. Usually lower voices help me.

If I may suggest a French podcast, there used to be history podcast by Jean des Cars "Au coeur de l'histoire" (maybe 5 years ago though). I could listen to him while doing something else and get what he said (I'm native French speaker though). When the speaker changed on the podcast, I remember I had to focus very hard to achieve the same level of understanding.

I had the same phenomenon in English, I used to struggle understanding what the remote team would say on the phone, except one person whose voice what very clear.

I don't know how to describe that other than "I don't hear them with my hears, I hear them with my brain".

Any favorite intermediate French ones? I already have One Thing In A French Day, Duolingo French, and Francais Authentique.

I've got a bunch of native French podcasts as well, mostly on science, but they're often past my limit. About the only one I can handle is Il était une fois, which is also very slow, targeted (I think) to Francophone children.

BTW: I use Pocket Casts. It does a really good job of rendering these at 80% or 90% speed, for a bit of extra help.

Podcasts have always felt a bit alien to me. I know they exist, and people apparently listen to them, yet I haven't done so nor do I know anyone who has. They only seem to come up occasionally as advertisements.

They also feel like they occupy a weird middle space. They aren't as low-attention as something like television - without the visual component you need to pay attention more to 'get it' and follow along.

But it doesn't feel right to sit there and solely listen to it while doing nothing else. But I'm not sure what else you can do that doesn't eat up enough concentration to follow along. Cooking or cleaning maybe? Things that you can do from muscle memory.

Yup cooking and cleaning are great ones.

Also good on walks or commutes.

>But I'm not sure what else you can do that doesn't eat up enough concentration to follow along. Cooking or cleaning maybe? Things that you can do from muscle memory.

Chores, driving, walking, even playing video games is when I listen to podcasts. There is very little going on if you are doing that, so why not listen to something semi interesting.

I also listen to audiobooks, but they need far more investment and/or concentration.

> even playing video games is when I listen to podcasts.

This is where you lost me. The only way I could possibly play video games and listen to a podcast is if I'm playing a video game that I've played enough that I've reduced the game down to going through the motions.

If I'm playing a game I've never played before while a podcast is on, I can only really pay attention to one at a time. If I'm listening to the podcast, I can't properly follow plot points/dialogue/etc. If I'm following plot points/dialog/etc. in the game then whatever is happening in the podcast is going in one ear and out the other without being processed.

For me, it's almost like trying to read a book while listening to a different audio book.

I grew up listening to my dad's record/CD collection, all 60s-80s rock. When we drove in the car, we listened to music on the radio.

My father in law likes 1950s big band music; it's not really on broadcast radio much. He listened to a lot of public radio when my wife was growing up. As a result, she listens to public radio in the car 90% of the time.

When we first got together and I rode in her car, I was stunned that she never listened to music while driving.

Podcasts are on-demand talk radio. It's really nothing more.

I do most of my podcast listening in the gym, while walking around the city going places, and on airplanes, trains, and buses.

As others have said - cardiovascular exercise, trips/commutes...

Gardening, working out, going for walks. Cutting hair, washing a car. I can think of a few.

I feel like this podcasting hype is filling a sort of para-social gap that we’ve had in the last years. Listening to podcasts feels like you’re on a couch with your mates, just without the awkwardness of.. you know… socialising.

Looking at Google trends[0], it seems "podcast" was pretty stagnant between 2007-2017 in the US (and worldwide).

The growth in 2018 and 2019 is interesting tho. I would've thought that covid lockdowns are what brought it to the masses.

[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

>The growth in 2018 and 2019 is interesting tho. I would've thought that covid lockdowns are what brought it to the masses.

Overall podcast listens decreased during the lockdowns because of fewer commute hours, but fiction podcasts grew in popularity. <https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/Podcast-walks-Left...>

AntennaPod hooked to a NewPipe folder = ad-free unlimited content.

Meanwhile, at Google: "Let's add our podcast app to the long list of Google Graveyard apps and further erode user trust!"

It's fun to think that radio is making a comeback.

You'd think that adding moving pictures would make the experience better but it doesn't seem to be the case.

I guess the ease of audio makes it feel more “real”

it's too bad FM radio is dying. my car trips are usually 10-20 minutes. that's not long enough to faff with my phone or carplay. I greatly prefer to have preset radio stations. luckily i'm in a big metro area but I've lost a few over the years and the quality of the others has declined in line with revenue.

My phone connects to my car's bluetooth in an instant every time I start it up. Just press play and my last played podcast starts up. Hardly a faff.

i just have rotten luck with BT in general. mine seemingly connects to whatever other phone is in my house except mine. go into menu on phone to connect, takes a minute to time out. go into menu on car to connect, doesn't connect (or vice versa/phone/car) connect from phone again, finally works. i was listening to music last. ok now open podcast app. oh house wifi is too far but its still connected. disable wifi manually to get cell signal.

then i'm listening to something on my BT headphones in my house. car pulls up - now the car has stolen my signal and the occupants get whatever inane shit i'm listening to.

i only wish it was as easy as 1 button press like FM radio.

Bluetooth is basically broken in implementation. I’ve noticed all my Bluetooth issues went away after switching to iPhones. I’m guessing most cars just hyper optimize to Apple.

mine is an iphone. multiple generations of them

Just a couple of days before Google discontinues Google Podcasts

That sounds incredibly unlikely to be true

Really disappointing to note that podcasts.google.com is shutting down on Tuesday, April 2nd. It was a simple service that was convenient and free (as in beer), and it worked across the web and the mobile app. Presumably when they launched the service there was some intention of being able to benefit from analyzing trends and habits and so on, but they've now decided it's not worth it.

I think the current intent is to fold podcasts into YouTube or something, but the underlying message is very clear: Do not rely on Google services.

Yeah, I was really disappointed about this.

> I think the current intent is to fold podcasts into YouTube or something

The last email I got about it told me to head over to YouTube music so I don't lose my subscriptions or something. Yeah... not happening.

The credence people give to podcasters with no credentials whatsoever is frightening. Broadcast news has to at least attempt some modicum of truth, but podcasts are a free for all. The number of recommendations I've gotten for so and so podcast "it's really interesting!" that spews half truths and complete bullshit is alarming.

It doesn't help that traditional news sources have (understandably) lost trust over the decades, but the solution is to improve that. Not to abandon institutions with a history of legitimacy for those that never even tried to be about anything but profit and grift.

What if the “history of legitimacy” is largely just an illusion that was created by the fact aligned institutional bias, rather than any actual virtue compared to things that it is often contrasted to?

What if people didn't virtue signal extreme cynicism, confusing it for for skepticism?

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