
We’re Entering the Era of Big Podcasting - imartin2k
https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/podcasting-history-three-eras.html
======
mijustin
Has anyone here listened to the newest episode of Startup?
[https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/6nhr5r/our-company-
has...](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/6nhr5r/our-company-has-problems)

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."_

~~~
bilbo0s
> _And some of our biggest shows, with the largest audiences, still weren 't
> making money because we couldn't sell ads on them._

Maybe I'm just thinking about this whole thing in too simplistic a fashion,
but if the content is such that you can't make money on a podcast, why exactly
are you spending money on producing it?

~~~
atoav
Many of the bigger German podcasters earn finance their podcasts entirely
without ads by their listener’s contributions. The podcasts are usually people
talking about topics they really enjoy with people they like.

Why do people do open source software for free at times?

~~~
pmuse
A lot of podcasters make money off of live shows and merchandise too.

If they had a large, devout audience, but couldn’t make money, it seems their
main issue was relying on the wrong form of monetization.

------
pcarolan
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.

~~~
zaque1213
I'd be interested to see stats on how often people skip over the ads during a
podcast. I admit I do occasionally, but most of the time when I'm listening to
a podcast I'm simultaneously doing something - like driving, exercising,
mowing the lawn - that makes it inconvenient open my phone, navigate to to the
app, and press the skip button a few times. Coupled with the fact that the
adds are generally not too long, I don't find it to be too intrusive to the
episode.

~~~
mikestew
It’s probably one of the best features having an Apple Watch: flick of the
wrist, couple of taps, bye bye ad. If I had to pick up my phone, I probably
wouldn’t skip the ads, either.

~~~
eropple
Depending on your podcast player, what would be "next track" in a music app is
"skip N seconds." I double tap my headphones and skip the ad.

It doesn't work in the basic Apple podcasts app, but that app stinks and
Pocket Casts is now free to use.

~~~
mikestew
Oops, sorry; yeah, I forgot to specify the app being Overcast. Though without
firing up the machinery to confirm, I believe on the watch it's just using
Apple's Now Playing? Or maybe not. Anyway, to be specific, on the Apple watch
there are buttons on either side of play/pause; one goes back 30 seconds, one
goes forward.

~~~
ziggity
Overcast is an interesting case study on optimizing for listeners vs.
creators.

The app developer, Marco Arment, is also co-host of Accidental Tech Podcast.
One cool feature in Overcast is chapter markers: You can embed ID3v2 chapter
frames in your RSS feed's MP3 files indicating when different segments start.
This lets the listener jump between segments, it's a pretty slick experience.

Unsurprisingly, ATP uses this functionality. Advertising chapters are labelled
as such, but the timecodes are always deliberately skewed so that skipping to
the next chapter after an ad still gives you the last 15 seconds or so of the
ad read.

I suppose this is a slightly better user experience than disabling the Skip
Next button altogether on an ad segment, but it still irks me to be on the
losing end of a conflict of interest.

...says the guy (me) complaining about a free podcast being played in a free
podcast app.

~~~
eropple
Does anything besides Overcast actually respond to chapter markers?

...says the guy (me) writing a self-hostable podcast platform.

~~~
ziggity
Apparently I was wrong about how podcast chapters are embedded: It's not in
the RSS feed itself but encoded as ID3v2 tags in the MP3 file.

Apple Podcasts added support in iOS 12, here's a Google Sheet of the rest:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c2L14UVH1xtN4iDG4awh...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c2L14UVH1xtN4iDG4awheLbMgPCQgaKEamUauWs1gps/edit#gid=0)

------
bearcobra
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.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
I did like their term of "netcast" because podcasts grew way beyond the iPod.
But like with many terms nowadays it seems Podcast was the one to catch on as
the generic term. Leo Laporte even mentioned that they gave up on "netcast"
because it was obvious it would never happen and it was causing a lot of
confusion with new listeners.

~~~
nerfhammer
the mechanical cash register sound effect is still used to represent money in
media despite the fact that the kids these days have never seen a mechanical
cash register and have no reason to be able recognize that sound from real
life.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I’m 38 and I doubt I’ve ever seen a “cha-ching” style cash register in active
use either. Didn’t those get phased out in like the 60s?

Maybe when you say “kids” you’re talking about me though!

~~~
nerfhammer
I didn't mean "kids these days" to be taken exactly literally. I'm not at all
sure in which decade digital cash registers became overwhelmingly common.

------
Gatsky
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.

~~~
coderheed
I hadn't realized this, but it's so true. Thanks for the insight.

------
winkelwagen
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.

~~~
audiometry
The thing about Darknet Diaries... the host, intentionally or not, imitates
Ira Glass to even the level of his verbal ticks. It's so close a match that
it's creepy.

I wondered if "Jack Rhysider" might actually be Ira Glass, so I google image'd
him. Try it -- he has somehow polluted google images with his name such that
google images shows myriad different faces to his name. Cool trick -- not sure
how he managed it.

~~~
icebraining
> he has somehow polluted google images with his name such that google images
> shows myriad different faces to his name

I don't think he had to do anything, I have a rather unique name, yet Google
also shows a bunch of faces. I think it's the algorithm detecting that you're
search for a person, and therefore shows you faces. If there aren't enough
photos of you, it'll show other results.

------
miguelrochefort
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.

~~~
dvtrn
I think you would love PocketCasts.

~~~
IggleSniggle
Thanks for the recommendation. For others looking, I was very happy with
DoggCatcher for many years on Android, and am moderately happy with Downcast
on iOS now. Downcast does offer iCloud sync with multiple switches for various
settings you wish to sync, and import/export (terrible name for something that
makes me happy, tho).

The thing that I liked about DoggCatcher is that, as I remember (beyond usual
features like search and discovery) it was relatively easy to hook it up to
whatever source you wanted. I had lectures in a Dropbox link, and I could
point DoggCatcher at the folder and it would pick up my audio files, while
being seamlessly integrated with “normal” podcast feeds.

------
dirtyid
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.

------
ericol
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)

~~~
ericol
> But I live in a non English speaking country, and what I'm observing is that
> podcasts _are_ percolating the news

Sorry but my comment is crap here. This 2 ideas are separated one from the
other. I live on a non english speaking country so I can comment on that (The
big era thing).

But even then, all the rest and blah blah blah. sorry about my lack of writing
skills (And proofreading).

------
fencepost
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.

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

Or audio version:

[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/podcasting-
adventures-...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/podcasting-adventures-
decentralized-distribution-ip/id1467007633?i=1000440692888)

------
nautilus12
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.

~~~
333c
That isn't the point of (most) advertising. The point is to get the brand or
product into your mind and make it familiar. That way, when you are in the
market for Product X, you'll think of Brand Y due to their podcast ads.

------
greggman2
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.

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

Would someone with more insight help me to understand?

~~~
erikpukinskis
The radio to podcast transition is an S-curve driven by smartphone adoption.

There is a slight offset from the smartphone adoption curve because you need a
bigger market to support niche productions long enough to work out enough
standard formats that it can be easily replicated in non-niche segments.

Once you have non-niche shows that are nicely formatted, and you’re past the
tipping point for smartphones, the curve stands up.

------
m0zg
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.

------
sjg007
Podcasts are great. I think Michael Lewis has really nailed the niche.

