
Ask HN: How to make the podcast listening experience better? - neilsharma
I love listening to podcasts, and there is a lot of great content out there. Despite the fact that podcasting has been around for a decade, technology and consumer engagement mechanics seem very rudimentary, especially compared to web&#x2F;mobile apps. Many good publishers struggle with economic sustainability (like lots of people in the publishing industry).<p>My question is open-ended: what problems do you have with podcasts? What have you found useful? What are some suggestions on improving the consumption, production, and monetization experience?
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neilsharma
To start, here are some problems that I've noticed:

DISCOVERABILITY:

\- The best way to discover new podcasts seem to be through curated lists,
word of mouth, or recommendations from other podcasts. Haven’t come across a
recommendation algorithm that surfaces little known podcasts.

\- iTunes, probably the largest distributor of podcasts, has strange
algorithms. For example, “New and Noteworthy” is based on # of new
subscribers, not # of downloads or reviews [1]. Android users don’t have
iTunes.

\- A particular publisher’s content is usually organized episodically instead
of by topic. This makes it harder to dive deeper or learn more about something
that piqued your interest.

REVIEWS / RATINGS:

\- incentives to write a review is very low. Lack of reviews contribute to
discovery problem Reviews are scattered across dozens of platforms, few of
which have mass adoption

EPISODES:

\- Most episodes are long -- 20 min to 2 hours. This makes previewing,
skipping, and embedding into other forms of media harder.

SEARCH:

\- Can’t easily search through an episode -- this is a general problem with
audio searching

\- Are podcasts even being indexed by any search engines if there is no
transcript on the website?

PLAYER FUNCTIONALITY:

\- Sharing an episode on FB/Twitter is hard -- users often don’t even need to
sign in to use the podcast app. Sharing a segment of an episode is nearly
impossible

\- The “Skip” button is contextless and usually just jumps ahead a predefined
number of seconds. It should be “skip ad” or “skip to next topic” While
driving, operating the player means gambling with your life.

ANALYTICS:

\- Primary metric is # of downloads, not # of listens.

\- Ability to know when listeners drop off is nearly impossible

\- Whatever little data is out there is scattered across every distributor.

ADS/MONETIZATION:

\- Monthly subscription model means losing 95%+ of your listener base. Often
this is still economical.

\- Ads are doing well-ish ($10-$50 CPM), but fail to attract many advertisers
because there is no tracking (unless there is an accompanied coupon code). CPM
might be at its peak

\- Too much free content available for a “netflix of podcasts” to work

PRODUCTION:

-High quality content, esp storytelling, is expensive or time-consuming to produce

ENGAGEMENT

\- Users can’t do surveys, click on links, add tags, “like” or “share”,
comment, rate/review, etc through most apps/players.

\- No easy direct line to engage with publisher. Nobody goes to the website
and writes a comment

\- No easy way to engage with the community of listeners

\- AMAs and live broadcasts are seen by a small % of fans

\- Engaging with the content while passively listening (ie: driving, at work,
at the gym, etc) is hard

