5 ms·

Ask HN: How to make the podcast listening experience better?

1 points by neilsharma 11y ago

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/mobile apps. Many good publishers struggle with economic sustainability (like lots of people in the publishing industry). 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?

neilsharma 11y ago
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