I was aware of podcasts when they launched around 2004 (and worked on some related sites) but a lot of the early hype about podcasts as a business didn’t pan out. I suspect it may be misleading to look to the past this point—the upsurge of professional content, advertising, etc. may mean it really is different this time.
The Serial podcast is huge, and in journalism, one of the few bright spots of success in indepth reporting...I would say that that alone has accounted for the majority of upswing in number of media reports proclaiming the new popularity of podcasts. So, despite the stats of increased downloads/awareness cited...which may not be impressive at all if we compare them against the overall uptick in phone adoption and mobile digital consumption since 2008...there's no guarantee that podcasting as an industry has real footing...particularly in what exists for creators to create and then get paid. At least, there's nothing on the scope of what Twitch and YouTube have done for gaming screen casters, AFAIK
Serial podcast was great. Tim Feriss is good, Dan Carlin is awesome. Any other podcast you'd recommend? Excluding the self promotional internet business types.
Exactly the name I think of when I hear the word 'podcasting', and I'm surprised to see no mention of him in the article. In fact, I'm a regular podcast listener and I recognized few of the names in this piece, which was confusing to say the least.
If you're a Carlin fan, you definitely need to listen to Mike Duncan's podcasts - History of Rome and Revolutions. I'm also a fan of Skeptoid and Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. For lighter stuff, I enjoy Bill Burr's Monday Morning Podcast and Nerdist.
QOD. James Altutcher and Steven Dubner (freakonomics). They have one question each day they talk about. Both have GREAT perspectives. It's almost always a paradigm shifter.
The problem with podcasting for me is I have no easy way to consume them that isn't already part of my entertainment workflow.
Literally, if it isn't something I can subscribe to in Youtube, or add it to my queue in Netflix, eventually it just gets lost and falls out of my entertainment workflow.
Dan carlin's podcasts hardcore history[1] and common sense [2] both get uploaded to youtube whenever a new episode comes out. Both excellent podcasts as well.
I'm sure it's not very common however.
Oh, i also might as well mention that you can have itunes download your podcasts and put them in your plex media server or kodi server.
I understand that a huge percentage of podcast listeners are based in the US but the number of hours I've spent listening to completely irrelevant adverts is insane.
Surely someone can make a service that takes a podcast feed and packages it with different adverts for different markets and then creates new feeds.
I'd make it but the scaling sales end is not something I know how to do.
I suppose it depends how Apple interprets the feed as I assume Apple devices are the most used for podcast consumption.
Crowdsourcing? See if a lot of people skip over certain fragments of an episode and mark it as "advertisement". Granted, this requires some level of cooperation from podcast player applications.
Yes, please! Let's make bootstrapping and indie projects as hard as possible by placing advertising control solely in the hands of large corporations that have means and resources to fight adblocking.
> I find the advertising inside podcasts also particularly annoying.
Really? Most podcast apps replace the skip buttons with "jump forward/back 15/30 sec".
Hitting a button twice is too much effort in exchange for getting content for free?
Yes I could FF through ads. The point (for me) is that I can leave my phone in my pocket and use two hands to do something, or keep them in my pockets when trudging home through snow. Which adds to the aggravation of ads - put stuff down, fish phone out of pocket, turn on phone, FF, stash phone. Or listen to the ad.
We currently don't have the technology to automatically transcribe podcasts into text (good for the SEO on your podcast site) - But even if we did, how would it know that something is an advert as opposed to part of the show? Most of the podcasts I listen to have ads and in many cases the ads aren't just at the start or end, they're either a live read during the podcast or a cutaway somewhere towards the middle.
Maybe you're just not the target market for ad-funded podcasts.
Cut any segment of 10 seconds or more that is found in more than one podcast episode. (I think this is feasible considering Shazam)
It would remove pre-recorded/repeated ads in the middle (assuming that's what cutaway means), but wouldn't be able to remove live reads. It would also remove intros/exits.
That actually does sound feasible. I'm not sure how feasible when it comes to mobile devices but definitely possible if things like YouTube's ContentID can work
As I understand it, ContentID is notoriously over-aggressive in matching and only "works" in the sense that YouTube's interest in having it isn't particularly harmed by that, since its mostly a tool to improve relations and avoid lawsuits from big media interests.
Without manual validation, it probably wouldn't be a good model for identifying and removing ads from podcasts, especially using a "repeated in multiple podcasts" model, which doesn't start with known ads.
I find the advertising inside podcasts also particularly annoying.
Get headphones with forward/back buttons on them. As soon as the ads start it's one or two quick taps on a button by my neck and I'm back to the podcast.
The major problem is that you can't control the behavior of a podcast client. Some of them will cache you media files "forever", unless you explicitly change the guid. But changing the guid has negative effects on some clients too, as they will re-download the episode because they will see it as new, thus creating duplicate entries.
This is the reason why you just cannot create dynamic ads if you want to stick to the standard RSS+client approach (like iTunes).
Some of the podcasters have started actually building their own native apps to have better control of the content they emit, but it comes with reduced visibility. This is why most of podcasters still release their stuff through iTunes, but invite the listeners to download their app.
What if you dynamically updated the same mp3 file instead of updating the media file URL (and changing the guid.)
As far as cached mp3s that are already downloaded, I don't see why that should have a huge impact on ads. The most important episode for advertising purposes is probably the most recent episode, and if someone pulls an archived mp3 that should have the new ads too. As for already-downloaded, cached mp3s you just gotta let those go.
Out of curiosity, what podcasts do you listen to that have ads? I listen to a couple hours of podcasts every day for a couple years now and have never heard one (beyond the podcast itself asking for patreon support).
I don't think I've heard many podcasts with actual radio-style ad breaks, but there are plenty with sponsors (e.g. TWiT, DevChat.tv, Spec.fm, Jupiter Broadcasting -- except for Tech Talk Today and Unfilter which are Patreon-supported).
Luckily with the podcasts I'm subscribed to most of the sponsors tend to be relevant to the actual shows. The only irrelevant sponsor I recall is Ting (a Canada-based US mobile provider I think).
I have had the opposite experience, all but two of the podcasts I listen to have adverts. The ones I listen to are from the bigger podcasting studios (Smodcast, PodcastOne, etc). One of the two is Patreon funded and the other is more a bonus content on top of a much larger network of entertainment.
A lot of the tech podcasts I listen to - e.g., Arrested Devops, Talk Python to Me, Software Engineering Daily, Re/Code Decode - have fairly prominent adverts. Sometime read out by the presenter themselves, other times presented as a piece of pre-recorded audio. In the former cases, they'll sometimes do their best to make reference to the content of the podcast in the advertising message.
I'm not too bothered with these, as compared with the type of adverts you'd find on commercial television or radio, they're not that annoying and usually relevant to the podcast subject matter. If they started playing multiple irrelevant adverts back to back, with accompanying audio compression, then I'd be upset about it.
I'm the other way around. I immediately lose trust in a host as soon as they start reading an ad - it shows that the production doesn't have a strict separation of content and sales.
Interesting, I wonder how much of this is an artifact of podcasts oriented more towards a hobbyist audience vs. a professional audience?
Podcasts aren't expensive to produce at a basic level, it's mostly just the hosts sitting around and chatting on skype for an hour every week or two. I'm only aware of one podcast I listen to that frequently asks for contributions, and that's mostly because the hosts have found they work best when they're physically co-present and have to fly one of the hosts out every month to record a bunch of shows all at once.
> I'm not too bothered with these, as compared with the type of adverts you'd find on commercial television or radio
Yeah, I agree. When the parent discussed adverts before I was thinking of the more commercial radio type. I think it's an effort to try to monetize podcast audiences, but at least for me I'm able to find more content than I can listen to, run by hosts that aren't all that interested in turning their hobby into a money making venture.
You dont own the podcast material, and you'd be taking away revenue from the owners. Not a suggested idea.
I've personally thought about a paid platform where users subscribe to the podcasts they like best and get the perk of avoiding ads since they're contributing to the podcasts creators
A friend and I have launched a podcast publishing platform, batteries included, called Podigee (https://www.podigee.com).
The backend runs on Rails + PostgreSQL, the frontend is a mix of Rails and AngularJS. Also, we run dedicated download / stream servers with some nice Lua scripts for caching the files and reducing overall costs for AWS S3 traffic.
The nicest feature is that once you upload an audio file, we will apply some good audio algorithms to it, encode it to different audio formats, and expose it automatically in your RSS feed.
I used to have a serious podcast habit - one of which used to run adverts for Audible. Now I listen to audiobooks and hardly ever listen to podcasts and never listen to the podcast where I learned about Audible.
When it comes to Audible literally anyone can be 'sponsored' by them - I don't know if the big guys get an upfront or set amount but I was able to register as an Audible podcast affiliate before we even had a single episode out
I know that with Squarespace at least podcasts with a larger listenership have a completely different deal than the regular affiliate marketing channel- though I don't know any details. I kind of assumed it was the same across the board for podcasts on larger networks though I don't really know for sure.
I've tried consuming podcasts on a number of occasions. I've utterly failed at finding a way to appreciate them, even on subjects that interest me. Reading faster than people speak is a factor (much faster) and being able to skim and dive in where I'm interested, ability to bookmark, to cut-and-paste bits for my notes files and so on. Besides reading is a lot easier for me to stay concentrated on the content rather than listening to someone talking. Podcasting just isn't for me, but I totally understand that there are people for who they are very useful. Any article can be turned into speech by using text-to-speech software, it would be nice if podcasts could be turned into transcripts with similar ease.
If you have a long commute, car/bike/train/etc. they're basically perfect audio companions. I couldn't figure out what to do with them either until I decided to stop listening to the news on a daily basis during my commute (it made me too aggravated).
>If you have a long commute, car/bike/train/etc. they're basically perfect audio companions.
On bikes, at least where I live, using headphones is illegal. I'd love to listen to music or podcasts on my bike but I just can't do it with only one ear covered. It's probably not advisable anyways.
Interestingly, it is legal to ride a bike or even drive a car while deaf. It would be illegal for a deaf person to cover both ears while driving or biking if I'm reading the statutes correctly.
I work in DC, so DC and / or Federal law would also be relevant. I believe the distracted driving statutes in DC would also apply to bikes, so headphones would fall under that I believe.
DC, VA, and MD also have contributory negligence. You can read more about that here:
TL;DR you can receive no damages if you break the law in any tiny way while on a bicycle or on foot. Wearing headphones might be said to have contributed in some way, so you might get nothing.
One of my coworkers who bikes through the district will sometimes follow behind a guy who plays NPR on a regular radio - loud enough for my coworker to listen for a while on his commute, too.
I admire your desire to adhere to the law, but in the DC area I never see traffic enforcement applied to cyclists and I rarely see it applied to cars, so I doubt an officer is going to nail you for having some earbuds.
> I admire your desire to adhere to the law, but in the DC area I never see traffic enforcement applied to cyclists and I rarely see it applied to cars, so I doubt an officer is going to nail you for having some earbuds.
In DC cops occasionally like to sit in the 15th Street Cycletrack and write tickets for running red lights. I'm sure if they found any violation of the law, they would also throw in another ticket.
For those not aware, 15th St. abuts the White House and, because of the many roads that are permanently blocked off, it is not possible for there to be car / bike conflicts for a stretch of this street from New York Avenue to the Ellipse where the bike lanes end (though bike / pedestrian conflicts can happen), except with emergency vehicles and the like. The markings on the road make it unclear whether or not bikes must stop at red lights or just when pedestrians are present.
Because of this, the vast majority of cyclists on this stretch of road ignore red lights and treat them as yields since it is perfectly safe to do so. You will almost never see any bike stopped unless there are pedestrians crossing the street or the bike is turning.
As for why you rarely see traffic enforcement, at least in DC there is no traffic enforcement division. Virginia has traffic enforcement (don't go over 80 MPH in Virginia on any road; it is automatically reckless driving, which is a misdemeanor. This applies even if the speed limit were 79 MPH).
Even without traffic enforcement of any kind, contributory negligence makes wearing headphones risky from a liability standpoint. Any minor law violation or safety hazard by a bicyclist can be used as a defense by a driver in court and end up with no damages awarded.
The saner comparative negligence standard does not apply in DC, MD, or VA.
On a commute if I am not on the wheel (and usually I am not), I always prefer reading a book to listening to a podcast. Most podcast are full of time-fillers, which makes them very annoying.
I get motion sick doing that and struggled to find something to pass the time with for years. Podcasts seem to work well for me, but I used to try music and even old classic radio shows for a while.
FWIW most podcast apps have a speed control, in fact Overcast's speed up uses a different algorithm that sounds 100% better to my ears than Apple's at the same multiplier.
In what mesure does a podcast compliment a proper article? As far as I see, the only thing that could be missing would be the interactivity (being able to ask question about the parts of the article that we haven't understood and that we would like to clarify), but podcasts don't solve this.
You can't read while you're driving, doing the dishes etc. There's many times when your mind isn't all that busy but your hands or eyes are. Podcasts are great for that.
I also find them much better for interviews and the like than text, you get a lot of information out of the tone people use, which is lost when it's committed to text.
They are great for that because, just like the Radio, it's not really important if you listen half of the time - because it's precisely low density, low quality content.
Classifying an entire medium as "low quality content" is pretty damn shortsighted. You do know that listeners get to choose what podcasts they press "play" on, right?
It's not short-sighted once you consider the large mass of podcasts is composed of people recording themselves speaking without any prior script. Of course it's going to be low density and low quality, just like a chat with friends.
There are exceptions like Serial, but that's what they are: exceptions.
Out of curiosity, can you list me a few of these low quality podcasts? I started getting into them heavily about 10 months ago and I'd label the ones I subscribe to as very high quality. I don't personally equate "unscripted content" with automatically low quality, though. Some high quality podcasts I love right now: Joe Rogan Experience, Here's The Thing (Alec Baldwin), Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
There are exceptions like Serial, but that's what they are: exceptions.
Sure, taken as a whole, most podcasts are terrible, and quality podcasts are rare exceptions. But then again quality books are also, on the whole, a rare exception when you include every self published manuscript floating around somewhere on the internet.
The absolute number of decent podcasts out there have increased massively over the past year or two, and there are easily a dozen podcasts that can match serial in quality and production values and more are coming online all the time.
Personally, I'd say most blog posts are very low quality as well, taken as a whole. Most music is low quality. In 2015, it's not a stretch to say most content is low quality. We're all now responsible for our own curation and filters, which includes where we source from and where we spend time (like HN versus 4chan).
This is totally off-topic and quite irrelevant to anything in this thread but I just realised from your comment that written language is lossy compression for thoughts, sight and sound
There is untold information in our voices when we speak. If you're only doing this for information sure. But have you ever heard a story told better than it ever could be written? Do you remember reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark out loud? Ever wonder why? It's because audio is high def. Text is a stenographer... For stories and personal interviews you are depriving yourself if you choose text over audio.
For information you should continue to read as you were.
Thanks for clearing that up. I was unsure what the previous comment meant, but now I know, thank you for using grammar for its intended purpose: looking superior on the internet.
I used to feel the same way until I realised listening to podcasts was more a passive activity. Reading is active - as in you have to take time away from other things to do it - listening to podcasts is more akin to listening to music.
It's possible to do actively of course, I know there are people out there that listen to music without any interruptions. The primary market for podcasts however are likely to be people who are doing something else and passively listening to them. They may focus in on a subject as it's talked about but a lot of the podcast will only be taken in as a distraction from background noise or silence.
Of course this is all guesswork based on my own opinion and use case, a little of how other podcast listeners I know ingest podcasts too
I guess our differences there come down to the types of podcast we're looking for then. I lean more towards the comedy side of the podcast universe - as in I'm looking for entertainment rather than knowledge.
Not a bad thing on either side of course, just differing use cases.
If you're on an iPhone, Marco Arment's Overcast app has a brilliant Smart Speed function that effectively shortens silences in podcast conversations - combined with an adjustment to the base speed, I find that it approximates speed-reading quite effectively.
To the broader point, there are a lot of instances where an engaged conversation produces fresher insights to my mind than a carefully constructed article. In the entertainment world, it's practically pioneered a new brand of confessional comedy. More to this audience's taste, hearing a founder pitch a product and answer some challenging questions on the a16z podcast is far more interesting to me than any profile I've ever read in Tech Crunch/WSJ/whatever.
As an Android user (Pocket Casts now after years with Doggcatcher), I haven't used Overcast. But from listening to Marco's ATP podcast I understand Overcast can also help control the wide fluctuations in the volume of speech that is a problem in so many podcasts. I could really use that for my daily listening.
That's a great feature too. User controllable audio compression seems to be having a moment. One of my favorite features of the new Apple TV is that there's a universal setting to "reduce loud noises" - great for eliminating jarring booms in action movies and evening out the levels in an overly dynamic orchestra performance. I appreciate dynamics when I'm in a pristine listening setting, but in the real world, I want this feature in all of my gadgets.
Have you tried listening at 2x speed? Takes a little bit of getting used to, but I've found it to be well worth it. This also makes it so I can watch lectures on youtube/coursera/etc (whereas I was never capable of paying any attention to lectures when I was in school, and found them almost unbearable to attend).
Have you found things that don't? I didn't think to mention it because it hasn't been an issue for me in years, it seems to be implemented everywhere, including the default app on iOS, at least if I understand what you're referring to correctly.
Regular mplayer doesn't have tempo scaling, nor did the shitty mp3 player I used to use for podcasts, it simply sped up the audio playback. It is pretty common now though I suppose.
Increased speed really helps with the concentration factor, and brings podcasts much closer to reading speed. I had trouble understanding at first, but using a podcast player with variable speed allowed me to work my way up near 2x through 1.3x, 1.5x, etc.
I'm so used to listening to spoken word at 2x speed these days that it's basically muscle memory for me to hit the options menu in youtube and select 2x. For a while, I was completely boycotting vimeo because they refused to implement a 2x function but then I found a chrome plugin that lets you set the speed of any HTML5 video.
It was a surreal experience hearing the Slate Gabfest live and having it sound completely different to what I was used to because IRL doesn't have a speed control function.
I was slow to get into podcasts as well, but since I have a 1.5 hour commute I eventually became a big fan.
Something key for me was to find podcasts that don't "work better as articles" as you say. There are many tech related podcasts and I find most of them unlistenable.
Instead I found that more entertainment/comedy or seminar-like discussion works better in the podcast format. Maximumfun in particular has a lot of very high quality podcasts (with high production value, which tends to be a big factor in whether a podcast is listenable).
These are just my personal preferences, but one of these might "make sense" to you as a podcast if you give them a chance: The Adventure Zone, International Waters, Judge John Hodgman, My Brother My Brother and Me, The Partially Examined Life, Sawbones, Oh No Ross and Carrie, and of course Serial. For tech podcasts I only really like The Haskell Cast and occasionally a Changelog.
This was the deal for me, too. The only time I can listen to a podcast is when I'm driving -- there's no real eye distraction (IE a phone). I listen to stories/conversations (Roderick on the Line, Reconcilable Differences, Back to Work -- basically anything with Merlin Mann or John Roderick involved makes for great conversations to listen to).
For me it's been the same usage for several years: I only really listen to them on long drives. I don't take long drives very often but when I do, podcasts are by far my preferred thing to listen to.
During the week I have a short commute to work (maybe 15-20 minutes each way) and for 3/4 of the year, when it's not too cold, I ride a motorcycle so listening to anything isn't really an option.
When I'm at work, I've got too much going on and much of it requires me to listen to something else (editing video, etc.) so podcasts or music are again not an option.
But when I have to drive somewhere that takes over an hour? Radio shows like This American Life are the best way to pass the time. Many podcasts follow a similar format where there's a narrative to get lost in and you don't need to deal with radio signals getting weak or hoping it's time for the show you want to hear. About once a year I take a ~9 hour drive to an event out of state and the only thing that keeps me sane is a phone or mp3 player full of podcasts.
Like reading a novel or watching a serial TV show, I can get caught up in the story or discussion and before I know it, another hour has gone by and I'm closer to my destination. Music just becomes background but podcasts give me something to focus on beside the fact that I still have hundreds of miles yet to drive.
Podcasting (which is effectively just "radio" with different technological underpinnings) isn't (in most cases) intended solely to convey information efficiently.
Podcasts are presented as entertainment and performance art, in addition to the ones which are also informational. To say something broad like "podcasts aren't for me" seems like you might be missing out on many opportunities to experience creative storytelling based on some negative experiences you have had with the medium.
Is it impossible to imagine audio-only content you might enjoy? Because for whatever interest you might have, there is certainly a podcast serving that niche, whether it be fiction, non-fiction, drama, music, investigative journalism...
tbh, I'm subscribed to far more than I can ever listen to, and I'm in my car for at least 2 hours a day. Right now, I'm addicted to the ANTIC podcast which features an almost impossible number of interviews with people from all over the early computer industry who experienced working for a fast growth startup, the bust that followed and the hand-off to an unexpected acquirer. It took a few episodes to get going, but it's very addictive now.
I'm pretty much convinced that there's a selection of podcasts for just about any interest. They act as an audio-only companion to my youtube subscriptions...and there's even a bit of overlap between the two communities.
Everything I listen to is very amateur/hobbyist produced (like most youtube videos) and it often shows, but the enthusiasm is often enough to pull me through.
I had completely ignored podcasts until about 3 years ago and started seriously getting into them a couple years ago. I've even got my parents hooked on a couple.
>I listen to a huge assortment of retrocomputing related podcasts
Interesting. I like to dabble a bit in retrocomputing in my free time (mainly older languages, some of which I've used before, others not). Looked at that list of podcasts. A majority seem to be for games, which I'm not much into - I only play a few, sometimes. Only a few, like "retro computing roundtable", seem like they may be about more general computing topics. Do you know if any others are?
Thanks. I'll check out the Amiga ones. Pretty interesting machine, and I'd read earlier, very advanced for its time. IIRC, one of the designers of either the hardware or OS of the Amiga, also later designed the REBOL language - Carl Sassenrath. I've tried out REBOL a bit, and it's interesting, with what seems to be a somewhat different approach from many other languages. It recently got open sourced.
What i love about Podcast Addict is that it lets you listen to the episodes on fast forward. I'm subscribed to 127 podcasts currently and theres no way i can keep up to date with all of them, but the ones i do keep up to date with i can do so by listening to them at 2x speed.
Sometimes i can even get away with listening to them at 3x speed, depending on how fast the host talks.
> Podcasting has been around for about a decade — the term is a reference to the iPod, which older readers will remember as an iPhone that only played music.
Now I'm in the category of "older readers." Lovely.
Podcasting was hard at the time of the iPod ? Seriously ? Isnt't that the other way around, it was hard until iTune made it easy to suscribe to thousands of podcast from a single, unified interface ?
Listening to podcasts was "hard" until you could download over cellular and didn't have to sync up at your computer. So I do think there was friction at the time of the iPod. That's been one of the big changes--plus a greater range of good content.
I'm surprised how little I've seen someone trying to sell pickaxes for the gold rush of podcasting.
I don't know whether that's an indicator of a trend, or whether the domain knowledge just makes such a venture unfeasible, but I'd imagine to see people renting out recording studios and selling bundled podcasting setups with training and the like, if this were such a huge trend.
Both Panoply and Gimlet (two popular podcasting companies) are getting into that business to various degrees. Panoply recently co-produced and co-promoted a podcast with GE while Gimlet seems to be more focused on doing pure "white-label" podcasts where they'll do all the production work, but their name doesn't appear on the final product.
Basically if you are company and want a podcast they'll make it for you (or work with you to make it).
Here in Atlanta http://businessradiox.com/our-studios/ is doing it on a regional scale. They are very knowledgeable in the domain, and they are very active in the local start up scene.
For me podcasts fill a similar niche to TV: something I can passively enjoy without having to focus much while doing unrelated things. The two major differences are that I no longer watch TV and I can listen to podcasts wherever I am.
My biggest problems are that there's too many of them and it's easy to miss the one or two really interesting episodes in a sea of monthly/weekly content. Even more so if you listen to them at 2x speed and rarely have the time to stop and actively pay attention.
It's more of a form of pleasant background noise with the occasional glimpse of really interesting information. Like overhearing a conversation between colleagues.
I really enjoy podcasts at work, and they excel when I am doing boring repetitive work. I do however wish that there would be a better place for Podcast discovery than ITunes.
I paid for Overcast by Marco Arment on iOS and it's pretty good at recommendation (uses Twitter). He's since made it free (!) so you should check it out if you run an iDevice.
I'm surprised the article makes no mention of Adam Carola's podcast. Possibly due to some of the controversial remarks made by Carola on the show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adam_Carolla_Show_%28podca.... I'm not a fan, but if you're mentioning Serial and WTF, Carola's podcast is right up there as far as numbers go, and was involved early on in monetising his podcast with adverts etc.
Indeed. Always look at the URL before reading an article to understand the environment in which it was written. There's lots of websites out there with agendas - some more blatant than others.
I don't have much time to read but I do have a lot of time to listen, usually while I'm doing housework or travelling, so I'm subscribed to a lot of podcasts and YouTube channels. When a YouTube channel has something new that looks interesting, I download the video, convert it to an MP3 and add it to my collection. When I come across a book I want to know more about, I look up the author's name on YouTube to see if there's an interview with them. That usually presents the main ideas of the book without having to read it. I download the video, convert it then subscribe to that channel if it has other videos I'm interested in too.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadIs it ahead of where it was then?
Exactly the name I think of when I hear the word 'podcasting', and I'm surprised to see no mention of him in the article. In fact, I'm a regular podcast listener and I recognized few of the names in this piece, which was confusing to say the least.
If you're a Carlin fan, you definitely need to listen to Mike Duncan's podcasts - History of Rome and Revolutions. I'm also a fan of Skeptoid and Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. For lighter stuff, I enjoy Bill Burr's Monday Morning Podcast and Nerdist.
Literally, if it isn't something I can subscribe to in Youtube, or add it to my queue in Netflix, eventually it just gets lost and falls out of my entertainment workflow.
That's a bit of a contradiction.
Dan carlin's podcasts hardcore history[1] and common sense [2] both get uploaded to youtube whenever a new episode comes out. Both excellent podcasts as well.
I'm sure it's not very common however.
Oh, i also might as well mention that you can have itunes download your podcasts and put them in your plex media server or kodi server.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/user/dancarlinpodcaster [2]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3As7170z7TsHZ7-ShaRe1A
Surely someone can make a service that takes a podcast feed and packages it with different adverts for different markets and then creates new feeds.
I'd make it but the scaling sales end is not something I know how to do.
I suppose it depends how Apple interprets the feed as I assume Apple devices are the most used for podcast consumption.
I find the advertising inside podcasts also particularly annoying. You can't ignore them by looking away like you would on a screen.
Maybe we need an adblock for podcasts (even if it will be difficult to automize -> some manual stripping of the parts where they are promoting stuff)
Crowdsourcing? See if a lot of people skip over certain fragments of an episode and mark it as "advertisement". Granted, this requires some level of cooperation from podcast player applications.
Really? Most podcast apps replace the skip buttons with "jump forward/back 15/30 sec". Hitting a button twice is too much effort in exchange for getting content for free?
Thanks, but no sale.
Maybe you're just not the target market for ad-funded podcasts.
It would remove pre-recorded/repeated ads in the middle (assuming that's what cutaway means), but wouldn't be able to remove live reads. It would also remove intros/exits.
Without manual validation, it probably wouldn't be a good model for identifying and removing ads from podcasts, especially using a "repeated in multiple podcasts" model, which doesn't start with known ads.
Get headphones with forward/back buttons on them. As soon as the ads start it's one or two quick taps on a button by my neck and I'm back to the podcast.
This is the reason why you just cannot create dynamic ads if you want to stick to the standard RSS+client approach (like iTunes).
Some of the podcasters have started actually building their own native apps to have better control of the content they emit, but it comes with reduced visibility. This is why most of podcasters still release their stuff through iTunes, but invite the listeners to download their app.
As far as cached mp3s that are already downloaded, I don't see why that should have a huge impact on ads. The most important episode for advertising purposes is probably the most recent episode, and if someone pulls an archived mp3 that should have the new ads too. As for already-downloaded, cached mp3s you just gotta let those go.
Luckily with the podcasts I'm subscribed to most of the sponsors tend to be relevant to the actual shows. The only irrelevant sponsor I recall is Ting (a Canada-based US mobile provider I think).
I'm not too bothered with these, as compared with the type of adverts you'd find on commercial television or radio, they're not that annoying and usually relevant to the podcast subject matter. If they started playing multiple irrelevant adverts back to back, with accompanying audio compression, then I'd be upset about it.
Podcasts aren't expensive to produce at a basic level, it's mostly just the hosts sitting around and chatting on skype for an hour every week or two. I'm only aware of one podcast I listen to that frequently asks for contributions, and that's mostly because the hosts have found they work best when they're physically co-present and have to fly one of the hosts out every month to record a bunch of shows all at once.
> I'm not too bothered with these, as compared with the type of adverts you'd find on commercial television or radio
Yeah, I agree. When the parent discussed adverts before I was thinking of the more commercial radio type. I think it's an effort to try to monetize podcast audiences, but at least for me I'm able to find more content than I can listen to, run by hosts that aren't all that interested in turning their hobby into a money making venture.
I just skip the first 2-5 minutes of most podcasts and the last 1-3 minutes and pray they don't have ads in the middle.
I've personally thought about a paid platform where users subscribe to the podcasts they like best and get the perk of avoiding ads since they're contributing to the podcasts creators
A friend and I have launched a podcast publishing platform, batteries included, called Podigee (https://www.podigee.com).
The backend runs on Rails + PostgreSQL, the frontend is a mix of Rails and AngularJS. Also, we run dedicated download / stream servers with some nice Lua scripts for caching the files and reducing overall costs for AWS S3 traffic.
The nicest feature is that once you upload an audio file, we will apply some good audio algorithms to it, encode it to different audio formats, and expose it automatically in your RSS feed.
Again in Rails, all running on AWS.
On bikes, at least where I live, using headphones is illegal. I'd love to listen to music or podcasts on my bike but I just can't do it with only one ear covered. It's probably not advisable anyways.
Interestingly, it is legal to ride a bike or even drive a car while deaf. It would be illegal for a deaf person to cover both ears while driving or biking if I'm reading the statutes correctly.
I work in DC, so DC and / or Federal law would also be relevant. I believe the distracted driving statutes in DC would also apply to bikes, so headphones would fall under that I believe.
DC, VA, and MD also have contributory negligence. You can read more about that here:
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/24312/what-is-contr...
TL;DR you can receive no damages if you break the law in any tiny way while on a bicycle or on foot. Wearing headphones might be said to have contributed in some way, so you might get nothing.
In DC cops occasionally like to sit in the 15th Street Cycletrack and write tickets for running red lights. I'm sure if they found any violation of the law, they would also throw in another ticket.
For those not aware, 15th St. abuts the White House and, because of the many roads that are permanently blocked off, it is not possible for there to be car / bike conflicts for a stretch of this street from New York Avenue to the Ellipse where the bike lanes end (though bike / pedestrian conflicts can happen), except with emergency vehicles and the like. The markings on the road make it unclear whether or not bikes must stop at red lights or just when pedestrians are present.
Because of this, the vast majority of cyclists on this stretch of road ignore red lights and treat them as yields since it is perfectly safe to do so. You will almost never see any bike stopped unless there are pedestrians crossing the street or the bike is turning.
As for why you rarely see traffic enforcement, at least in DC there is no traffic enforcement division. Virginia has traffic enforcement (don't go over 80 MPH in Virginia on any road; it is automatically reckless driving, which is a misdemeanor. This applies even if the speed limit were 79 MPH).
Even without traffic enforcement of any kind, contributory negligence makes wearing headphones risky from a liability standpoint. Any minor law violation or safety hazard by a bicyclist can be used as a defense by a driver in court and end up with no damages awarded.
The saner comparative negligence standard does not apply in DC, MD, or VA.
I've just been hit by a car (I was completely uninjured) and I know people nailed for Virginia's reckless driving law (which can send you to jail).
Why do you view it as an alternative to reading, rather than a compliment?
I also find them much better for interviews and the like than text, you get a lot of information out of the tone people use, which is lost when it's committed to text.
They are great for that because, just like the Radio, it's not really important if you listen half of the time - because it's precisely low density, low quality content.
There are exceptions like Serial, but that's what they are: exceptions.
Sure, taken as a whole, most podcasts are terrible, and quality podcasts are rare exceptions. But then again quality books are also, on the whole, a rare exception when you include every self published manuscript floating around somewhere on the internet.
The absolute number of decent podcasts out there have increased massively over the past year or two, and there are easily a dozen podcasts that can match serial in quality and production values and more are coming online all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
People have been known to enjoy both the Game of Thrones books and the television series.
You could transcribe a Louis C.K. hour long show and read it in 15 minutes, but you would lose a lot.
For information you should continue to read as you were.
You mean a complement ?
It's possible to do actively of course, I know there are people out there that listen to music without any interruptions. The primary market for podcasts however are likely to be people who are doing something else and passively listening to them. They may focus in on a subject as it's talked about but a lot of the podcast will only be taken in as a distraction from background noise or silence.
Of course this is all guesswork based on my own opinion and use case, a little of how other podcast listeners I know ingest podcasts too
If I just let a podcast play on the backgrond, I'll certainly learn nothing at all from it.
Not a bad thing on either side of course, just differing use cases.
You can surely learn more by reading lyrics to a song than by listening to it - does that make music a lesser medium than writing?
Part of it is also just an addiction factor, I basically can't walk at this point without putting something in my ears.
To the broader point, there are a lot of instances where an engaged conversation produces fresher insights to my mind than a carefully constructed article. In the entertainment world, it's practically pioneered a new brand of confessional comedy. More to this audience's taste, hearing a founder pitch a product and answer some challenging questions on the a16z podcast is far more interesting to me than any profile I've ever read in Tech Crunch/WSJ/whatever.
It was a surreal experience hearing the Slate Gabfest live and having it sound completely different to what I was used to because IRL doesn't have a speed control function.
Something key for me was to find podcasts that don't "work better as articles" as you say. There are many tech related podcasts and I find most of them unlistenable.
Instead I found that more entertainment/comedy or seminar-like discussion works better in the podcast format. Maximumfun in particular has a lot of very high quality podcasts (with high production value, which tends to be a big factor in whether a podcast is listenable).
These are just my personal preferences, but one of these might "make sense" to you as a podcast if you give them a chance: The Adventure Zone, International Waters, Judge John Hodgman, My Brother My Brother and Me, The Partially Examined Life, Sawbones, Oh No Ross and Carrie, and of course Serial. For tech podcasts I only really like The Haskell Cast and occasionally a Changelog.
During the week I have a short commute to work (maybe 15-20 minutes each way) and for 3/4 of the year, when it's not too cold, I ride a motorcycle so listening to anything isn't really an option.
When I'm at work, I've got too much going on and much of it requires me to listen to something else (editing video, etc.) so podcasts or music are again not an option.
But when I have to drive somewhere that takes over an hour? Radio shows like This American Life are the best way to pass the time. Many podcasts follow a similar format where there's a narrative to get lost in and you don't need to deal with radio signals getting weak or hoping it's time for the show you want to hear. About once a year I take a ~9 hour drive to an event out of state and the only thing that keeps me sane is a phone or mp3 player full of podcasts.
Like reading a novel or watching a serial TV show, I can get caught up in the story or discussion and before I know it, another hour has gone by and I'm closer to my destination. Music just becomes background but podcasts give me something to focus on beside the fact that I still have hundreds of miles yet to drive.
Podcasts are presented as entertainment and performance art, in addition to the ones which are also informational. To say something broad like "podcasts aren't for me" seems like you might be missing out on many opportunities to experience creative storytelling based on some negative experiences you have had with the medium.
Is it impossible to imagine audio-only content you might enjoy? Because for whatever interest you might have, there is certainly a podcast serving that niche, whether it be fiction, non-fiction, drama, music, investigative journalism...
tbh, I'm subscribed to far more than I can ever listen to, and I'm in my car for at least 2 hours a day. Right now, I'm addicted to the ANTIC podcast which features an almost impossible number of interviews with people from all over the early computer industry who experienced working for a fast growth startup, the bust that followed and the hand-off to an unexpected acquirer. It took a few episodes to get going, but it's very addictive now.
I'm pretty much convinced that there's a selection of podcasts for just about any interest. They act as an audio-only companion to my youtube subscriptions...and there's even a bit of overlap between the two communities.
Everything I listen to is very amateur/hobbyist produced (like most youtube videos) and it often shows, but the enthusiasm is often enough to pull me through.
I had completely ignored podcasts until about 3 years ago and started seriously getting into them a couple years ago. I've even got my parents hooked on a couple.
Interesting. I like to dabble a bit in retrocomputing in my free time (mainly older languages, some of which I've used before, others not). Looked at that list of podcasts. A majority seem to be for games, which I'm not much into - I only play a few, sometimes. Only a few, like "retro computing roundtable", seem like they may be about more general computing topics. Do you know if any others are?
I believe they've even had a couple episodes reviewing the different dialects of BASIC available for the Atari 8-bit computer platform.
AMICast is a relatively recent show with not many episodes, but it's about the Amiga from a very European perspective.
I'd love to know more as well.
Sometimes i can even get away with listening to them at 3x speed, depending on how fast the host talks.
> Podcasting has been around for about a decade — the term is a reference to the iPod, which older readers will remember as an iPhone that only played music.
Now I'm in the category of "older readers." Lovely.
My brother is 18 and he would probably be 'one of the last' to use a scroll-wheel iPod.
Vox has short memory.
I don't know whether that's an indicator of a trend, or whether the domain knowledge just makes such a venture unfeasible, but I'd imagine to see people renting out recording studios and selling bundled podcasting setups with training and the like, if this were such a huge trend.
Is anyone currently doing this?
Basically if you are company and want a podcast they'll make it for you (or work with you to make it).
Also I have been working on this https://www.chirbit.com/ on the distribution/consumer side.
My biggest problems are that there's too many of them and it's easy to miss the one or two really interesting episodes in a sea of monthly/weekly content. Even more so if you listen to them at 2x speed and rarely have the time to stop and actively pay attention.
It's more of a form of pleasant background noise with the occasional glimpse of really interesting information. Like overhearing a conversation between colleagues.
HN is a great discovery service, as is Facebook.
Email me if you wanna know the podcast my fiancé and I look forward to most each week! :)