If you're just looking to find podcasts to listen to that are new to you, I'd say word of mouth. For example, ask your friends and colleagues. Or ask around on Twitter, Reddit, HN, etc. Or search for conversations where people have shared recommendations.
Seemingly everywhere? When i search an existing podcast or even just a subject in my podcast app it typically suggests no less than 30 podcasts to me, most of which i have never heard of. I have found new ones that are quite good, as well as some stinkers and duds. Hard to believe it is that hard to find something vaguely interesting if you have used a modicum of effort.
yeah, i should have been more explicit -- i want not only new-to-me podcasts, but actually-new/newly-created podcasts -- as in podcasts that were created in the last day, week, month, year, etc.
but after all my searching, there are no new-to-me pods, unless i just can't find the newly-created pods, which is very possible, even likely.
Ah my mistake. Maybe the answer lies in combining podcast searches with filtering options within your app? I've recently started using filters on my searches in various applications/file systems/etc and it has really improved my UX across the board. Switching from "sort by relevance" to "newest first" might be the move. I've also had a bit of luck trying out podcasts outside of my normal areas of interest.
My trick with podcasts (as with books and other content) is to be interest driven, and to seek out podcasts which address my interests.
That might be searching for specific podcasts within a topic area, specific creators, or (and most usefully) searching by episode for a specific topic or interview subject.
Occasionally there will be references within one podcast to another which I find useful as well, though ... this occurs far less often than such promotions are presented, most especially those which are commercial promotions rather than the more-organic spontaneous mentions of a host or guest. (Many of these are of course not entirely spontaneous, the best however are.)
I've had a few good experiences with referrals from other people online, which may be how I came across the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast (absolutely excellent). Several other "History of..." series have mutually recommended one another, notably of Rome, Byzantium, and China. You're Not So Smart being another.
Podcasts based on programmes I've known elsewhere (usually radio series) are also a source: CBC Ideas, On the Media, This American Life, and a few others. These ... can be good, though I'm finding some make the pod transition less gracefully than one might hope.
Good podcast search tools are another challenge. The Podcast Republic app has a search over all episodes known to it. I don't use Apple iTunes, though suspect it may as well. There are a few Web-based podcast search sites, most have proved disappointing and/or annoying, and the most comprehensive one I've found has been throwing up CAPTCHAs incessantly, which rather entirely makes it useless. I believe that's ListenNotes.
I'd really love to see a good podcast search option under DuckDuckGo, hint, hint...
I work in the podcast industry. Anchor made it easy and free for people to start podcasting, so tons of people tried it during lockdowns. But podcasts are a lot of work beyond just having a place to host: from recording, finding guests, editing, marketing, etc. So you have a lot of beginners who drop off.
It's more than that, though. I own a podcast hosting service that Apple lists on their page of recommended services. Fewer people were starting podcasts in 2021 and 2022 than they were in 2019 and 2018 (it's hard to say before then, because my business has grown). The world, on the whole, lost a lot of interest in podcasting.
Part of that is a lack of a focus on podcasting. Serial drove a lot of interest, and that momentum faded with no obvious replacement. Podcasts were something folks made time for on their commutes and during their workouts. When folks started working from home en masse, they had less and less reason to listen.
Listenership fell for shows that have remained consistent. Some of my biggest customers have half or less than the number of listens they were pulling per week in 2019. And that's without changing cadence.
> The world, on the whole, lost a lot of interest in podcasting.
Your customers' data may reflect that, but industry data shows that podcasting is still growing steadily. In their more recent (2022) report, Edison Research notes, "Monthly podcast listening saw growth year-over-year among those age 35-54, as 43% are now monthly podcast listeners, up from 39% in 2021."
> Some of my biggest customers have half or less than the number of listens they were pulling per week in 2019.
Shows fail. There are countless podcasts whose listens have grown substantially since 2019.
I believe the data in the article, but a less clickbaity way to frame it is that podcast creation rates have returned to normal after an unprecedented pandemic pop.
> 43% are now monthly podcast listeners, up from 39% in 2021
The number of people listening isn't a proxy for _how much_ they are listening. Nor is the number of times they listen per month. What matters is the number of hours listened.
It's also the case that with more shows, there's a dilution of listeners' time. There's a pretty firm cap on the number of hours of podcasts that people can listen to. It's easy for folks to dig their heels in on one or two favorite shows and stop listening to the rest of the ones they had previously been interested in.
> There are countless podcasts whose listens have grown substantially since 2019.
And there are countless more podcasts whose listenerships have shrunk substantially since 2019.
>Listenership fell for shows that have remained consistent. Some of my biggest customers have half or less than the number of listens they were pulling per week in 2019. And that's without changing cadence.
Do you think QCode has a viable business model? Producing scripted podcasts that are designed to be trial runs for TV shows/films?
I am not an expert on that side of the industry, but I'll say that there's good reason to believe their business model is viable. People subscribe and unsubscribe from streaming services (Netflix, HBO, etc.) as they find shows they're interested in or when content they care about wanes. I've subscribed to CBS for Star Trek and canceled after the season ends.
There's no reason to assume podcasting would behave differently: if there's compelling content, people will go out of their way to consume it. The trick is making audio that people will want to listen to.
This is insightful. I used to listen to several hours of podcasts a day, but it was mostly while commuting and at the gym. When I switched to remote work and outdoor runs during the pandemic, I fell out of the habit, and I haven't listened to one in months.
I wonder how they count this? I use overcast app. It automatically downloads episodes of anything I’m subscribed to. But I migh not listen to it. Or I might listen to five minutes and delete. What level of truth do these podcast stats catch?
The IAB publishes guidelines for how downloads are counted as listens. If you download but don't listen, it still counts as a listen. The relative changes to listenership matter a lot more than every one of the downloads being a real, legitimate listen.
I've lost interest in podcasts recently because it feels like the same people are just round-robining from host to host. It's all the same people.. Huberman feels like a lab manufactured podcast meme machine, even the high profile podcasters like Tim Ferris seem to have the same guests as everyone else.
Is it important for podcasts to have guests? Are podcasts that provide insight or discussion or deep dives into ideas without guests not as valuable as ones with guests? Do you primarily seek out podcasts that have guests?
Isn’t that like, an extremely narrow subset of podcasts you’re talking about? Like basically just the longevity+psychedelics+stand-up comedy podcast circle? I don’t see any of those guests on my movie and TV podcasts, for instance.
I'd say incestuous circle of brand-boosting than a pyramid scheme. The same 10 LA-based people go on the other 9 people's podcasts right when they've got some show or TV special to promote.
I was in that podcast circle, and honestly, it's just exhausting. They have to keep pumping new information at you and I eventually ended up doing nothing but being depressed at how much I was supposed to change about my life.
I haven't had interest in podcasts beyond the few occasions I've tried, because I consistently got the sense that a podcast was made in the interest of the creator (as something "low effort"), instead of me as a listener.
It feels like an obligatory side income stream for every "creator" out there, one that only requires them to turn up in front of a microphone and banter once a week. The signal to noise ratio is way off. I don't want to start of with 15 minutes about how the creator's week was.
Nowadays I realise that there are podcasts that are actual "productions" (educational or otherwise), which I would enjoy a lot more. I'm probably missing out on a whole medium. But I haven't come across that many yet.
I used to have high expectations for podcasts and YT. Though I've come to appreciate having any content in niches that will never sustain full time production values. And even the quirky and awkward hosts have grown on me.
Think of it like replacing niche, once local-only radio programs. Those too aren't very high production because of resource and time constraints. It won't please everyone and doesn't have to.
You likely know of Lex Fridman and many of his older podcasts really interview people you might not normally see in the "mainstream". Many of those people were especially leaning towards CS and would likely appeal to you, my fellow HNer :)
It probably depends very much on the sort of podcasts you're listening to. I haven't noticed that (most of the podcasts I listen to don't have guests, for a start), but then I've never even _heard_ of Huberman or Tim Ferris.
There was definitely a fad over the pandemic of people hosting their own podcasts. Multiple people I know started doing it. Super nice people, but they didn’t offer particularly insightful opinions or have great guests. It seemed like a fun thing for a group of friends to do, but I’m not surprised that podcast creation is slowing down.
If podcasts are like blogs, they will need a crazy amount of time and energy to get off the ground and that’s why we don’t see so many blogs any more. Discoverability is too hard for most individuals to even try for now
I was shocked at how much I needed to have in place to record, to get listed on the major players (and Google took DAYS to publish my show but Spotify and Apple did it within hours).
Yeah. I remember when podcasts first came out (before they were even called podcasts in the iTunes Store.) It was super easy to be discovered because there was so few things out there, and most of them were junk.
yep. If one could solve the discoverability problem for podcasts they'd make a mint.
The problems, as I see them:
- must be resistant to gaming. Many of the really popular podcasts are backed by marketing money, many of the best ones are buried
- must be able to account heavily for taste. I really love midst, magic tavern, darknet, zzyx (RIP), night vale. Lots of people aren't into fiction so the system would have to have market segmentation built in. like a music app recommendation engine.
- should provide mechanisms to link to other stuff for the podcast. A huge part of the problem for the podcasters is the friction there is to give them money. This is mostly solved by podcast metadata but any good tool needs to display these properly.
as it is, current podcast recommendation algorithms miss tons of good content. There should be more than enough data on me to recommend a lot of stuff that I've had to hunt down Internet 1.0 style by googling and reading blogs.
I wonder if an embedded cbatgpt like system could offer such a recommendation engine on demand for different sorts of media. It wouldn’t ever be the best recommendations of all time, but it might be able to handle scale better than humans. Eg, to get something YouTube algorithm like for other services like podcast apps
Podcasts are no different than any digital medium. I can create a podcast, a blog, a YT channel, a Twitter feed with a few clicks. Record on my phone. Even plug into ad networks. But getting an audience is still really, really hard.
I can second that. I started a podcast almost 10 years ago with some friends. The guy who ran the site had analytics on everything. Each episode got maybe 100 downloads, but despite soliciting comments, only about 3 other people that we didn't know listened. It ultimately felt like a job, and I was putting too much effort into it and getting too little out of it. The format and topics on the show eventually felt long in the tooth, and I stopped in late 2019. If I figure out a plan to address those problems, I might start it again.
A personal story about podcasts is that I usually listen to them during my commute. That means my podcast consumption went way down when the pandemic happened and I started mainly working remotely. I just don't have a defined suitable time for them anymore.
A few weeks ago I was sick and I put on some podcasts as I was resting. Made me realize how much I miss the content.
I wonder how much the radio/podcast industry is reliant on car radios and such.
I would recommend replacing the commute with a walk every day, get a little bit of exercise, clear your mind, and optionally listen to those podcasts again.
I walk to the office now and run back. Solves the can’t shower at the office issue too as walking won’t make me all sweaty even if I walk fast. The time I lose compared to the subway is just 15min and I arrive alert and sometimes had a really good idea already that I can pounce on as soon as I get there.
I also hope the high amount of Zone one Training I get for free will help my ultra running but I would still do it just for lifestyle reasons.
I just started releasing episodes I recorded the past 3 months. I am excited to finally get some personal interests out there for the world to enjoy! ListenNotes microfeed tool was slick to setup and use to publish. I've had a lot of fun learning everything it takes to make a show.
Of particular interest to this crowd E1 with Ange Yaghi & Engine Simulator just released last Wednesday and we talk about it going viral along with some of the technical details.
Considering what happened in 2020, I'll submit that a comparison of 2020 and 2022 doesn't necessarily tell us much about podcasting, per se. At least show me 2019, too, and then we can start hypothesizing.
I wanted to like podcasts, but never found one that wasn't either incredibly boring or incredibly grating to listen to.
Maybe I'm not the target audience, but I'm rarely if ever interested in the speaker of whatever information I'm trying to consume, and podcasts' focus on guests (and hosts) always came off as self-aggrandizing and people speaking just to hear themselves speak. Especially with very little editing (uhs, pauses, and general dysfluency) and/or preparation (winding conversations with a lot of fluff instead of a structured outline), I'd almost always just prefer to listen to a narrated book or textbook on whatever topic I'm interested in.
I think different formats have different propensities.
Your problems with podcasts appear more related to propensity than inherent format issues - that is, books too can come off as self aggrandizing, fluff and winding, but you have found mode examples that don't do this perhaps?
Perhaps one thing inherent to podcasts vs books is that you can simply skip sections and skim past the content you find not worth your time, where podcasts are harder to do this without missing your spot, etc.
Podcasts like 99% invisible I find hit the right balance, but again, definitely have more emphasis on interviews than pure factual info compared to books. But I think that's kind of normal, as podcasts do suit discussion and interviews better than a more straight facts approach.
Still, I feel the points you've listed, while valid, are not always the case and like most mediums, you can find examples that would suit your style.
It works if the guest is discussing a topic that interests you and the information cannot be readily found elsewhere, because it's his unique story or perspective.
I was like this until I found the NPR Planet Money podcast. I am not 100% sure why I found this so engaging but here are my guesses:
1. They cover a subject I was interested in (economics), but knew basically nothing about. This made it easier to listen to as I found I didn't space out when they were talking about things I already knew.
2. Nice, tight editing and good production. No hosts blathering on for hours - they keep it short and to the point. Most episodes are 20 minutes and easy to get through.
I used to listen to Planet Money, but it’s devolved over the same dumbed-down drivel that dominates NPR these days:
“Money has always been used to buy goods, but did you know you can also use it to buy services? Here’s some pop culture reference comparison to fake a narrative.”
I think the show started suffering when NPR turned every show into a podcast; it removes the ability to cater to a more focused audience because you have to waste half the show doing background.
I think that's a bit unfair - I think they're taking a very dry, boring subject and trying to make it engaging and interesting to a wider audience. They are sometimes going to err on the side of too generic, but most of the actual stories are still quite interesting, at least to me, who is coming into economic stuff very late in life and has very little grounding.
Podcasts are not a good format for consuming serious information, at least in my experience. Neither are audiobooks. The problem with podcasts is they are light on real content and if it's on a technical topic and the format is having a guest be interviewed on it, the quality of information depends on the quality of questions and most people are not good at coming up interesting questions on unfamiliar topics on the spot. So you get very superficial questions and equally superficial answers. But podcasts are great for entertainment and zoning out. And for lonely people it's great to hear people talking. Darknet diaries is a good one though I don't listen consistently
I disagree, though it depends on the circumstances in which you're consuming them. If you're listening while you're doing something that is mentally engaging then of course it will be hard to absorb the information. But I'm not exactly taxing my brain when I'm walking my dog or sitting on the porch drinking coffee.
Heartily disagree. A lot of professional journalist-led podcasts are really excellent. And the audio format is concise without being distracting. It's basically the on-demand version of classic talk radio. I crow a lot about On the Media which is fantastic journalism. There's loads of other similar content that varies from topical to human interest. Stuff like This American Life or Radiolab or How I Built This or Planet Money or more niche stuff like Cyberlaw. Kara Swisher is great too.
I quite enjoyed Swindled. Not exactly on the lighter side, but usually stories I’ve never heard of before. With the type of research and structure you mentioned.
I noticed that I like podcasts just how I like blogs. Even if it's objectively great (as decided by the masses), I probably don't like it and can't stand listening to it for long. But if I stumble upon something I like to read or listen to, then I'll follow that blog/podcast for many years. I would in general even go so far as saying that listening to people talking is not my medium of choice (I also don't like audio books) - but I'd say I'm actually a fan of a select of few ones.
My favorite podcasts are science Friday or stuff I’d hear on public radio for a short bit while driving.
One-off interview podcasts can be good if looking more into a specific person but in general many podcasts seem like/wanna be a cult of personality
Interestingly, these are exactly the traits that make podcasts appealing to me.
It's fun to hear people talking about what they're interested in, or I get to hear people's personal experiences on a subject I care about (entrepreneurship, neurodivergence, software development). I'm here less for structured content than to expand my perspective on general experience and challenges of being in a given situation.
For what it's worth, there are also lots of other formats besides "two dudes/dudettes talking": scripted drama, documentary, unscripted/situational comedy. I even listen to a guy critique classic computer science research papers.
The Eric Normand Podcast, previously titled Thoughts on Functional Programming. Despite the name, he also dives into e.g., some classic OOP material too, as well as general programming paradigm commentary.
"In this first episode of season 3, we analyze a great paper called Lisp: A language for stratified design. The paper asks the question "What is Lisp good for?"
For me, the lack of editing, scripting and structure is exactly what I find refreshing about podcasts. They feel more natural, more flawed, more raw, but therefore also more honest and more human.
But to each their own. Not saying there's anything wrong at all with disliking podcasts for exactly these reasons, they're just not for everyone I suppose.
There is a limit to "natural". If the hosts even slightly stay on topic, a few umms and aahs don't bother me.
But when I start listening to something titled "X & Y talk about Z" and they tangent off to A, B and C. I just stop listening.
My pet peeve is shows that have interviews with people and preface it with 30 minutes of "banter" that doesn't interest anyone who hasn't listened to the previous 420 episodes.
Just have one episode with the catch-up part and one with just the interview, please.
> My pet peeve is shows that have interviews with people and preface it with 30 minutes of "banter" that doesn't interest anyone who hasn't listened to the previous 420 episodes.
Repeat listeners are most podcast producers' bread and butter, and those listeners tend to be invested in the hosts, and typically enjoy the banter.
It's sort of the reverse of radio. In a radio show you want to pander to the widest audience - every show must stand alone and can't rely on the audience's familiarity with the host or past content. In a podcast there's no one tuning in at random because it's something interesting that's "on" at the time that they happen to be listening, so podcasters get by from cultivating and pandering to a dedicated fanbase, who then tend to enjoy content that benefits from a deep familiarity with the show.
It sounds like you'd most enjoy "podcasts" that are really recordings of radio shows (99% Invisible, the many NPR podcasts etc).
Not all podcasts do that, though. I listen to about ten podcasts fairly regularly; one ("Behind the Bastards") has regular guests, though their purpose is largely to have someone for the host to tell a story to, two ("The Rest is History" and "The Rest is Politics") have occasional expert guests, on perhaps 10% of episodes, the remainder don't have guests at all.
I don't listen to off the cuff podcasts at all. I used to listen to Tank Riot, for example. They had really interesting topics. But then it devolved into "we haven't seen each other for a month, so let's catch up while we're recording" and they got into endless unrelated tangents.
My current list is only well-edited and produced stuff
- No Such Thing as a Fish (facts, trivia, comedy)
- 20kHz - audio production and sounds in general
- 99 Percent Invisible - random trivia and deep-dives
- More or Less - analysing statistics
- Cautionary Tales - historical failures, they have actual radio play style stuff with actual name actors (Helena Bonham-Carter for example)
And stuff I listen to on the background and usually fall asleep to:
- Crowd Science - people as questions about science and the host interviews people who know about it
- Every Little Thing - More random trivia stuff
- 30 Animals that Made us Smarter - exactly what it says on the tin
My tolerance for "let's turn on the mic and chat for three hours without any plan and publish it as a podcast" is pretty close to zero.
- In Our Time (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl) - nearly 1,000 episodes since the late 90s, covering history, science and literature. Different expert panel every week with some amazing reoccurring guests (Ian Stewart, Martin Palmer, Mary Beard, Angie Hobbs, Paul Cartledge, Caroline Crawford).
Revolutions podcast was too in-depth for me (think, hundreds of episodes for each revolution). But I've been listening to his podcast-closing appendix (12 appendix episodes, that tells you something about being verbose), and it's fun :)
Now wondering what the boundary between "BBC radio programme on Sounds" and "podcast" is. Could the BBC have been said to invent the "podcast" format with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_America ? (2,869 episodes! "The series ran from 24 March 1946 to 20 February 2004, making it the longest-running speech radio programme hosted by one individual")
(Very strictly, a podcast requires an RSS feed and the ability to download to an iPod, but those criteria have been eroded to "any audio programme that is not on the radio")
> Now wondering what the boundary between "BBC radio programme on Sounds" and "podcast" is.
This thread is teaching me that people would even draw a boundary there at all. It's clear from the people posting here that many really think of podcasts as "couple of guys sitting around shooting the shit", but there's a hell of a lot out there outside of this one genre.
It's a bit "I tried a bunch of science fiction books, but I didn't like them so reading isn't for me."
BBC Radio podcasts are not representative of podcasts, nor is it the reference point for most people that start one. Those people very likely have the image of two friends shooting the shit in front of a mic.
I find Fall of Civilizations lacking. It often lacks structure, few sources are cited (though I don't doubt the author's seriousness) and few points are made. I much more prefer Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, even if it is based on a kind of long storytelling.
There are a few podcasts that turn on the mic and chat, yet where the hosts also make an effort to reach out to new guests. For example: episodes of The Amp Hour that aren't just Chris and Dave pull in people from all over the industry. The thing is, I suspect that is difficult to do when you are are small podcast. Without the reach, potential guests simply don't know who you are.
Over the years I have adopted almost this same rubric. The way I describe my filter is "two people read wikipedia to you for an hour".
I have 2 of the ones on your list: 99PI and Cautionary Tales and I notice that they are both publish about the ~30 minutes episodes once per week. I think all these podcasts that are 60-120 minutes > 2 times per week are really just replacing talk radio on people's long commutes. It's just a pleasant way to fill the air, not to actually learn anything.
Exactly, there's no way you can produce 2+ 2 hour podcasts a week without them being a rambling mess - or you have dedicated script writers and editors and the one reading them is just the voice of other people's text.
Any podcast should be prepared and scripted to some extent, especially shorter ones. Especially good political comment/talk shows. Unprepared 15-minutes interview podcasts are just as annoying to me as very long one.
This relies on the moderator / podcaster to have sufficient time / manpower to prepare, or sufficient authority to convince guests not to come without any serious preparations.
On the opposite, there's a podcast from the German Newspaper Die Zeit that has made the long rambling its concept. It's called "Alles gesagt?" and consists in a usually unedited interview with two journalists. The interview (in English or German) stops when the guest considers he has nothing more to say or pronounces a magic word. Yuval Noah Harari's interview lasted 10 hours IIRC. It's decently prepared, but that's not the kind of podcast you can listen to regularly.
These are good, maybe similar, and have high frequency of very interesting episodes:
- People I mostly Admire (Steven Levitt/Freakonomics Radio)
- The joy of X (Steven Strogatz, discontinued)
Both are in the style that the host talks with an interesting guest about their work. Coincidence has it that in the most recent episode of PIMA, the guest is the host of the other one, Steven Strogatz. They normally don't collaborate but have their similarities.
I listen to podcasts that take a lot of production. One favorite of mine is "American History Tellers." It is well edited and tightly scripted and thoroughly researched.
Check out a big podcast producer like Wondery. They approach podcasts with production and professionalism. It takes a team to produce a good podcast.
If a professional podcast is like network TV, the podcasts you're describing are like the old public access channel on cable. They're both the same medium, sure, but they're in different leagues entirely. I don't listen to the podcasts with a random person with a mic chatting about what he thinks is interesting; that would indeed be boring and a waste of time.
I could not get into podcasts until I started listening at 1.5x. That changed everything for me, the information density was finally high enough that they were worth listening to, and over time I upped the speed to 2.5x (mostly). Also I’ve started listening audiobooks faster (though not as fast), and that has greatly increased my consumption of audiobooks, even when measured in hours listened.
If you’ve not tried it I would heartily recommend it - I really didn’t think it would matter before I tried it.
It would be so cool in the future if AI could predict which parts are harder to understand and which parts are fluff and dynamically adjust the speed for you.
I’d love 50% speed for tough concepts but 300% for the banter and their dumb stories.
Maybe a product idea actually? Feel free to run with it.
I've begun doing this as well. Also, as soon as one of the guests makes some off-topic joke and I sense that there is going to be some banter before they get back to the point I just hit the fast-forward-30-seconds button.
I'd give "In Our Time" from the BBC, and Econtalk, by Ross Roberts, a try if I were you. They both follow the traditional podcast format with a host and guest, but there is a lot of work done by the hosts ahead of time to ensure your time is well spent. Definitely high-density content.
I don't think that this is a bad thing. There were way too many people putting out podcasts in 2020-2022 who obviously didn't have any interest in the medium. I mainly worry that a contracting field might hurt revenues for established podcasters.
As a side note, I've found it harder and harder to find good podcasts. A select few seem to be able to game the metrics so they end up at the top of whatever lists I used to use to discover new content.
I don't listen to podcasts at all but oddly enough, I just came across the Hermitix[1] podcast today and found myself listening to it most of the day.
> Hermitix is a podcast focusing on one-on-one interviews relating to fringe philosophy, obscure theory, weird lit, underappreciated thinkers and movements, and that which historically finds itself 'outside' the academic canon.
The market demand is satisfied by like ~250 podcasts the same way that there are about that many TV shows or fewer. The difference is that unlike TV shows, which cost a lot to make, amateur podcasts are very cheap to produce so there are a lot of people just doing it not because it's profitable but because they had nothing better to do during the pandemic. Now that we're past that phase people are over making new podcasts.
I think the better comparison is to YouTube and Twitch: lots of folks make niche content that most people will never hear of, yet which pulls in tens of thousands of regular listens and devoted fans.
As a point of reference, I've been an avid podcast lister since the beginning, and I've never subscribed to any of the high-profile shows.
A lot of creative outlets are faddish for production, even if they remain commercially viable. For a while podcasting was having a moment, with big names like Serial making a splash.
Now TikTok and short form videos are having their moment. Something else will come again.
It's impossible to keep up the pace. Not because people can't create them but because most can't find an audience. If you create one you want a sizeable audience. That's not possible if the number falls in the millions. My bet is that a few hundred, if that, will eventually be successful enough to create a viable business. Most others will be hobbies but there won't be 100's of thousand of them. We've hit peak podcast numbers.
There may be fewer, but there are still people making new podcasts, though! I really like this one weird local podcast called Bay Area Weekend, for example.
--too much competition. How many more productivity podcasts, nutrition, or fitness podcasts does the world need?
--too much expenses such as production, audio, set-up, etc.
--hard to get good guests unless you are part of the clique/network , although I don't think this matters too much. It's not like you need top gusts to have a good podcast.
Like the app store, we had a gold rush but it quickly became oversaturated and dominated by few players. It's also very hard to get discovered. Only way to get to top 10 is to spend a lot on marketing. I don't know people who build new apps anymore as a result
Yeah, I don't get it why the same 10 results come up for a search when for a given topic there exists 1000 good results? What about mixing those good results, so more people would get the opportunity to shine.
219,178 new podcasts were created in 2022 as opposed to 337,063 in 2019.
2022 saw the publication of 26.1 million new episodes, up from 18.1 million in 2019. Yet, those numbers fare poorly compared to 2020 and 2021 figures (30,130,431 and 29,513,070 respectively).
Even if it's declined it is a mind bogglingly large number of new podcasts.
It's like book publishing but arguably even easier. Who knows, perhaps 100K new podcasts per year is enough....
Podcasts have become professionalised IMHO as well.
With the likes of the BBC creating tons of them which are written and recorded by professional journalists, the quality is pretty high and I can see these capturing the market from the amateur "I just recorded some crazy stuff and threw it out there" sector.
It's also very different from the podcasts I think other posters are talking about, which have a host and guests, all of whom bloviate about whatever the topic of the day might be. That's just like an old-school radio show and not really very interesting to me.
Most podcasts I listen to these days consist of someone interviewing someone interesting. Since the supply of interesting people is limited, Pareto distributions start to dominate.
There's also a bandwagon effect, which means that once someone Becomes Known they are Suddenly Everywhere.
A terrific antidote to this has been the New Books Network, an audio universe of literally hundreds of channels and many thousands of episodes on the back-catalogue. Topics, content, technical quality, interviewer quality, and recently advertising intrusiveness are all over the map, but despite all that, there are in fact many excellent episodes, a huge back catalogue, and a selection of interviewees and topics which I'd otherwise have entirely missed. There are of course some well-known (or at least known) names, but many I'd otherwise never have come across.
Note that a specific episode may appear on multiple channels, but you can also focus or diversify your interests and discovery by picking topics with which you're both familiar and unfamiliar.
Regrettably, it seems like the once great 99% invisible has passed into covering the long tail. So yes, maybe they have covered all and done their best work and don't have that many ideas for great episodes left.
One question not asked is: how many podcasts can there be? If regular years recently have seen ~250K new podcasts, and 2020 saw a million, that means that there might be as many as 5 million podcasts created throughout history.
Do that many people have that much to say?
Or looking at it from the other side: are there that many people who listen to podcasts? If you take 500 listeners as a bound of "podcasts with such low listenership that they are at risk of ending" and suppose that the average person listens to 5 podcasts regularly, then you need 100 million podcast listeners just to sustain 1 million podcasts. Again, are that many people listening?
Slicing it yet another way, if the average podcast lasts for 3 years, then at present rates that means there are ~600K active podcasts at any one time.
There should obviously be a flow of old podcasts ending and new ones springing up to take their place. But it seems unlikely that 600K individual podcasts is sustainable.
In 2018 I was subscribed to like 20+ podcasts. Most of these were either tech news or "popular" podcasts. Lots of once or twice a week in that group and it really felt like a chore to keep up with them. I also felt that there was dwindling actual information or entertainment that I was getting out of them so by 2019 I had already unsubscribed from about 1/3rd of them. The pandemic hit and I no longer had a 30-45 minute commute so I stopped listening to most of my podcasts. I unsubscribed to the rest and only listen to 2 regularly (while running) and have a few others that I listen to if the topic/guest is intriguing. All of this is to say that most podcasts seem to exist in an effort to make podcasts rather than having anything worthwhile or entertaining to say. Also, none of the podcasts I am still subscribed to are tech related.
I personally never really got into podcasts. I just get bits here and there from them. They remind me of the old AM late night radio shows. There are a tons of interesting items out there. Sometimes they get someone who is actually interesting to listen to. But many I see they are talking to themselves and/or reading tweets/blogs/other articles then reacting to that. There is an audience for both types. But I am not sure it is that big. Big enough for a small production crew to care about, but not big enough for any meaningful sized audience. There are of course exceptions out there of the 'big names' but most are very small audiences that enjoy that niche content.
YouTube has better analysis support, profits from ads and premium, recommendation, and far more big user base. So it looks natural that people just post YouTube videos. A cons is that background playback needs Premium.
216 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadi've tried seemingly everywhere, but no luck.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-datasets/solutions/
For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34056715
but after all my searching, there are no new-to-me pods, unless i just can't find the newly-created pods, which is very possible, even likely.
Good luck on your hunt.
That might be searching for specific podcasts within a topic area, specific creators, or (and most usefully) searching by episode for a specific topic or interview subject.
Occasionally there will be references within one podcast to another which I find useful as well, though ... this occurs far less often than such promotions are presented, most especially those which are commercial promotions rather than the more-organic spontaneous mentions of a host or guest. (Many of these are of course not entirely spontaneous, the best however are.)
I've had a few good experiences with referrals from other people online, which may be how I came across the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast (absolutely excellent). Several other "History of..." series have mutually recommended one another, notably of Rome, Byzantium, and China. You're Not So Smart being another.
Podcasts based on programmes I've known elsewhere (usually radio series) are also a source: CBC Ideas, On the Media, This American Life, and a few others. These ... can be good, though I'm finding some make the pod transition less gracefully than one might hope.
Good podcast search tools are another challenge. The Podcast Republic app has a search over all episodes known to it. I don't use Apple iTunes, though suspect it may as well. There are a few Web-based podcast search sites, most have proved disappointing and/or annoying, and the most comprehensive one I've found has been throwing up CAPTCHAs incessantly, which rather entirely makes it useless. I believe that's ListenNotes.
I'd really love to see a good podcast search option under DuckDuckGo, hint, hint...
Part of that is a lack of a focus on podcasting. Serial drove a lot of interest, and that momentum faded with no obvious replacement. Podcasts were something folks made time for on their commutes and during their workouts. When folks started working from home en masse, they had less and less reason to listen.
Listenership fell for shows that have remained consistent. Some of my biggest customers have half or less than the number of listens they were pulling per week in 2019. And that's without changing cadence.
Your customers' data may reflect that, but industry data shows that podcasting is still growing steadily. In their more recent (2022) report, Edison Research notes, "Monthly podcast listening saw growth year-over-year among those age 35-54, as 43% are now monthly podcast listeners, up from 39% in 2021."
> Some of my biggest customers have half or less than the number of listens they were pulling per week in 2019.
Shows fail. There are countless podcasts whose listens have grown substantially since 2019.
The number of people listening isn't a proxy for _how much_ they are listening. Nor is the number of times they listen per month. What matters is the number of hours listened.
It's also the case that with more shows, there's a dilution of listeners' time. There's a pretty firm cap on the number of hours of podcasts that people can listen to. It's easy for folks to dig their heels in on one or two favorite shows and stop listening to the rest of the ones they had previously been interested in.
> There are countless podcasts whose listens have grown substantially since 2019.
And there are countless more podcasts whose listenerships have shrunk substantially since 2019.
Yes, podcasts (and YouTube channels, and blogs, etc.) fail all the time. I'm not disputing it, but it's not a new phenomenon.
Do you think QCode has a viable business model? Producing scripted podcasts that are designed to be trial runs for TV shows/films?
There's no reason to assume podcasting would behave differently: if there's compelling content, people will go out of their way to consume it. The trick is making audio that people will want to listen to.
All these podcasters know each other. It may as well be network television
It feels like an obligatory side income stream for every "creator" out there, one that only requires them to turn up in front of a microphone and banter once a week. The signal to noise ratio is way off. I don't want to start of with 15 minutes about how the creator's week was.
Nowadays I realise that there are podcasts that are actual "productions" (educational or otherwise), which I would enjoy a lot more. I'm probably missing out on a whole medium. But I haven't come across that many yet.
Think of it like replacing niche, once local-only radio programs. Those too aren't very high production because of resource and time constraints. It won't please everyone and doesn't have to.
I was shocked at how much I needed to have in place to record, to get listed on the major players (and Google took DAYS to publish my show but Spotify and Apple did it within hours).
The problems, as I see them:
- must be resistant to gaming. Many of the really popular podcasts are backed by marketing money, many of the best ones are buried
- must be able to account heavily for taste. I really love midst, magic tavern, darknet, zzyx (RIP), night vale. Lots of people aren't into fiction so the system would have to have market segmentation built in. like a music app recommendation engine.
- should provide mechanisms to link to other stuff for the podcast. A huge part of the problem for the podcasters is the friction there is to give them money. This is mostly solved by podcast metadata but any good tool needs to display these properly.
as it is, current podcast recommendation algorithms miss tons of good content. There should be more than enough data on me to recommend a lot of stuff that I've had to hunt down Internet 1.0 style by googling and reading blogs.
A few weeks ago I was sick and I put on some podcasts as I was resting. Made me realize how much I miss the content.
I wonder how much the radio/podcast industry is reliant on car radios and such.
I find that without this, there's no time to think about the near and far future and plan what to do about those.
I think walks help with thinking, and exercises can block it.
Some people I have great respect for take daily walks.
I think having a dog helps here. ;-)
I also hope the high amount of Zone one Training I get for free will help my ultra running but I would still do it just for lifestyle reasons.
Of particular interest to this crowd E1 with Ange Yaghi & Engine Simulator just released last Wednesday and we talk about it going viral along with some of the technical details.
https://leetrout.com/fishtales/e1/ and links to the show's pages on the popular platforms is on the parent of that page.
Maybe I'm not the target audience, but I'm rarely if ever interested in the speaker of whatever information I'm trying to consume, and podcasts' focus on guests (and hosts) always came off as self-aggrandizing and people speaking just to hear themselves speak. Especially with very little editing (uhs, pauses, and general dysfluency) and/or preparation (winding conversations with a lot of fluff instead of a structured outline), I'd almost always just prefer to listen to a narrated book or textbook on whatever topic I'm interested in.
Your problems with podcasts appear more related to propensity than inherent format issues - that is, books too can come off as self aggrandizing, fluff and winding, but you have found mode examples that don't do this perhaps?
Perhaps one thing inherent to podcasts vs books is that you can simply skip sections and skim past the content you find not worth your time, where podcasts are harder to do this without missing your spot, etc.
Podcasts like 99% invisible I find hit the right balance, but again, definitely have more emphasis on interviews than pure factual info compared to books. But I think that's kind of normal, as podcasts do suit discussion and interviews better than a more straight facts approach.
Still, I feel the points you've listed, while valid, are not always the case and like most mediums, you can find examples that would suit your style.
1. They cover a subject I was interested in (economics), but knew basically nothing about. This made it easier to listen to as I found I didn't space out when they were talking about things I already knew. 2. Nice, tight editing and good production. No hosts blathering on for hours - they keep it short and to the point. Most episodes are 20 minutes and easy to get through.
“Money has always been used to buy goods, but did you know you can also use it to buy services? Here’s some pop culture reference comparison to fake a narrative.”
I think the show started suffering when NPR turned every show into a podcast; it removes the ability to cater to a more focused audience because you have to waste half the show doing background.
I think media types decided everything needed to be like Vox Explainers, so now everything sounds like it’s designed for primary school students.
Yes, podcasts are reminding me 'the age of the feuilleton' from Hesses's Glass Bead Game.
Steve O has had some interesting people open up about their issues, same with Jon Bernthal. Especially his episode with Shia LaBeouf was amazing.
But these people are rare. They devolve too often into the host fawning over the guest. Nerdist podcast started doing this at one point.
Many popular podcasts just have guests who are obviously trying to promote a new Netflix special or book.
He stutters and the outcome isn’t that polished but if you can adapt to that his podcast feels very authentic.
It's fun to hear people talking about what they're interested in, or I get to hear people's personal experiences on a subject I care about (entrepreneurship, neurodivergence, software development). I'm here less for structured content than to expand my perspective on general experience and challenges of being in a given situation.
For what it's worth, there are also lots of other formats besides "two dudes/dudettes talking": scripted drama, documentary, unscripted/situational comedy. I even listen to a guy critique classic computer science research papers.
https://ericnormand.me/podcast
A couple episodes you may be interested in:
"In this episode, I excerpt from and comment on Allen Newell's and Herbert Simon's 1975 ACM Turing Award Lecture."
https://ericnormand.me/podcast/computer-science-as-empirical...
"In this first episode of season 3, we analyze a great paper called Lisp: A language for stratified design. The paper asks the question "What is Lisp good for?"
https://ericnormand.me/podcast/lisp-a-language-for-stratifie...
"We read one of the great articles by Alan Kay, inventor of Smalltalk, called The Early History of Smalltalk."
https://ericnormand.me/podcast/the-early-history-of-smalltal...
But to each their own. Not saying there's anything wrong at all with disliking podcasts for exactly these reasons, they're just not for everyone I suppose.
But when I start listening to something titled "X & Y talk about Z" and they tangent off to A, B and C. I just stop listening.
My pet peeve is shows that have interviews with people and preface it with 30 minutes of "banter" that doesn't interest anyone who hasn't listened to the previous 420 episodes.
Just have one episode with the catch-up part and one with just the interview, please.
Repeat listeners are most podcast producers' bread and butter, and those listeners tend to be invested in the hosts, and typically enjoy the banter.
It's sort of the reverse of radio. In a radio show you want to pander to the widest audience - every show must stand alone and can't rely on the audience's familiarity with the host or past content. In a podcast there's no one tuning in at random because it's something interesting that's "on" at the time that they happen to be listening, so podcasters get by from cultivating and pandering to a dedicated fanbase, who then tend to enjoy content that benefits from a deep familiarity with the show.
It sounds like you'd most enjoy "podcasts" that are really recordings of radio shows (99% Invisible, the many NPR podcasts etc).
Not all podcasts do that, though. I listen to about ten podcasts fairly regularly; one ("Behind the Bastards") has regular guests, though their purpose is largely to have someone for the host to tell a story to, two ("The Rest is History" and "The Rest is Politics") have occasional expert guests, on perhaps 10% of episodes, the remainder don't have guests at all.
My current list is only well-edited and produced stuff
And stuff I listen to on the background and usually fall asleep to: My tolerance for "let's turn on the mic and chat for three hours without any plan and publish it as a podcast" is pretty close to zero.(Very strictly, a podcast requires an RSS feed and the ability to download to an iPod, but those criteria have been eroded to "any audio programme that is not on the radio")
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/help/questions/features/subscri...
This thread is teaching me that people would even draw a boundary there at all. It's clear from the people posting here that many really think of podcasts as "couple of guys sitting around shooting the shit", but there's a hell of a lot out there outside of this one genre.
It's a bit "I tried a bunch of science fiction books, but I didn't like them so reading isn't for me."
BBC Radio podcasts are not representative of podcasts, nor is it the reference point for most people that start one. Those people very likely have the image of two friends shooting the shit in front of a mic.
I have 2 of the ones on your list: 99PI and Cautionary Tales and I notice that they are both publish about the ~30 minutes episodes once per week. I think all these podcasts that are 60-120 minutes > 2 times per week are really just replacing talk radio on people's long commutes. It's just a pleasant way to fill the air, not to actually learn anything.
This relies on the moderator / podcaster to have sufficient time / manpower to prepare, or sufficient authority to convince guests not to come without any serious preparations.
On the opposite, there's a podcast from the German Newspaper Die Zeit that has made the long rambling its concept. It's called "Alles gesagt?" and consists in a usually unedited interview with two journalists. The interview (in English or German) stops when the guest considers he has nothing more to say or pronounces a magic word. Yuval Noah Harari's interview lasted 10 hours IIRC. It's decently prepared, but that's not the kind of podcast you can listen to regularly.
Example : Most show on France Culture.
Check out a big podcast producer like Wondery. They approach podcasts with production and professionalism. It takes a team to produce a good podcast.
If a professional podcast is like network TV, the podcasts you're describing are like the old public access channel on cable. They're both the same medium, sure, but they're in different leagues entirely. I don't listen to the podcasts with a random person with a mic chatting about what he thinks is interesting; that would indeed be boring and a waste of time.
If you’ve not tried it I would heartily recommend it - I really didn’t think it would matter before I tried it.
I’d love 50% speed for tough concepts but 300% for the banter and their dumb stories.
Maybe a product idea actually? Feel free to run with it.
It’s hard to find good ones though. I haven’t had as much luck.
And for some good fun (and some occasional new insight), the Soft Skills Engineering podcast (https://softskills.audio/).
As a side note, I've found it harder and harder to find good podcasts. A select few seem to be able to game the metrics so they end up at the top of whatever lists I used to use to discover new content.
> Hermitix is a podcast focusing on one-on-one interviews relating to fringe philosophy, obscure theory, weird lit, underappreciated thinkers and movements, and that which historically finds itself 'outside' the academic canon.
1. https://anchor.fm/hermitix/
As a point of reference, I've been an avid podcast lister since the beginning, and I've never subscribed to any of the high-profile shows.
Now TikTok and short form videos are having their moment. Something else will come again.
--too much expenses such as production, audio, set-up, etc.
--hard to get good guests unless you are part of the clique/network , although I don't think this matters too much. It's not like you need top gusts to have a good podcast.
From the article :
219,178 new podcasts were created in 2022 as opposed to 337,063 in 2019.
2022 saw the publication of 26.1 million new episodes, up from 18.1 million in 2019. Yet, those numbers fare poorly compared to 2020 and 2021 figures (30,130,431 and 29,513,070 respectively).
Even if it's declined it is a mind bogglingly large number of new podcasts.
It's like book publishing but arguably even easier. Who knows, perhaps 100K new podcasts per year is enough....
With the likes of the BBC creating tons of them which are written and recorded by professional journalists, the quality is pretty high and I can see these capturing the market from the amateur "I just recorded some crazy stuff and threw it out there" sector.
It's also very different from the podcasts I think other posters are talking about, which have a host and guests, all of whom bloviate about whatever the topic of the day might be. That's just like an old-school radio show and not really very interesting to me.
A terrific antidote to this has been the New Books Network, an audio universe of literally hundreds of channels and many thousands of episodes on the back-catalogue. Topics, content, technical quality, interviewer quality, and recently advertising intrusiveness are all over the map, but despite all that, there are in fact many excellent episodes, a huge back catalogue, and a selection of interviewees and topics which I'd otherwise have entirely missed. There are of course some well-known (or at least known) names, but many I'd otherwise never have come across.
Note that a specific episode may appear on multiple channels, but you can also focus or diversify your interests and discovery by picking topics with which you're both familiar and unfamiliar.
<https://newbooksnetwork.com/>
Do that many people have that much to say?
Or looking at it from the other side: are there that many people who listen to podcasts? If you take 500 listeners as a bound of "podcasts with such low listenership that they are at risk of ending" and suppose that the average person listens to 5 podcasts regularly, then you need 100 million podcast listeners just to sustain 1 million podcasts. Again, are that many people listening?
Slicing it yet another way, if the average podcast lasts for 3 years, then at present rates that means there are ~600K active podcasts at any one time.
There should obviously be a flow of old podcasts ending and new ones springing up to take their place. But it seems unlikely that 600K individual podcasts is sustainable.