Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is podcast discovery. The reason I’m so keen on podcasting right now is that I see it as a killer use case for both hearables (passive content consumption as a reason to wear the devices longer and more frequently) and smart assistants (control, curate and mediate the information).
Last week, I wrote about the concept of podcast-to-podcast advertising as a potential solution to help creators of all sizes work together to monetize and grow their audiences. As I mentioned in that post, there are 750,000 podcasts out there and a total of more than 30 million episodes have been recorded, according to website, podcastinsights.com. So, there’s a big ocean of content out there that listeners need to wade through in order to find something they might like.
One of the other potential solutions that I’ve been thinking might work to help with the discovery dilemma is “podcast previews,” which would be controlled via a smart assistant. The way that I envision this operating is similar to a flash briefing, where you issue one voice command (Alexa, play my podcast previews), and then receive a stream of short clips from the podcasts that you subscribe to, in addition to podcast recommendations that you might like. This would seem to fit right in the wheelhouse of platforms like Spotify that are focusing heavily on podcasting and personalized curation.
You’d then be able to control the stream via your voice assistant, allowing you to skip ahead, play the full podcast, and ultimately subscribe to a podcast. In this scenario, podcast creators would be able to crop their own clip from the episode being previewed and submit it to the stream, the same way a flash briefing is submitted.
To any podcast creators reading this – what do you think? Would this make sense as a way to potentially expose more people to your podcast? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so be sure to reach out on twitter to get the conversation going!
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave
To listen to the broadcast on your Alexa device, enable the skill here
To add to you flash briefing, click here
To listen on your Google Assistant device, enable the skill here
and then say, “Alexa/Ok Google, launch Future Ear Radio.”
