A Post-Mortem for Social Podcast Discovery

Three reasons why RSS still dominates in audio, but not text.

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Jacob Mørch over 4 years ago

Great post Nathan. Have you tried the (relatively new) Airr podcast app? Its key value prop is the ability to "highlight" snippets of podcasts you listen to, but it also has a social element because I can see other people's highlights/snippets.

A quick intro: https://jacobmorch.com/podcast-notes

Justin Jackson over 4 years ago

Really love this exploration. Folks typically write off RSS as a protocol because it didn't really gain traction with blogs. But, as you've said, the format is perfect for podcasting.

Loved this line:

"Why do people listen to podcasts? I think a more primary driver is to develop “relationships” with interesting personalities."

@paul_7380 over 4 years ago

Your second hypothesis builds on a question I’ve been chewing on this past week as my organization leads a website redesign effort.

One of the interesting observations made in our survey of readers (most people use our site for our articles) was not really knowing who was writing each piece (we have a byline at the top and an author’s bio at the bottom). What I’m asking myself is “ how do we make authors more prominent and recognizable to the reader?”

With your observations, the question now is, “how do we make authors more prominent and recognizable to the reader so that they are seen as a must read feature each time they write for us?”

How do we cultivate relationships between reader and author like one might experience listening to podcast personalities?

Thank you for the nugget!

Sreeraman Thiagarajan over 4 years ago

Good observations, Nathan. "If in 2016, everybody thought the future of podcasts looked like Twitter, in 2021 people think it might look more like Netflix."
at aawaz, we have been at the latter since 2018 :)