A Bold Move For Pandora. What Serial’s Exclusive Rights Mean For The Big Players In Podcasting

Does this mean a slow death for mail kimp? Is Pandora ready for the new format?

Many loyal users spent this morning frantically refreshing their iTunes podcast subscriptions searching for the much anticipated first episode of Serial’s second season. There were also users looking to catch up on their morning commute that went straight to serialpodcast.org which has an excellent user interface. But wait, didn’t Pandora get exclusive rights to release this season of Serial? What do we know about this decision to go with Pandora, and what does it mean for podcasts going forward?

How big are the stakes?

There is no question about who is king when it comes to podcasts. Serial truly changed the game and got a lot of new listeners interested in the long podcast format. With over 100 million downloads to date, Serial is seriously popular and has the ability to dictate the behavior of it’s loyal users to come extent. The previous sponsor, MailChimp, became synonymous with Serial and gained it’s own sort of cult following. Still, the podcast space is relatively small.

Podcast use is on the rise, however, only 17 percent of Americans have tuned in to one in the last month. (Edison Research)

Internet radio is a different beast, but Pandora does boast a huge user base. Serial and This American Life producers think this move will allow them to reach an even bigger audience while allowing Pandora to come out swinging in the podcast medium.

The first season of Serial reached 8 million users, while Pandora reaches 78 million

“We also have our fingers crossed that Sarah Koenig’s voice sounds enough like Justin Bieber’s that Pandora’s genome pushes the show on hordes of millennials,” -Ira Glass

Getting the audience and the content in one place is only half the battle. Next, you have to make it the most appealing way to consume that content.

What are these ‘exclusive rights’ you speak of?

Manu users voiced concerned that this meant the podcast would only be available on pandora - but we can now see that is not the case. What do exclusive rights mean? Well, let’s see what Pandora has to say

While Serial will still be available on Serialpodcast.org and other podcast apps, this partnership opens up new advertising inventory only on Pandora.

We are building on the advertising success of Season 1 by bringing Serial’s premium content to Pandora’s high quality ad environment.

These partnerships will align best-in-class content with a premium ad environment to reach scalable, engaged audiences - Pandora Blog

So basically, Pandora has the exclusive rights to advertise? This means when I listen to the podcast elsewhere I not only don’t have to listen to ads, but can’t? This really does nothing to help push people toward Pandora other than the fact that they get to say the podcast is available there at the top of each episode.

Why wouldn’t I just let Pandora be the advertiser as I listen merrily on iTunes or the Serial website like I have been this whole time. To get a user to change behavior you need more than a ‘best in class experience for advertizers’. It isn’t easier to listen on Pandora, it isn't less interrupted, the quality isn’t improved, there is no new, exclusive content I can’t get anywhere else. In fact, the entire blog post they released about Serial talks exclusively about the value to the advertisers. It is important to remember there is no value to advertisers without value for users.

Pandora stock has been declining in value for the past two years but hit a beautiful 5% bump following the announcement that they have gained exclusive rights to both Serial and This American Life. This move was intriguing when I first heard about it a few months back.

If Pandora was going to break into a totally new genre to stay competitive, they were going to have to do a complete overhaul of their interface. Everyone knows Pandora has the best predictive algorithm to make radio stations, but it has never handled on demand content like Spotify, iTunes, or Google Play. How would the app need to change to fit these new realities?

Apparently, according to Pandora, not much.

The new old user experience

Listening to a podcast on Pandora meant that I had to do all the things I normally end up doing on Pandora for radio. I had to clear out a station to make room for Serial (Bon voyage Backstreet Boys!) and then listen to an ad before we could get started (That ad was not for mail kimp).

Every episode is broken into 13 parts (about 4–5 minutes each) but I can’t just move back 30 seconds or forward 1 minute. If I missed something, I have to re-start the whole section. While this may make sense for music radio, a podcast full of mysteries often creates situations where you want to review a moment, not an entire section. This functionality feels like more of a band-aid than a solution.

I expected the entire app to be going through an overhaul to deal with this new form of content. Most applications would be launching a new section that delivers as good of an experience for podcasts as their current selection delivers for radio.

We will have to wait and see how the algorithm will adapt to podcast content. You can currently listen to comedy on Pandora and it will mix in other comedians you may like, but a comedy bit is still about the length of a song and designed to be able to stand alone. It will take a huge influx of podcasts for the predictive features to add any real value.

What does it all mean?

At this point it is safe to say Pandora made a bold move negotiating the rights for Serial and This American Life but is unprepared to handle it from a technology perspective. Pandora already lost a huge opportunity with curious users at the launch of the podcast checking to see what kind of experience they are offering - there will never be a stronger reason for users to revisit that option. If they want to build an interface that is friendly to podcasts, they need to do it quickly to fully capitalize on the excitement surrounding their new aquisitions.

Overall, the landscape of poscasts hasn’t changed one bit. People still listen on the apps they’re used to and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. We do have to thank Pandora, however, for supporting some of our favorite podcasts in what should have been a partnership but is now looking more and m like a donation. Serial and TAL came out way ahead in this deal.

What do you think about Pandora’s venture into the podcasting world? What features would make Pandora more appealing for podcasts than the options you have now? Leave me a comment and let me know!