While the Internet is now closing in on 5 Billion MAUs, podcasting is still only about 10% of that (Statista). There isn’t a country in the world where a majority of the population has listened to at least one podcast in the past year (Statista). If you stopped a person in any country on earth and asked them what podcasts they listen to, the most common answer would be “Podcasts? Not my thing.” In the US, podcasting is doing better, but still is far from mainstream. US monthly podcasting consumption lags most other mediums…significantly.
How can podcasting ever catch-up? Some might say that the content isn’t good enough. While that may be true in certain languages and locales, we know from all the great content that comes through Headliner every day that there is more than enough amazing podcast content out there. The real issue is much of the work on podcast discovery has focused on getting podcast listeners to listen to new podcasts, rather than aimed at making new podcast listeners.
Headliner’s first solution, our audiogram tool, brought podcast audio to social media platforms with billions of users. In other words, we put the content where lots of podcast non-listeners are. Currently, we estimate our users are getting a 100 Million views a month on social and YouTube.
One of the best definitions we’ve heard for discovery is “it’s just putting the right piece of content in front of the right person at the right time.”
While we’ve been doing that on social for a few years now, enter Disco, our next act. Disco matches the right podcast content to the right person in the right context, directly on digital publishers around the web.
Disco automatically selects segments of a podcast episode and matches those segments on relevant articles for webpage readers. But this isn’t a standard embeddable player: embeds are static while Disco is dynamic.
Here’s where we think embeds while they have their place, still fall short on solving discovery across the web:
- Manual Management: the digital editor must hand-select a particular podcast episode for a given article. This process is harder than it sounds, which means often podcasts don’t get any placement on articles at all.
- Staleness: The match may be great at the moment of publication, but if a new episode drops that is a better fit, too bad, the editor must manually update it, or more likely, the content becomes stale.
- Visually Boring: Embeds show the same visuals for every clip, most often the podcast art. Even with great podcast imagery, it can blend into the background if it’s presented in the same way on every page
- Low Relevance: Embeds typically play the entire episode, starting from the beginning. The first thing the audience will hear is an intro, an ad read, or the opening discussion. It won’t be very relevant to the article.
- Static: Every viewer of the page sees the same episode or clip with an embed; they don’t dynamically change based on the audience, the content, or the podcast’s feed.
In short, we have not seen embeds be an effective tool in getting new listeners to the medium at scale, but Disco can help!
Disco is built to be added to page templates, so it ends up on all pages of the site. Disco automatically selects clips from new episodes, keeps webpages fresh, and learns what is engaging for audiences. Disco employs dynamic imagery to attract attention and maximizes relevance to hold onto it. In addition it leverages our automation engine and the data we have collected on the nearly 7 million videos made on Headliner to date.
What does this all add up to? We are outperforming regular embed players by 4X, increasing listenership materially for our beta publishers, accomplishing all this with zero management from publishers, and we are just getting started. The next time you are reading an article online like this one, look for our podcast recommendations. Our bet is if you are interested in reading, there is a good chance you are interested in listening as well.
Here are some early designs we are testing and iterating on:
We are working on making podcasting as popular as everything else on the Internet. Hopefully we can get podcasting from millions to billions of listeners soon. We know the content is out there, just need to connect people to it.
If you are a publisher interested in turning your readers into listeners, get in touch. You’ll see Disco take your listenership to a whole new level.
