Why our embed player focuses on one episode at a time
If you’re a podcaster, your hosting company may offer you an embed player that displays a list of past episodes. While this approach often appeals to podcasters in a “Behold my amazing output! Take your pick of these many, many delightful episodes!” kind of way, we’ve taken a simpler, focused approach. Our free, universal podcast embed player serves up one episode at a time, with no distractions:
Here’s why.
How people really listen to podcasts
After years of observing how people listen to podcasts, we found that they sample shows on the web, and then decide to listen more later. They want listening to be easy, and by “easy,” they mean, “Show me where to start.”
Another important cue we took from listeners: when they’re in a web browser, they typically listen to a short segment of a show (~1–3 minutes), to get a sense of it and decide if they like what they hear. After that, they want to “take it to go,” i.e. follow a link to listen inside a mobile podcast listening app. This is particularly true now that mobile web browsing exceeds desktop browsing — your website visitors are already on their phones.
Put simply: listeners discover podcast episodes on the web, but they listen on the go.
As easy as listening to the radio
Because we want RadioPublic to make listening to podcasts as easy as listening to the radio, we pay attention to how listeners actually listen. We optimize our tools for the broadest possible audience, so that you — the podcaster — gain as many listeners and followers as you can.
Most embed players optimize for listening in the web browser. We optimize for how people want to listen.
So we’ve designed our embed player to embed a single episode, and then display links to continue listening inside RadioPublic:
How this helps you
The purpose of RadioPublic’s embed player is to encourage someone to become an engaged, loyal listener. So we’ve made it dead simple for them to press play, sample the episode and turn into a loyal listener. Put another way:
- More of your website visitors turn into listeners: with our embed player, you’ll convert more casual browsers to listening and subscribing to your show inside the app, rather than listening for a couple of minutes and then leaving.
- Once they’re listening on RadioPublic, they stick around: where someone might visit your website once and forget about you, RadioPublic listeners come back again and again.
This article is part of a series on how podcasters can use RadioPublic to grow audience and engagement for their shows. Check out the rest of the series here.
Still have questions? Leave a response, or get in touch. We love helping podcasters grow and engage their audiences.
