Web content marriage of equals: Pandora and podcasting

I had been writing this blog weekly, but took a forced hiatus the past two weeks or so, just because other responsibilities were taking over and because I was searching for a worthy idea to explore.

This entry will be a short one, but it’s an observation worth noting. The Pandora streaming audio service has made two very popular podcasts available – This American Life and its spinoff, Serial. But these are the only podcasts Pandora currently streams. It added stand-up comedy a few years ago, and that’s still most of, or the only, spoken word on the service. The browsing functionality has improved in its newest or newer versions, but there’s no visible category for podcasts – you have to already know those two shows are on there, to find them.

So how useful is this? According to Fast Company, Pandora has 78 million listeners and few of them subscribe to podcasts. In this story, John Paul Titlow theorizes that by going on Pandora, This American Life and Serial will reach many millions more listeners than they had through iTunes and other channels – even as very big hits in the podcast genre. I’m not sure how much that rings true or will bear out, if the Pandora interface continues to neglect promotion of these podcasts’ presence, or have any obvious indication that these shows are now there.

What does this even do for Pandora? It may not do much for the shows, for the aforementioned reason. Adding to Pandora’s success or quality depends on whether it plans to sign on many more podcasts and build a reputation as a destination for such content.

It’s curious that Titlow, writing for Fast Company, views Pandora as the “mainstream” and places podcasting outside that mainstream, even though Serial, as he notes, had 40 million downloads for its first season. That’s only one big hit podcast, but having that many millions for an audience means the programming or content is mainstream. If Pandora does go further with podcasts, we’re talking about giants joining forces, not a big fish swallowing up small fish.