Podcasting singularity? Nevermore.

In previous posts, I’ve written about Amazon/Audible’s new entry into podcasting-style programming, Audible Channels [July 17]; about streaming music service Pandora picking up podcasts to distribute to its users [May 5]; and about the emergence of podcast aggregators, and their future [April 7].

Thinking about these different developments in spoken word audio and podcast distribution makes one wonder if these various distribution outlets will ever come together. Or to re-direct that thought, if content will ever become totally agnostic and non-exclusive to any one platform. That is now the case in television, with networks and channels making themselves available through cable; satellite; online; and devices such as Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast. HBO Now and Showtime streaming through Hulu or Amazon services can now be accessed using computers, smartphones or the previously mentioned streaming boxes.

Back to the podcasting landscape -- Audible Channels has a few exclusive shows, as previously noted, but also many shows that appear in numerous other outlets. Pandora has picked up two of NPR’s biggest hits and is said to be after more, but doesn’t have its own original podcast content yet. Howl, the service closest to Audible Channels in price point and inclusion of exclusive content, doesn’t have the breadth of subject matter that Audible Channels can offer. Its value may be that it does cost less than Audible Channels, for subscribers who are only interested in the comedy-centric content it offers.

Podcasting distribution may never have a “singularity” – meaning there won’t ever be one way to get all major podcasting content, just as some cable packages or systems would be missing an obscure channel or two, in the past. But podcasts may have to make sure they are on all available outlets, pursuing deals or licensing with Pandora, Audible Channels, Howl and more. The burden does fall on the podcasters themselves to find income, whether from sponsors or licensing. It’s less likely right now for distributors to commission more than a handful of podcasts – although the potential for more of that is there, if distributors think it will help them compete.

Podcast of the week

Episodes 11 & 12 of “Criminal” [“I’m About To Save Your Life” and “Break the Internet”] from fall 2014 – the first one is like one of those astounding stories you sometimes hear about someone who was so sadly gullible that they pay a fortune teller hundreds of thousands of dollars over time. In this case, a man was extorted by a criminal for over two decades, repeatedly, with a combination of tales of woe and threats – and his extorter was eventually put on trial even after the victim died, because the court admitted testimony the victim recorded. The second one is about a teenager who hacked AOL in its early days, just to get free time to use the service, when it was still charging hourly or monthly fees.

 

Audible's Channels: Are They Being Heard?

Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook service, debuted a beta version of “Channels,” a foray into podcast-style programming, in April. The service is not yet widely available, but the effort raises a few questions about its place in the audio programming competition.

Channels  is a de facto competitor for both free podcasts and subscription podcast apps and networks like Howl and Gimlet, as well as, in some respects, to satellite radio.

The first question is whether Channels’ few original shows are enough of an attraction by themselves, especially when so many popular podcasts are free.

Second, Channels has what one could call “syndicated” content from other media outlets, including several WNYC public radio-generated podcasts, highlights of the Risk storytelling podcast, and the Charlie Rose show (in audio form). These, of course, aren’t exclusive, and the only value of including them on Channels is the assumption that a Channels user lives only within the Channels firewall and doesn’t access any other audio content in any way, even free content.  Also, if Channels does grow exponentially in popularity, producers of this outside content could start demanding licensing income, or higher licensing fees – just as that happened with Netflix.

Third, numerous channels on the service are generic with titles like “60 Minutes of Fear,” “The Appetizer for Food Lovers,” “Entrepreneur Accelerator” and “Learn Something Amazing.” Without more detail on what these are, how much content they have and how frequently they add new content, it’s unclear how much of a draw these are, or what their quality is.

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but once they become evident, which is likely to take some time – possibly even years, not months – those answers will determine just how successful Audible Channels could be. The “market cap,” if the initiative works, could be far higher than just the audiobooks service.

Podcast of the week

I left this feature hanging, but promise to be more diligent to add it to each post going forward. The first episode of Chris Gethard's "Beautiful Stories From Anonymous People" was an intriguing listen. It was exciting and moving to hear Gethard urge his caller to get out of a rut and go out and seize life.

The broader threat of patent trolls

This entry will stray a bit outside the bounds of being strictly about podcasting, but will start in that realm.

For some time, well-known podcasters were backing and helping promote the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to fight off patent trolls, companies formed solely to attempt to capitalize on patents by stretching the definition of what patents actually cover. Patent trolls were suing popular podcasters or sending them cease and desist notices, claiming they owed licensing fees for the use of a patent that supposedly covered the practice of podcasting, in what any reasonable observer would say amounted to extortion.

The patent trolls were dealt a disabling blow in April 2015 when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office invalidated Personal Audio’s patent on podcasts because podcasting is “prior art,” meaning information or technology that was already publicly available and not a trade secret.

EFF is still fighting a much more pervasive and broader battle against patent trolls, however. Podcasting was only the tip of the iceberg, apparently.

Universities’ research, funded directly from federal and state grants that come out of citizens’ tax dollars, typically produces patented technology or biomedical discoveries. The trick is that some of these seeming innovations are akin to “prior art.” Universities actively market their patents through technology transfer departments. Third parties can buy these patents and profit from them – legitimately, by producing the technology, medication or other products derived from the patented material – or illegitimately, by taking the patent troll route.

Now, even in the legitimate route, one could argue that the public deserves some royalty or licensing income for contributing to the funding that made these discoveries possible. The counterargument is that society benefits from the innovation and discoveries – and that is the payback, which does make sense, now that I’m writing it.

As the EFF cites, though, patent trolls have taken questionable patents, like one from Stanford University on a natural amino acid, and used them as ammunition to sue workout supplement manufacturers. As John Oliver once related in an episode of “Last Week Tonight,” supplement makers aren’t the most ethical bunch either, but being able to extort any industry on flimsy claims of ownership is also wrong.

The point I want to make is that this phenomenon is exactly the sort of thing that should spark constituent and citizen demands to legislators and governments, since it’s public money supporting extortion. For more details on the story, I encourage you to check out EFF’s background article.

Moving podcasting to the next level

I had meant to add on to each recent blog entry some recommendation of a podcast episode that I enjoyed. I’ve been remiss on that, but I now have one to explore more in depth.

The “StartUp” podcast, begun in 2014 and now in its third season, follows the story of a start-up business with each season. The first season, which I’m past midway through now, tells the story of the Gimlet podcasting network itself, which began with this very show.

Gimlet set out to challenge podcast networks and aggregators such as Panoply, Earwolf and Howl, and become the “HBO of podcasts,” as several stories about the company called it. At present though, only one of its current stable of six shows, “Reply All,” is showing up on the Stitcher and iTunesChart.net lists (see previous blog entry). That doesn’t mean this still can’t happen, or Gimlet won’t continue to grow, but it can’t be deemed a runaway success just yet.

At different points during the first season of “StartUp,” host and Gimlet Media co-founder Alex Blumberg speaks to investors and advisers who tell him, first, that he should consider pivoting his idea for a podcasting start-up to offer functions previously (and apparently still) unavailable, such as social media sharing of excerpts from shows, or a Netflix-like algorithm for recommending programming based on what listeners have already heard.

Instead, Blumberg went forward with what Gimlet Media is now, another programming network. This blog aims to advocate for good ideas in the industry, or better ways to evaluate podcasts, or better ways to grow the medium. It seems like the route taken by Gimlet was an end run around any of those goals, because it’s so similar to what was already there. So, what does that mean for where podcasting is now?

As interesting as “StartUp” is, it’s not an innovation for the medium, only an exceedingly “meta” endeavor – a podcast about podcasting – as Blumberg freely admits in some of the episodes. Technology venture capitalist investor Matt Mazzeo tells Blumberg in the podcast that he would be more interested in a game changing idea that can take podcasting from an audience of millions to an audience of tens of millions or more. An innovative idea for how podcasts are distributed and consumed will inevitably do more for the medium than one or two breakout hits.

Picking the 'truthiest' podcast ranking

In my previous blog entry, I dissected some obvious flaws in the new Podtrac monthly ranking of a top 10 podcasts. Since then, it’s been found that there are several respected podcast groups, including The Ringer, Earwolf and Maximum Fun in the comedy and culture genres, as well as CNN news podcasts, that are not being evaluated or considered for inclusion in the ranking. Apparently Podtrac chooses what podcasters to include in their sampling, or maybe the podcaster have to respond to their inquiries.

So, what are the alternatives? There’s the Stitcher top 100 podcast list. Although that list seems like a more relevant cross-section of podcasts that people are talking about, it does not disclose its methodology or what the rankings are based on. Stitcher does have two other top 100 lists where some indication of their methods is given – one for “top movers,” which have risen the most in Stitcher’s rankings. But you can’t see the full rankings, and many of these top movers do not appear in the overall top 100 list. Lastly, Stitcher also has a top 100 for the “most shared” podcasts, which looks more similar to the overall top 100. Overall, the assumption is that the Stitcher top 100 lists are all based on – and only based on – what is being heard through Stitcher’s app, which discounts all the other distribution methods available.

Another ranking, iTunesCharts.net, inspires more confidence. iTunesCharts.net operates by culling Apple’s published iTunes rankings of podcasts at the end of each day. Apple’s rankings are fluid and can change in real time – and Apple does not publish past ranking data, so iTunesCharts.net’s records are the only available history. The major attribute of iTunesCharts.net is that its measurement is based on a more universal means of podcast, so its rankings are likely more representative of the listener following that podcasts on its list actually have.

At this relatively early stage in the development of the podcasting industry, without a truly universally accepted standard for measuring the listenership of podcasts or ranking their popularity, the best any observer may be able to do is choose a ranking that feels like it has “truthiness” (the Stephen Colbert-coined word for something that most seems like it is true, even if might not be completely true). So, for now, iTunesCharts.net has the truthiness crown.

The Nielsens of Podcasting?

We’re never going back to the days of the big three TV networks, in which the ranking of the networks was a much bigger part of pop culture. CBS ruled in the 1970s; ABC was in the basement for a long time. NBC’s woes have attracted attention in recent years, but its situation was still not dire.

In previous entries here, I’ve looked at how podcast audiences and success are measured. The podcast measurement and advertising services company Podtrac has launched a new ranking that aims to become a standard for the success of podcast networks in the way that Nielsen ratings measured TV networks.

The list ranks a top 10 of podcast outlets based on their monthly audience in the US and globally, but appears to be weighted to favor greater numbers in the US. This becomes more relevant in the bottom half of the list in which The Moth and Roman Mars (the owner of the 99% Invisible podcast) rank higher than the Nerdist and WBUR (Boston’s NPR station) because they have more US listeners, even though they have fewer listeners globally.

The top 5 of the list’s first edition, for April, have numbers that are consistent as they scale from US to global, but this certainly could be an issue anywhere in the list in the future. NPR currently is dominant at the top of the list, but the next three, This American Life, WNYC and HowStuffWorks, are close together in either US or global numbers, or both.

The list also has another obvious issue – comparing podcasting outlets that are very different in scope, scale and focus. CBS, which ranks fifth on the list, is drawing from the entire CBS TV News and CBS Radio operations for its material – plus CBS Sports, yielding 474 different shows that collectively have 1.5 million listeners. (Presumably Podtrac is referring to Play.it, which is how CBS branded its audio offerings last year).

This American Life, which ranks second, offers just that show and “Serial,” and has 5.6 million listeners. Even if you sloppily divide the number of shows by the number of listeners, This American Life and Serial have much more reach than all of CBS’s efforts. There’s also no indication given of just how small the listener  figures may be for some or many of the CBS shows, and how far above or below the average.

That means CBS should arguably be ranked way lower on this list, or maybe not at all. It’s possible that NBC, ABC, Fox or any number of media entities outside of network television, have individual podcasts or small handfuls of podcasts that reach more listeners than many or most CBS ones.

Perhaps other commentators out there have similar criticisms of Podtrac’s top 10 list, or other ones I haven’t considered. The point is that it’s too simple to go with the numbers Podtrac uses if you’re really going to measure a media company’s success in podcasting. Having one or two great shows with large audiences or a small roster of such shows could be worthy of greater advertiser support, which is the purpose of such a list. A “big three” TV network may not necessarily be a “big three” podcaster, if there really can be such a thing.

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.