We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts (opens in new tab)

> I'm not saying iHeart is evil

I don't know why not. Back when they were known as Clear Channel, in the wake of 11SEP2001 they censored songs that went against the agenda of starting wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Channel_memorandum

(Ah, I see it has been spun as mere a suggestion. Just like I'm sure the managers at each station only passed along the suggestion. There couldn't have possibly been any accompanying social pressure, especially at that time, that would have made it a tacit order).

>I'm actually worried that podcasts are going the way of the web. What, for a while, was a weird world of enthusiasts talking about things that interests them seems to be morphing into a world of a few big corporate entities calling the shots.

I think podcasting is somewhat shielded from this by the fact that you really don't need an insane amount of capital to put out a good product. There definitely are podcasts that have expensive, professional studio set ups, but there are others I've listened to that are just straight up recorded on an iPhone and they can actually sound very decent. This low barrier of entry makes it easy for people to make their own weird podcast without having to water down their product and pitch it to investors. I guess with time that could change if your podcast is considered dead if its not on one of these big corporate channels. As someone who really enjoys the "homemade" feels, I hope this never happens, a podcast feeling overproduced is a big turn off IMO.

> I don't want to have different players for different shows

This is at the heart of the control problem. If you have one true player, it commands more control than is good for you, me and all consumers. Healthy competition is the only practical way to keep this under check.

I make sure to distribute my consumption over at least 2-3 contenders for any content be it search (google, ddg, bing), video (youtube, vimeo, dailymotion), podcasts (overcast, apple podcasts). I've begun extending this pattern over all sorts of consumption.

Sure its a hassle for me. I'm ok with it. I like to think that one extra click, one purchase, one download helps the competitors in keeping the market healthy.

I love that podcasts are one of the few pure truly open mediums. Its literally just a audio file on a server somewhere included in an RSS feed.

I think more people should try to create their own podcast. I've been doing my own podcast after being a guest on a couple episodes of another tech podcast and I can't recommend it enough.

I think it should be treated like the low barrier to entry medium it is.

Current favorite podcast is the indie hackers podcast. Sometimes something you hear is more impactful then reading the equivalent.

I prefer podcasts to audio books usually as podcasts are meant for audio whereas audio books are just adapted to the medium.

This is something that has been concerning me as well. My fear is that as money perverts this ecosystem, the big players will increasingly push out the small players. They'll suck up all the ad revenue and flood discovery services with mediocre (but well produced!!) corporate shlock. That will suck the air out of the room and damage all the smaller outfits, making them harder to find and less profitable to run.

I hope I'm wrong.

I agree, we might be leaving the golden age rather than entering it. The article mentions Spotify exclusive shows and we have already seen several other paywalled shows from companies like Audible and Stitcher. Meanwhile a number of podcasters are taking control of their own shows, not joining a podcast network or content company, and moving the show to platforms like Patreon. That is great for the content creators themselves, but it hurts discoverability and just isn't great for the podcast listener. The days of all the best shows being available to everyone for free are over. The days of most podcasts just being people having fun and sharing their passions with the world are over. We are entering the world were podcasting is big business.

I tried some Gimlet podcasts but didn't find any of consistent quality. For me "consistent quality" means I'm willing to binge-listen every episode and in order.

Personally, I subscribe to the podcasts of: Sam Harris, Conan, The Energy Gang, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and a couple other NPR shows. None of my podcasts, IMO, are decreasing in quality, nor would I expect any of these groups to sell-out as they are off-shoots of other things.

The podcasts I listen to are intentionally hand-selected over time to be 1) informative, 2) have a decent content:fluff ratio, and 3) enjoyable. I unsubscribed from Star Talk because about 90% of it was non-scientific chatter or ads, even though it was enjoyable and informative (sometimes). If a podcast doesn't cut to the damn chase like NDT's, that's an instant unsub from me.

In particular, I find independent podcasts like Sam Harris or Dan Carlin to be FANTASTIC, and that content is free for all to download in multiple ways. So, I'm not worried in the slightest.

Anecdotally, I have noticed an increase in advertisements in the podcasts I listen to. I think this is more likely a sign of decline than a sign of the opposite.

iHeartMedia is a junk stock and will probably delisted from NYSE soon. Stuff Media will be gutted and lost in the ensuing chaos in the coming years as iHeart desperately attempts again to restructure their debt. Both them and Cumulus Media serve as yet another sad tale of what happens when PEGs descend on in for the rape and pillage.

I listened to Crimetown season 2 on Overcast, but you're right, it looks like it's been removed from the feed. I was hoping they'd approach it more like Stitcher has, where they continue to produce open podcasts, but offer additional episodes or only gate a limited number (and definitely expected that any Spotify-only podcasts would be brand new, as opposed to removing access to pre-existing ones).

I agree the purchase of Gimlet and putting shows behind paywalls is concerning.

That said, as long as the vast majority of shows continue to publish their shows as god intended -- as enclosures on an simple RSS feed -- I think podcasts will stay healthy and vibrant. I will not subscribe to Spotify for a whole host of reasons, and it would take far, far more 'available only on Spotify' podcasts to ever make me reconsider that.

I think podcasts, from a consolidation POV, looks more like video than music (for starters, think of the content length and engagement level). You'd swap app/provider to listen to a different podcast, but a music player with a limited subset of music is essentially DOA.

Agreed. And I imagine that if Spotify succeeds, then Apple might eventually follow suit and start picking up exclusives. At that point, there's no going back.

Stitcher is building a garden. I think they are trying to combat the unassailable dominance of Apple.

Long live Napster!

> I'd much rather consume the same content by reading instead of listening. It's faster, it's easier to skim and skip around, you can have hyperlinks to other references, etc

My counterargument to that is that in order to do any of those things you need to have your eyes engaged with the content. I can listen to podcasts (or audiobooks) while at the gym, cooking, doing laundry, cleaning dishes, or going to pick my kid from school. That means to me more than the advantages you mentioned.

One additional advantage: getting to sleep. I don't enjoy sleeping. If i have a light source near me, be it a lamp or a screen, I don't feel sleepy at all. I can't fall asleep while watching a Netflix show that I like. I have done the experiment. I can feel sleepy while reading a book, but an engaging one and a night lamp will keep me awake: I read the first Harry Potter volume in a single sleep-less night. Listening to podcasts with the lights off and my eyes closed makes me drift to sleep much more easily.

I think it depends on the type of podcast. I'm a huge fan of the storytelling style that was pioneered (AFAIK) at This American Life, continues at Planet Money, and is used in almost all the Gimlet Media posdcasts (given that one of the main Planet Money people started it). 99% invisible is also good at this, in a slightly different way.

> Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines.

That depends on the Podcast. Planet Money, some (all?) Gimlet Media podcasts, and 99% Invisible have online articles/transcripts of their podcasts. I've found more than a few I wanted to reference here through searching for portions I remember.

Well, yeah, of course if you're just sitting in your living room you'd rather read than listen; however that's not really the use case of a Podcast.

The value podcasts bring is you can consume them during times you can't read. During exercise, driving, walking to work, cleaning the house, cooking, and train/car rides (for people who get motion sick while reading in a moving vehicle). They turn tedious menial tasks into times when you're mildly entertained - that provides immense value.

They can also be used for a slightly more interesting white noise.

As many others have said, podcasts are definitely necessary over text when doing things you can't read during (driving, exercising, etc.)

Additionally, I enjoy podcasts for the personalities. This varies with the podcast, as some podcasts consist of generally the same content as something like a blog post, with a generic narrator reading from a script. However, most popular podcasts are popular not just for the content, but the conversations between the personalities.

e.g. I can read Bill Simmons' sports columns (which have their own merits) and get much of the same content, but I can't laugh along with him and one of his pals or a pro athlete tossing out an impromptu joke in one of his columns: only on his podcast.

> The podcast is very well done, but each one is about an hour long.

Many podcast apps have a pitch stable speedup function, that increases the playback speed. I'm currently at 2.1x, but I have a blind friend that listens to email via TTS at something like 4x. It's a skill that you can practice and ramp up over time.

> I'd much rather have it as a blog post where I can skim through to find the pieces that interest me.

Personally, podcasts are a supplement to my blog feeds, for the daily commute. There is no public transit to work that's feasible, and even if there was, I generally cannot read in car without getting motion sickness. So reading is pretty much off the table, and instead podcasts fill that slice of daily life.

> Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines.

This is mostly true, although nothing prevents transcripts from being made readable.

    > Personally, I'm not a fan of podcasts at all.

I think your concerns are more about your dislike of podcasts as a medium. Not everyone listens to podcasts strictly to mainline information straight into their brain.

There's something to be said for dialog and for the discovery and exploration of unexpected topics. Moreover, there's an aesthetic associated with the human voice and verbal communication that doesn't necessarily translate to text. Not everything has to have a fine-grained search index for a-la-carte consumption!

For people with long commutes like myself (1 hour +), audio podcasts are a great way to pass the time in he car. Podcasts are a great way to keep your mind occupied when you're sitting in traffic or doing some other tedious and menial task. Sitting down and actively listening to a podcast while doing nothing else is not very appealing to most people.

Me, when I'm able to read a book, I certainly prefer to do that, too.

But I can't really read a book while I'm driving, or walking to work, or cooking dinner, or cleaning the kitchen, or working out, or knitting, or soldering, or doing a jigsaw puzzle, or playing video games.

I seriously enjoy humor or political / debate podcasts, especially while commuting, but technical podcasts never stick.

I find when getting into a new framework (something like Rails or React) then it's an interesting bit of "immersion learning" to throw on the latest episode of the big associated podcast. Maybe I pick up a bit of knowledge, but just hearing people speak naturally about the framework helps me build a fuzzy roadmap in my head of the big subjects to tackle.

> Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines.

Google is actively working with the podcast community and encouraging podcasters to structure their data to be accessible in search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/podcast

I use them as white noise with the potential of an interesting tidbit here and there. I like having something playing in my headphones while working and podcasts have become something I turn to. Most of the time I'm focused on what's on my screen but every now and again an interesting story comes up that I stop to listen to.

Also about your search engine comment, Google has basically crawled and tagged through all your images if you use google photos. They've added automated closed captioning to almost every single youtube video. I would not be shocked if they're in the process of transcribing and indexing every single podcast available on google podcasts. Once they do that, you could probably search for "orange chicken recipe" and it would skip to the 55:16 where they're talking about that very thing.

Audio-only medium have benefits over text and video. For example, you don't need to be fully engaged to consume audio in the same way you need to be to consume text or video (i.e. it's easy to vacuum your house or drive a car while listening to a podcast. Not so easy while reading a book or watching a movie).

>Overall, text just works better for the kinds of content I'm interested in.

You're making such a weird argument. Podcasts are not replacements for books. Books do things that podcasts can't. Podcasts do things that books can't. Don't want to listen to podcasts or music? Don't. Read your books and be happy.

>Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines.

That's a problem for search engines to solve. In principle, search engines could auto-transcribe podcasts and index that.

>If I want to find the podcast where they talked about an interesting thing that I want to revisit, and it's not in the episode description, it's basically lost forever.

Again, indexing is not something that the medium needs to solve. That's for others to figure out. Text is easy to index. Images are harder to index, audio is harder still, and video is probably the worst.

I prefer nonfiction audiobooks to podcasts. Good books have years of effort put into them to present a cohesive narrative with deep research and subtle detail. Podcasts feel rushed in comparison. I can also listen to classic books that will continue to be relevant for hundreds or thousands of years, where most podcasts will be stale in months or years.

> I'd much rather consume the same content by reading

I think most ppl listen to them when they can't read like driving, working out, on the train, falling asleep ect.

Try casefile podcast if you are into truecrime. I've been travelling around the country and this podcast has kept me company well, although it did make me a little paranoid :D

I like Podcasts mostly because they're something to do with my head while my hands are occupied. I agree that for content that someone may actually care about, the format is a bit of a pain (though not as bad if, like Reply All (for example) you publish transcripts as well.

I am glad I am not the only one. Podcasts are simply not for me.

I am FAR more efficient at reading content than listening to it. Not even close.

And since I am a massive music fan, I rather listen to music than listen to talk. There is so much new music to explore, who has time for podcasts?

I partially agree with you. I don't like audio books, because I prefer the pace of thinking and reading a book.

But, for conversational topics I love podcasts. Long form interviews (1-2-3 hours) that used to be impossible now can be done.

What wee need is a pod-cast-to-text-blog-bot

A bot that will listen to the podcast, ML it and transcribe it into a blog post - when a term is stated verbally, it will look it up and turn it into a link. Over time we will teach the bot with verbal cues for what to lookup.

Basically a virtual Jamie from Joe Rogan's podcast "Pull up" "Google" "where is" "someone said" "lets see" "did you see" "did you read" etc can be triggers for the bot to pull up that relative content and put into the transcript...

Podcasts aren't for reading a prepared text.

They're mostly for conversations.

I like to read too, but its nice to have something to put on while you clean up around the house.

>Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. If I want to find the podcast where they talked about an interesting thing that I want to revisit, and it's not in the episode description, it's basically lost forever.

this is an issue, but I think it is solved by maintaining an active subreddit or discussion forum to discuss the episodes as they are released.

Try searching podcasts by people or topics here https://www.listennotes.com

I walk to/from work (about 40 minutes), so its nice to learn / stay up to date on things. I usually listen to data science related podcasts

I would agree with you if I didn't have a significant commute every day. Many of my interests shouldn't be obsessed at over work (videos or a bunch of reading), but still require my attention. In the car alone on the way home or to work is perfect for that, because I've learned that the rest of my family REALLY REALLY could care less about Lawns Across America.

The other thing is that we often engage with things for two goals: (1) information and (2) entertainment.

Text excels at being extremely efficient for (1), but not as efficient for (2) - at least when compared to multimedia like photos, videos, audio, etc.

Podcasts offer a good balance between (1) and (2), but they are not the high-octane fuel of information that pure text can offer.

Can you read while driving a car or a bike?

You listen to podcasts like you listen to the radio: when you're driving, doing chores, working out, etc.

I personally absorb some type of content, especially story types through my ears better than my eyes. This is perhaps because I enforce it through imagination. When I read, my imagination is still on but to a lesser degree. I also like the emotional impact a voice can make on my imagination.

I'm generally in the same boat as you (I even read my Kindle as I walk to work), with one exception - cleaning the house.

My hands are occupied so I can't hold anything, and it's completely brainless work so I'm free to focus.

I pop in a foreign language podcast and suddenly the time flies by.

You're right, text is a much better medium. However, at least for me, I listen to podcasts at work mostly, or when I am doing something physical like dishes, where reading is impossible (or impractical).

Yeah, I feel the same about podcasts and audiobooks. Would prefer to have it in a written medium.

also depends on your schedule. i dont listen to podcasts when I am in town. But when driving or flying somewhere, I always download a few.

I don't know about you, but I find it hard to read while cooking, jogging, eating, driving, folding laundry, doing the dishes, sweeping/mopping.

Not sure what you are even exactly complaining about. Is it the UI?

I agree that most podcast players just lack features. They're built for "dummies": you can subscribe and click play, that's mostly it.

I'm a power-user. Podcast Addict on Android is the best player I have used, it has a ton of features and extreme customizability. Still, I am now using PocketCasts which is inferior by a wide margin, but it has sync capability, which ends up making my life a lot easier since I don't listen to podcasts on just a single device.

I think ultimately there is still space for another podcast player that is not built for dummies and offers a wide range of features on multiple platforms. Nothing like that exists, as far as I know.

IMO we should celebrate that podcasts have managed to remain an open standard for so long. All of the open standards we have, are basically a historical accident: HTTP, SMTP, etc.

It's really easy for open standards to be killed by big companies, and it's impossible to create a new, open standard and get adoption when big companies already own the space.

I will not listen to podcasts on Spotify, because Spotify cannot be allowed to own podcasts like Youtube owns video.

I kind of can't believe I'm saying this because I almost always want better structured technology but I actually think the simplistic nature of the delivery has protected the medium. Things like lack of DRM, skippable ads may have slowed the profitability of the business and therefor slowed the dumbing down of the content you get when a medium is mined to extract maximum profit.

The infrastructure and delivery is just fine. You can start a podcast easier than ever now. The difficultly is in creating good content, not serving mp3s and RSS.

Discoverability is certainly a concern, but only because there is _so much_ good content out there. I find out about good podcasts via word of mouth much more than any directory or online source.

Eh, I don't see it as a limitation of RSS, it's still up to the aggregator to display the episodes however they want after they've fetched the raw data.

I'm of two minds on this. Sure improvements could be made, but the dead-simple infrastructure is part of what makes podcasts so appealing and what has kept them going. You can fetch an episode or subscribe to a feed, and that's about it. Old unmaintained stuff can continue to be available for ages. No one cares where it's hosted.

All the categorization stuff is totally outside of the podcasts themselves. Sure the default podcast apps suck, but lots of people have tried to do better and haven't caught on in a significant way. There are any number of alternative ways to get podcasts that I hear about all the time on the podcasts I listen to, have you tried those?

But ultimately, I don't think we want a rework of the infrastructure. It's not going to end well for podcasters or podcast listeners. User tracking, ad injection, and platform lock-in will be the priorities of the people who build the next successful podcast protocol.

Apple Podcasts has gotten worse pretty much every year. I have switched to Overcast and I find it excellent. Lean and clean.

I like to listen on desktop and as far as I'm concerned there's nothing good.

For Mac I suffer itunes. For Windows, I ended up installing Blue Stacks and using Google's Podcast app. Nothing native or web-based worked well for me. Unreliable or being delivered through Windows Store which constantly crashes for me were my main issues.

For a while I used live bookmarks with Firefox, that was great but shortly after Firefox removed that feature :)

I don't know why anyone would subject themselves to the awfulness of Apple Podcasts. What were they thinking?! It's just bad.

I have fond memories when I was a teenager, loading my 80gb iPod video full of podcasts I could listen to on trips. The reason I even got into podcasts back then, was I didn't have any money to buy CDs or mp3s, but I could download as many podcasts as I wanted and it was awesome.

I suspect you're correct. I find it surprising that people buy flagship phones that don't include an SD card reader. It seems that there's a belief among some handset manufacturers that storage capacity is only relevant for apps since all media is stored in the cloud. Either that or they just want to charge you for that extra storage. Being able to download hours worth of podcasts on an SD card and not worry about storage is fantastic.

This is not it.. anecdata I stream all the podcasts I listen to, many of which I actually watch on YouTube.. I have unlimited data or 20gb or something like that..

The "download a podcast/movie" is probably an important RITUAL for a lot of people, but I don't see actual lack of space as a key barrier.

This is it. I downloaded every episode of LeVar Burton Reads earlier this week. Over 2GB on top of the 400MB from the other handful I subscribe to. My last phone would complain about insufficient space long before now.

This is a _really_ good point! I'm trying to find some data on this right now... might have to dig through e.g. Apple's previous phone releases to see trends over time.

This is a good point. Desktop/web clients have existed for a while, but I find that I listen to probably 90% of my podcasts on my smartphone. Prior to owning a phone with a large amount of storage, I just didn't really listen to podcasts (at least nowhere near the amount that I am now).

> Closed wall content is bad for everyone.

You said that twice. It's not bad for subscribers. There's a good argument to be made that ad-driven content is bad for everyone. In fact there's an argument to be made that ad-driven content is ushering in the end of the world. Who was it that said "we're building dystopia to maximize clicks." If you pay for your media, you at least know what the product really is.

There's now a glut of overproduced, samey content trying to compete as timewasters for a general audience. It feels like browsing through mass market paperbacks at the supermarket.

I think we're in a golden age if you're interested in fringe politics. Otherwise, we're well past it and on the decline.

I agree that the commercialization has been sucking the air out of interesting "homemade" podcasts. On the other hand, I think the higher popularity has been helping some independent podcasters justify the time they spend on it (some can even make a living from it, like Mike Duncan).

fellow econtalk/cumtown (well more red scare) listener here..

The latest feed refresh used to make me feel "Wow how will I have time to listen to all of these!" whereas now its "God do I really want to listen to any of these."

I guess previously we were all starved of interesting long form conversations (or socialist edgelords) but now we're reasonably satiated and like anything else it has to be good to hold our attention.

I still find a good econtalk pod is one of my greatest pleasures - russ & munger episodes particularly.

Oh I HATE the trend of corporate podcasts shoving episodes of other shows into their feed. I look forward to a new episode of the show I like only to start it and hear some other show. A close second is some podcasts have started putting reruns into their feed. I guess someone told them that missing weeks is bad so they just put a rerun in. Ugh.

I've been reducing my intake as well, after more than a decade of listening to 4+ hours a day worth of podcasts (and still having to skip episodes because I was subscribed to so many).

Podcasts nowadays tend to have way more advertising, long digressions, long intros and credit sequences, more re-runs and crossover episodes. That hasn't happened in a vaccum - the content and production values have gotten a lot more ambitious. A lot of the heavy hitters of modern podcasting have entire staffs dedicated to production, to investigation and research... they have caught up and surpassed radio shows of old, and now are more comparable in scope to a lot of documentary TV shows. Paying for all that has required a very different model of revenue, one that I'm not nearly as interested in consuming.

...but could they even support themselves with a paid subscription model? What's frustrating is that cross-promotion is very effective at increasing subscriber count.

Absolutely. This is why I was hopeful at Google entering the Podcast scene. I was hoping they would use the large amount of data to push podcast recommendations forward.

I have yet to see anyone really doing anything like that, taking your list of subscribed podcasts and using that to recommend you new ones. Seems like a trivial and extremely useful service to provide.

I almost never listen to podcasts for this reason, and because it is vastly more efficient to read than it is to listen to a couple of people talking who may or may not be sticking to the topic.

It's funny the market effect, if you're, say, John Dolan, it's vastly more time efficient to spend an hour and a half talking to your buddy and get paid for it than it is to spend many hours researching and writing a 1000 or 2000 word essay on a topic that nobody wants to pay for. It's kind of interesting the psychology here: people will pay for things which take hours out of their week, but won't pay for the thing which takes 3 minutes to read, even if the 3 minute thing contains more information. From my perspective; the denser information is more valuable!

Where do you find them? I keep trying to get into podcasts (tech, computer science, military, history...) but I really struggle. A sea of ancient abandoned shows when I search on my iPhone, seems nothing still running? Where should I be looking?

Upping the listening speed is the only cure I know of. Quite a few podcasters can be listened to exclusively at up to 2x the normal speed without significant impairment to their content.

Of course, some others talk so quickly that 1x is the best you can do.

What music do you listen to?

The stuff Rogan advertises is so bizarre. It has been a couple of weeks since I listened to him, but the one I can remember best was some sort of payment app that supposedly paid the user to use the app. Then there have been various AM-radio-type "nutritional" products. Maybe mainstream firms don't want to be associated with him, but how do the goofballs he advertises come up with 8 figures every year?

We match up well in when we started listening to podcasts, and what we listened to. But I still love Retronauts! I still like the more discussion-oriented episodes that mix deep insights along with personal experiences, but I'm still impressed by the consistent quality.

ymmv, but Cane & Rinse might be worth a try. Have about 350 episodes, each focusing on a single older game. The hosts are usually a lot more focused on talking about their memories of the games than trying to be entertaining (there's a lot of wannabe comedians in the videogaming podcast sphere ime). Only thing that seems a potential big issue with Cane and Rinse is that it's UK based but tbh I'd assume the lack of a fixation on NES would be a breath of fresh air compared to other podcasts

The Jeremy Parish led episodes of Retronauts with Benj Edwards have been really good in recent times too, very informative.

At least GB puts out so much content I don't have time for another podcast...

That's an awesome thing that you made! So far I've just been doing very limited searching from within Overcast. This is pretty much exactly what I was looking for, plus a whole bunch of features I didn't even know I wanted :).

+1 for the ListenNotes API. Easily better than anything else out there.

>> inquisitive and asks questions, and never over speaks them, treats them with respect and asks questions from a point of curiosity...

spot on - this is what I like about Joe Rogan podcasts too.

Most interviewers can't help talking or interrupting, just when the interviewee was about to say something interesting.

That quality of an interviewer is something that not all podcast hosts have. I find that if an interviewer is a trained journalist (i.e. Ira Glass), they do ask questions from a point of curiosity, even if they know the answer.

Contrast to someone like Dax Shepard, or in some cases Sam Harris, where they may monologue during an interview, or basically try to interject knowledge or anecdotes to prove they know the material. Harris I can deal with, and to his credit he will sometimes shut up and let the guest talk (e.g. Harris interviewing Zeynep Tufekci). I had to turn Shepard's podcast off after about 10 minutes.

I agree wholeheartedly! With my podcasts I feel I know the hosts, I look forward to the content, they may have ads but they pick them to match the content and they are still honest about the products they present in those ads. I don't know what it is, but it feels much more personal (I mainly listen to Jupiter Broadcasting podcasts (no more ads since recently) and some related ones but also Twit and NoAgenda (no ads at all) from time to time. Looking very much forward to the continuation of Stephen Fry's Great Leap Years...

I even feel personal interest in the lives of the hosts. Some I've been listening to for over a decade.

My feelings exactly! So much great stuff covering every subject.

Note that you can add The Economist's audio feed to your Podcast app. So your 1 and 2 can be the same :)

Seems like audio books would be a good addition to your list of media consumption.

I'm building an app on listennotes right now. It's a fantastic API and wenbin provides amazing support!

Teenagers mostly don't have long commutes, which is where a lot of podcast listening seems to happen.

> Spotify grew into the second largest platform bringing in a lot of fresh air and slowly but steadily eating into and breaking up Apple's monopoly.

Apple's "monopoly" isn't much of a monopoly at all, though. Apple has been a good citizen of the podcast world, because it's purely a directory that points to normal RSS files. Apple has made no move to provide user-specific analytics or walled-in podcasts. Spotify likely has very different motives.

Offtopic, but do you know of any good German fiction podcasts? I'm looking for something like LeVar Burton Reads in German. I'm somewhere around B1/B2 and trying to improve a little.

I listen to a lot of IQ Wissenschaft und Forschung, but need a bit of variety.

I've had a lot of trouble searching due to localization services.

> Plus, the whole idea

What idea are you referring to? The article I read talks about why podcasts are becoming more popular but doesn't present any new idea around advertising (unless I missed it).

I've been listening to podcasts for something like 15 years, since early days of TWiT & Java Posse, but I think my usage has remained the same over that time when I've been in long term relationships.

My current partner and I will listen to more 'general' podcasts when we are both in the car - so things like This American Life, Akimbo, Heavyweight, How I Built This, or Dan Carlin's HH and Common Sense.

When I'm driving or walking around solo, I'll listen to more tech / niche things. Podcasts like the Accidental Tech Podcast, Ruby / React / startup type things, etc.

There is honestly so much good content out there that my 'to-listen' queues in Overcast are overflowing for both types of listening.

Not married, but in a long-term relationship living with my partner. I listen to them while commuting to work or while doing household chores, and consistently get through 4+ hours/week of podcasts.

I don't find my listening habits change that much when I'm alone, as either way I tend to only listen to them while I'm engaged in some other activity. (When I have completely free time I prefer more interactive activities like games or music.)

99% of my podcast listening is done with my spouse. We've been together 10 years, she got into podcasts a couple of years ago as an alternative to broadcast TV. I would catch snippets of her podcast playlist when she was cooking or otherwise doing something while listening via a speaker rather than headphones. Since I was interested in some of the subjects that came up, I asked to listen to them with her.

We often listen during dinner together, pause to discuss when we hear something we want to talk about, and generally approach it as a group activity.

We started with The Dollop together, but I've soured on that lately because it's become depressing rather than interesting (at least to me). We listen to Sinisterhood (true crime, weird stuff, conspiracies, ghost stories etc), My Favourite Murder minisodes (true crime and user stories that all seem pretty made up), This Podcast Will Kill You (diseases discussed by doctorate students), No Such Thing As A Fish (facts from the people who research for QI), Infinite Monkey Cage (science stuff), etc etc. It's fun, we get to laugh (as most of our stuff has an undercurrent of humour and flippant discussion), and we get to learn stuff too.

Not married but live with my partner for almost 3 years. I listen to podcasts with headphones on at work especially when doing chores. No complaints, though I'm also not doing it 24/7. I've never thought of podcasts as something to do with someone else . Guess it depends on your relationship?

The ads may be annoying, but consider that ad reads in podcasts are a much more ethical and sustainable advertising model than almost any other model out there. In addition, ad read time takes up at most 5% of the total run time of your average podcast.

People who do podcasts as a living or companies where podcasts are their primary revenue source need to make money somehow.

Take How Stuff Works for instance. They have some great informational podcasts like "Stuff you Should Know", "Stuff to Blow your Mind", "Stuff they don't want you to know", and "Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe". These podcasts cover very interesting, and sometimes, very important topics. How stuff works makes their money from selling ad reads in their podcasts and ad space on their blog. They are providing a valuable service and paying people to literally do nothing but research and produce podcasts. These people need to get paid.

My point is, while nobody actually likes ads, the model which podcasts employ is at least tolerable; especially when compared to something like ads on Youtube.

There are a lot of daily activities that don't require your full attention

  - commuting (driving, bicycle, public transport)
  - getting ready for work (shower, getting dressed) 
  - cooking, eating
  - laundry, dishes, vacuuming, ...
  - shopping
  - gardening
  - exercise/working out
  - ...

For me, long walks. I get a little exercise and fresh air. My sister listens to audio books while doing housework. As the article mentions, many people listen while driving.

It's not just you, we're just half-assing both.

Joe Rogan said that roughly half of his audience is watching his videocasts rather than listening to his podcasts

I guess CDNs and services like S3 made it a non-issue.

Overcast (iOS app) does the first of your points.

That's when they sleep so it might be hard to break into that market.