✊ AI-Proof Podcasts III: Why listeners choose podcasts over other content
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Hi friends, Today, we’re continuing our series exploring how to make podcasts worth listening to in the age of AI content. So far, we’ve discussed how, with the value of information trending to zero, the opportunity is to move from teachers to interpreters. From sharing information to filtering, distilling, and making sense of the overwhelming supply of information our audiences are foundering in—based on a strong, idiosyncratic point of view based on our earned experience. To make the most of this shift, however, we have to embrace a countercultural idea: That despite the TikTokification of content and culture… There is an audience for slowness, depth, and nuance. The public play counts of algorithmic platforms make it seem that what people really want is sensational claims, breathless editing, surface-level-takes-presented-as-profound, and the continual compression of ideas into their smallest atomic units. But there is also a large (and growing) audience of people hungry for more substantive content. For slow, thoughtful, nuanced, immersive explorations, unpackings, and debates on the topics they care about. This content is not surface-level, top-of-funnel, biggest-audience-possible content. It will never generate tens or hundreds of millions of views. But it is exactly the type of content that your best future buyers are most hungry for. The type of content that does the heaviest lifting when it comes to building trust, transmitting your point of view, and demonstrating your expertise. And there is no better medium to facilitate this type of content than podcasting. There are a few reasons why. The first is podcasting's platform psychology. Essentially, platform psychology describes the subconscious expectations and usage patterns consumers bring to a platform. For our purposes, podcasting's platform psychology can help us understand why podcast consumers choose podcasting over other content in the first place. Most podcast listeners consume other forms of content on other platforms, after all. So when they reach for a podcast over one of the alternatives, they are looking for a specific experience. But what? For one, as a predominantly long-form medium, when someone chooses to listen to a podcast, they have implicitly indicated that they are actively looking for a long-form exploration of a topic. Otherwise, they would have gone to AI, Google, TikTok, or YouTube. In addition, podcasting implies a certain experience that other content platforms struggle to capture—an experience grounded not in performance and production but in natural, authentic conversation. In short, podcasting simply feels more real than other mediums. The second reason podcasting is so well-suited to build audiences around depth and nuance: Podcasting is an intent-based medium. We are not served up podcasts for mindless consumption. We actively choose them. In fact, many of us like podcasts particularly because it feels like one of the platforms where we are the ones consuming the content rather than being consumed by it. Longtime Scrappy Podcasting reader and host of Famous & Gravy, Michael Osborne, articulated this perfectly when he told me, “Podcasting is where I go to escape the internet”, a feeling I feel more acutely each passing day. The upshot of all of this is that, as creators, we should operate on the assumption that when someone chooses to listen to a podcast, they are actively seeking out a specific type of content experience. An experience we should be designing our shows to deliver. Rather than seeking to make our podcasts more like YouTube and social media—reducing the run-time, sharpening our editing, tailoring our titles, and content strategies to appease the algorithm... We should seek to make our shows more like podcasts. Because whether our audiences are consuming our shows via YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or their personal favourite podcast app, when they choose to consume a podcast, they want a podcast. If you want to optimize your content and ideas to reach the largest audience possible, you should stop podcasting and dedicate yourself to Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok. If you want to grow a podcast, on the other hand, you’re better off designing your show around the things that people come to podcasting as a medium to get: Depth, nuance, context, discussion, immersion, understanding, wisdom, genuine insight. These traits aren't just what podcast consumers in general want when they choose a podcast. They're what your best future buyers are starved for. And what a short-form algorithm-centric strategy will only take you further away from delivering.
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