{"id":3469,"date":"2017-07-07T09:08:14","date_gmt":"2017-07-07T08:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amdf-centre.org\/?p=3469"},"modified":"2026-07-05T20:14:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T19:14:12","slug":"new-site-podchaser-helps-listeners-discover-podcasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amdf-centre.org\/2017\/07\/07\/new-site-podchaser-helps-listeners-discover-podcasts\/","title":{"rendered":"New Site Podchaser Helps Listeners Discover Podcasts"},"content":{"rendered":"
Ricardo Bilton |<\/div>\n
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One of the most common gripes about Apple among podcasters, particularly those with smaller audiences, is that the company hasn\u2019t done enough to solve the industry\u2019s discovery problem. While podcast listening continues to climb,\u00a0it does so unevenly<\/a>: Apple\u2019s top podcasts charts are perpetually dominated by a shuffling, but largely identical, list of shows, all from established media brands: This American Life, Planet Money, How Stuff Works, Serial, etc. For smaller shows, it\u2019s hard to break through.<\/p>\n

The \u201cpodcast discovery is broken\u201d maxim, now frustratingly familiar, has spawned no shortage of efforts looking to solve it. A new podcast\u00a0database and discovery site, Podchaser<\/a>, which is billing itself as the \u201cIMDb of podcasts,\u201d is also taking a swing at the issue with what it says is a new spin: a focus on podcast episodes rather than entire shows, as well user-generated tagging and episode-level reviews.<\/p>\n

Podchaser, which is still somewhat barebones in its beta stage (it\u2019s planning a public launch for October,)\u00a0will let users find popular and trending episodes among both smaller and established shows, offering an alternative to other discovery options. Other features in the product roadmap include the ability to follow specific hosts, producers\u00a0and even guests, IMDb-style, across shows. A tagging system will let users find shows through tags that describe a show\u2019s topic (\u201cindie gaming\u201d),\u00a0format (\u201ccasual conversation\u201d)\u00a0and other, more subjective criteria.<\/p>\n

One of Podchaser\u2019s primary goals is to help people discover more shows in the long tail of podcasts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest complaint you hear from podcasters is that the majority of them are only getting 1,000 listens per episode,” said\u00a0Bradley Davis<\/a>, Podchaser\u2019s CEO.\u00a0“They\u2019re in iTunes, but the shows are in these super broad categories where people can\u2019t find them.\u201d\u00a0He pointed to\u00a0Saving The Game<\/a>, a podcast that covers tabletop roleplaying games from a Christian perspective and that is listed in iTunes\u2019 culture section. In Podchaser\u2019s database, on the other hand, users would be able to discover it through multiple tags, including \u201cChristianity\u201d and \u201croleplaying games.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sucks to get buried under culture,” Davis said. “You\u2019re just never going to be found.\u201d (On the business side, Podchaser plans to make at least some of its cash by selling sponsored results in its rankings. It\u2019s also considering some kind of paid analytics product.)<\/p>\n

Podchaser is far from the first attempt to solve the podcast discovery problem, and it\u2019s unlikely to be the last. Various attempts have tried the issue from different angles. There\u2019s\u00a0the app Breaker<\/a>, for example, which lets people view other users\u2019 listening history to find new shows.\u00a0OMNY takes a personalized approach<\/a>, using users\u2019 tastes to make recommendations. Overcast has a feature that lets users find trending podcasts among their Twitter friends. And then there\u2019s the\u00a0recently launched podcast directory site Podsearch<\/a>, which lets people search for shows by keywords.<\/p>\n

Other efforts have quietly disappeared, such as\u00a0ProductHunt\u2019s influential podcast page<\/a>, which the site shut down earlier this year. Pod.echo and Podcat, the latter of which also billed itself as an IMDb for podcasts, have also failed to make an impact so far. (It\u2019s worth mentioning that\u00a0Nick Quah<\/a>, our resident podcasting expert and the brains behind the newsletter Hot Pod,\u00a0isn\u2019t convinced that the discovery problem is as significant<\/a>\u00a0as all of these products make it out to be.)<\/p>\n

These attempts have proliferated largely because Apple, despite its outsize command and influence over the direction of the podcasting industry, has been historically blas\u00e9 about addressing many of the more persistent challenges in podcasting, particularly around discovery, analytics\u00a0and advertising. That\u2019s changing, albeit in small increments. Last month, Apple\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0it would finally offer podcast producers in-episode analytics, giving them (and, just as importantly, their advertisers) much more insight into their listeners\u2019 habits.<\/p>\n

Podchaser says that its value proposition is unchanged in the wake of Apple\u2019s announcement. The site anticipates that it will be able to build Apple\u2019s data into its own analytics product, which will also include episode-level reviews, listener data and other information that it thinks podcast hosts will use to improve their shows and build their audiences.<\/p>\n

Despite discovery\u2019s checkered past, Podchaser thinks it has staying power, thanks in large part to how it\u2019s rolled out its product. The initial idea for the site emerged last year, when Davis asked members of the\u00a0\/r\/podcasts subreddit<\/a>\u00a0why it was still so hard to find new podcast episodes. Many users agreed, and chimed in with their own ideas about what features such a platform should include. Some users even offered to help develop the product. Podchaser has taken much of that early input to heart, using many of those early contributions to develop the site\u2019s current and future features.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of our big advantages is we\u2019re trying to build this bottom-up, feature-wise, and talking to a hundred different podcasts and tons of listeners and asking exactly what they want,\u201d Davis said. At the same time, he said, Podchaser is consciously trying to keep the product small in an effort to avoid the feature creep that has bogged down previous similar efforts. \u201cWe\u2019re not trying to be the next big podcast player. We\u2019re a podcast database, first and foremost.\u201d<\/p>\n

This\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0first appeared on\u00a0Nieman Lab<\/a>\u00a0and is republished with permission.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Main image CC-licensed by Flickr via\u00a0Javonni Christopher<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n