Podcasting

“Like, most people never even listen to the content. They're just looking for an excuse because your podcast gave them so much value. That will always work. It worked today. It worked a hundred years ago, and it will work a hundred years from now.”

“The problem, Sean, is if you have a podcast where you're interviewing, you figure out the target audience, you've outreached the people, then you bring those people to your platform and you show their expertise. That's not really building your personal brand. …”

“I think we're going to see a new wave of growth driven by the video players, the streamers.”

“Discovery platforms are anything with an algorithm where there's like inherent mechanism for connecting new consumers to content. And in relationship platforms, there is no mechanism. It's decentralized. So on the relationship side, there's only a few, and I a…”

“We all know that the money is in the audio.”

“I just think they're one of the most like miraculous tools for education. So the way I think about what podcasting actually is, I think podcasting is the printing press for the spoken word.”

“A solo history podcast is not the optimal format for this medium of podcasting. When people think of podcasting, they think of exactly what's happening right now, one person talking to another”

“The unfair advantage that we have is essentially like we'd be like professional learner. You know, like, you get to study somebody, you get to have a multi-hour conversation with them, and like, oh wait, he said that, or she said this, like, I'm gonna take tha…”

“In the media business, in podcasting, You can grow your audience, and thus your revenue, and thus your importance in the world. All outputs can scale completely independently of your inputs.”

“Podcasting as a medium is very enticing for, like, sloppy thinking also, because it's not like being grilled by a journalist, you know, for the most part, like, it's mostly non-adversarial, and same with most public speaking, like, you were invited, they want …”

“If this is content marketing, it ain't gonna work. It's gotta be the main thing.”

“Podcasting. I was like, I feel like this is going to be a thing. And like, that was, I think a pretty good read. Cause I ended up being like a decent chunk of our revenue.”

“I mean, you could argue that Apple lost the entire podcast business based on, like, based on their religion around taste.”

“We didn't know before we started. If podcasting and later audio books would be cannibalistic to the other media types or not, but it turns out it's not.”

“Podcasting is a tough mark market, low margins, podcasters are broke. So the fact that they would shell out additional money seemed unlikely.”

“Having somebody on your podcast is the modern equivalent of an olive branch.”

“There are thousands of podcasts that are amazing. But podcast is a shit business to be in now, because it's so hard, unless you started years ago.”

“What's interesting is the ones that I sometimes think, holy moly, that was incredible, don't do as well as I would think. And sometimes ones I don't, I think didn't go amazing actually do a lot better than I think. And I think there's like a difference between…”

“The podcast world is in need of a breath of fresh air with all these bros.”

“Podcasting is a super competitive game, and the only way to grow is through word of mouth and promotion on social.”

“Podcasting is a super competitive game, and the only way to grow is through word of mouth and promotion on social.”

“Podcasting is a super competitive game these days, and the only way to grow is through word of mouth and promotion on social.”

“Somehow, when you do that and talk naturally, you sound subdued and with low energy. It's just this weird thing that cameras and microphones do, and so I now, at this point, I naturally switch. When I'm in front of a microphone, I talk just a little bit differ…”

“The problem with podcasting is podcasting is like bottom of funnel. It's like where people, you know, form a deep relationship. It's not where they meet you.”

“They totally bootstrap their way to become the scale player in podcasting. So to the extent that there is a big pile of money waiting to be the scale player in podcasting, they're well positioned to make it given the half billion dollars or three quarters of a…”

“I think if you want a podcast to make money, it's probably not something you should get into. Like, even if you have an audience, it's probably not the best way. I think if you have a massive audience, it can work, but like, it takes a really long time. Like, …”

“Training some, you know, AI on how we speak, just feeding it the transcript of our 500 episodes, and then having it write the ads for us in our own voice, and then actually synthesizing our voices. And reading the ads for us so we don't actually have to record…”

“So there are no breakout hits. No episode is ever twice as big as your next best episode.”

“We found that sometimes if we're overly prepped, I'm barely listening to the other person. I just know where I'm going.”

“I think this is why VCs like Twitter. And why VCs like crypto, and why VCs like podcasting. You know, it's like you see numbers go up every day, and you can get a feedback loop, right?”

“The thing about podcasting that is worse than basically almost every other platform is that there is no built in growth mechanism. There is no built in easy sharing mechanism. It's like, if you're reading an email and you're like, I have an idea of a friend th…”

“If you don't have an audience, like, don't, honestly, because it's so hard to get, there's no discovery built in within podcasting.”

“If you look at podcasting, it's like the average podcast ends after like 10 episodes.”

“We talked about it mostly for music, music discovery, but the same problem, it's the same problem and even harder for podcasts. So we're still focused very heavily on helping spot, on helping podcast creators find more audience. This is, like I said, it's even…”

“But the better way to think about audio books and podcasting is it's really around a business model mostly. So one way to frame it instead would be Podcasting is ad supported audio and audiobooks is paid audio.”

“And if every podcast was monetized like FM radio, it's probably that big. So it can probably like 20 X, 50 X, a hundred X. I don't know.”

“I think that it has the benefit of what you said, that people become really loyal very quickly, but it's the hardest to grow.”

“All content, because there were a limited number of channels and a limited number of time slots, everything had to be produced for the lowest common denominator, and now you can opt into your niche and find the highest quality content in that niche.”

“One of the superpowers of podcasting is it's authenticity scaled.”

“The thing was within instantly you could communicate to the guest was you are going to be okay here with me. When I saw that, right. And I don't want to claim we even get close to any of that, but I was like, this is what our goal is. Like every show, right. I…”

“No, look, I think podcasting is, of all the businesses we have, is the least affected by the macro, because it has such a fundamental strength.”

“I think it is at least as large as social networking, you know, two, three billion plus. The way I think about it is I think music and actually podcasting is a Sort of a core human behavior like communication. And that means that the sort of time in, in, you k…”

“I'm actually stronger on like B to B companies using podcasting because it has that exact same value I just described, but each one of their customers is substantially more valuable. So they don't need the scale that a consumer like application or product woul…”

“There's one thing about actually going and tweeting 200 and some odd characters, but, you know, being in people's ears all the time definitely builds affinity.”

“Podcast is not designed to be addictive because you don't get these like viral spurts. It's slow and steady compounding with no immediate feedback.”

“It's not about the room. It's about the show. You know, like everything we think of as social audio is really just a feature of creating a show, creating a new podcast.”

“People spend so much money on recording their stuff, and I actually don't think that's important, but when you have something like we have, which is like you kind of hit this lick, it's important to invest, and I think we've under invested, which is crazy.”

“I think podcasting is interesting because it lets you basically have like 10,000 people who kind of learn what you're about. And they can either decide if they like you or not. And if they opt in and they like you, you've already pre you've pre like sold them …”

“The tools for creators on YouTube are far more sophisticated right now. I believe, and I could be wrong in this, that you can capture more information from a YouTube audience than a podcast audience. And so I think we can always drive people to listening to th…”

“There was only five hundred million dollar market cap in podcasting two years ago, and so I went out and I bought a top indie podcast player We ended up starting a business in that space”

“No, but I think if you're a betting man, betting person, you would say Google will start indexing audio very soon, and that's what we think. So the SEO impact of podcasting will get massive, you know, for folks that have hundreds of shows.”

“Because the way the podcasts work is you launch a podcast, and when you launch it has an audience of zero. But you have to pay the people to make the podcast, and they're going to work for you for a few months before you're able to launch. And then once the po…”

“There were two, like, Basically, industry-level challenges that we were confronting along with every other podcast company, and one was audiences are still having a really hard time discovering new podcasts. Like, if you ask people how they find out new podcas…”

“Podcasting, and even, I probably say newsletters, it's one of the last ways to get direct free speech from someone's mind out into the world, and people will say things in a podcast that they couldn't Print or they can do something in a newsletter they couldn'…”

“Metric driven content production that's very professionally done sometimes loses the magic of podcasting.”

“There's been, ah, basically professors that have quit their teaching positions to be full-time podcasters because they quite literally make millions of dollars podcasting.”

“Anytime I ask a brand and say, Hey, what's, what's your highest ROI marketing channel? They'll usually say podcasting and then email.”

“I think people are used to curating their lives a little bit more with DVR and Netflix. They're used to, like, programming their own entertainment, and podcasting doesn't seem like that big of a deal anymore.”

“I think podcasting just eclipses the public radio connection. I mean, I would rather have one podcast listener than 10,000 radio listeners. It's that important.”

“I don't think that there's this notion that it's risky to go into podcasting, that it's lesser than I think it feels like the most exciting thing. I think it's equivalent to the kind of the startup world where, you know, you could have had a, you know, a great…”