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Do We Need The Zillow Of Podcasting?
Podcast Pontifications

Do We Need The Zillow Of Podcasting?

Jan 24 2022 • 14m 4s

Show Notes

Buying a house and finding a new podcast have more in common than you'd think. You aren't always in the market for both, and there's a problem if you have too many of either. Can lessons from one inform the other?I remain skeptical that anyone will ever build the YouTube of podcasting. But the Zillow of podcasting? Now that's an interesting proposition, weird as though it may sound.Zillow flipped the script and put would-be homebuyers in complete control of the "discovery" part of home buying. Today, anyone with an internet connection can use Zillow to view almost every property for sale, almost anywhere in the entire country. So what does this have to do with podcasting? Especially when most podcasts are publicly listed in every app and directory along with millions of other podcasts?Zillow's trick wasn't just giving homebuyers access to a lot more listings. It was how Zillow unpacked and exposed data—lots of data—for every property. That's what a Zillow-like service could bring to podcasting. How about recommendations that are (finally) based on criteria you either establish or are inferred from your listening activities that give a much higher degree of certainty? The recommendation engines in podcasting today are rudimentary at best. Imagine a new discovery system that atomized, ingested, and analyzed podcasts, making push-based discovery demonstrably better.Or how about a sort of "open house" for podcasts that lets the listener experience what it's like to "live in" a podcast for a while. Some type of lower level of commitment than subscribing to or following a show could be attractive to listeners who don't want to risk the hassle of unsubscribing to or unfollowing a show that wasn't a perfect fit. Those are just two quick examples of the benefits a service like this might offer podcast listeners. But there is a slew of challenges.The good news is that most datasets are public and have adequate APIs. But the bad news is that those data sets are woefully inadequate to perform the type of analysis needed here. Anyone seriously trying to develop a system like this has to invest time and resources to create new complementary data sets. Who's going to pay for that?A service like this wades into very treacherous waters. Just like Zillow pissed off many of the extant real estate industry big networks, powerful podcasters, or dominant listening/discovery platforms, may see this as a threat and fight against it.But the biggest hurdle to overcome is the one that makes this a winning service: listener adoption. This new service cannot be incrementally better than what listeners go through today. It has to be orders of magnitude better. Like Zillow was.-----LinksGetting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! - evoterra.link/gumball Podchaser.comIs Podcast Listening Too Big Of An Ask? - podcastpontifications.com/episode/is-podcast-listening-too-big-of-an-askpodcastpontifications.com/episode/is-podcast-listening-too-big-of-an-askOver 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout. - evoterra.link/buzzSerious about podcasting? Join the Advancing Podcasting Community today! - AdvancingPodcasting.xyz------ Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. New episodes are released four times a week, providing ideas and questions every serious podcaster should be thinking about.It's created and hosted by
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