Joe Hayashi is the product manager for the recently launched Yahoo! Podcasts. It’s a podcasting directory with search capability and folksonomy-style tags, giving you multiple ways of browsing for interesting podcasts. They’ve also done some nice things that allow you to listen to to podcasts directly through their site — even controlling the playback speed.
Yahoo! Podcasts has been out for about a month, and they’ve already learned a few things:
First, who is listening to podcasts? One thing they’ve seen is that over 80% of the audience is men, ages 30-44 (the typical “early-adopter” market). But… women are stronger in the younger demographic.
Listeners outnumber subscribers by 2:1. Among subscribers, the average subscribes to over three podcasts.
Community matters. Listeners can rate podcasts or add tags to podcasts, providing lateral navigation.
Metadata is the lifeline to your listeners.
- Create and use show notes; be specific.
- Create and use album art. Use iTunes tags.
- Use a duration
- Spell check
- Match ID3 tags to episode information
- Use an RSS validator
Yahoo sees podcasting broadening and growing, and there is a lot of opportunity for more, different genres and new forms of podcasts. New tools will bring in new publishers, which in turn will broaden the audience. Podcasts will move from iPods and PCs to phones, TVs, PSP and other devices down the road. Video or vidcasts are coming. And monetization is coming (marketing, advertising, premium content). The market is still very young.
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