The most important tales from Scorching Pod Summit

That is Scorching Pod, The Verge’s publication about podcasting and the audio trade. Join right here for extra.

I hope you all had an ideal week! Scorching Pod Summit was loads of enjoyable — it was nice to satisfy so a lot of you in particular person and chat about a number of the largest points within the trade. 

We’ll have extra on that under, however first, some acknowledgments. Massive due to our companions at work x work and the entire On Air Fest crew for bringing the occasion collectively in addition to to the Wythe Lodge for internet hosting us. Additionally, I completely wouldn’t have made it via this with out the assistance of my Verge colleagues Kara Verlaney, Esther Cohen, T.C. Sottek, Helen Havlak, and, in fact, Jake Kastrenakes. Plus, we have been so fortunate that the Decoder crew was all the way down to placed on their first dwell present on the summit. You possibly can hear Nilay Patel’s interview with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s digital audio group, proper right here. 

And eventually, thanks to our sponsors for the occasion: AdsWizz and Subtext. AdsWizz is a self-serve promoting platform for creating and operating audio adverts. Subtext is a textual content messaging platform designed to attach creators immediately with their subscribers.

It takes a village to make a podcast trade occasion, people! Now, some highlights from the summit.

YouTube declares that podcasts are coming to YouTube Music

Love to interrupt some information at Scorching Pod Summit. I had the chance to take a seat down with Kai Chuk, head of podcasting at YouTube, and Steve McLendon, Google’s product lead for podcasting, and discuss their plans for the medium. The crux of it: podcasts will quickly be obtainable on YouTube Music in each the free and paid variations. It marks a significant departure from YouTube’s video-first strategy to podcasting to date.

They have been keenly conscious of YouTube’s new-ish place of energy within the trade and likewise the drawbacks of their platform. Though it has turn out to be the most-used podcast platform available on the market, it’s nonetheless greatest for video podcasts. Audio-only podcasts operate in the identical method however with a static picture and not one of the listening options shoppers are used to with different platforms. “It’s pretty obvious that we haven’t had a great solution for audio as of yet. And there’s a whole new cohort of users and creators who we haven’t really been optimizing for as well as we can,” Chuk mentioned. “That’s something that we do want to change.”

On YouTube Music, listeners can have entry to the sorts of options they’ve come to anticipate on different platforms, like background listening, downloads, pace management, and the power to change between video and audio. McLendon additionally mentioned the crew is engaged on integrating RSS into the platform; at launch, although, the platform is actually simply enabling a greater consumption expertise for present video podcasts. Whereas that every one sounds grand, YouTube Music is way smaller than YouTube correct: 80 million subscribers versus 2.5 billion customers. YouTube’s edge is its searchability and attain. Chuk and McLendon mentioned it doesn’t should be an both / or strategy.

“I don’t expect podcasts to only live on YouTube Music, that’s the only way that people consume podcasts on YouTube,” Chuk mentioned. “We expect there to be kind of a back and forth between the two.”

McLendon used his personal expertise for instance, when he discovered a Kevin Systrom podcast interview on YouTube when he was at his work laptop after which switched to the audio model when he bought into his automotive to go house. Permitting shoppers to hop from one to the opposite goes to be a precedence. “We’ll bridge some of those experiences in seamless ways for the user and really center on the user journey,” McLendon mentioned.

That’s already how many individuals use YouTube podcasts anyway (or I do, a minimum of): discovering it via Google after which switching to a listening platform. The important thing, I believe, will probably be getting them to remain in YouTube’s ecosystem. Proper now, you can begin one thing on YouTube and end the remaining on Spotify or Apple. I’ll be curious to see whether or not and the way customers will probably be directed straight to the YouTube Music platform — and whether or not this might assist bulk up YouTube Music’s subscriber numbers.

How the economics of audiobooks could change

I used to be additionally actually pumped to dig into the world of audiobooks, which bought a brand new large participant in Spotify when the corporate accomplished its buy of Findaway final yr. I spoke with Spotify’s head of audiobooks, Nir Zicherman, in addition to writer and podcaster Gretchen Rubin and Penguin Random Home Audio’s senior vice chairman of manufacturing, Dan Zitt. With the entire pipeline represented — creator, writer, and platform — we have been in a position to study how Spotify’s plans for shifting the enterprise mannequin of audiobooks may affect the trade.

As an extension of the standard publishing financial system, the audiobooks mannequin has been fairly regular for some time now. Shoppers, who principally come to the medium as e book readers, both purchase premium titles a la carte on one thing like Apple Books (often for $10–$20 a pop) or have a subscription to Audible or audiobooks.com for about $15 a month. It retains costs carefully in keeping with print costs. Spotify has chosen the a la carte route to begin, however Zicherman says that the corporate will search to develop the way it monetizes audiobooks.

“Applying a blanket approach to everything — every piece of content, every creator, just like in podcasting — I think actually hurts the industry,” Zicherman mentioned. “So the future that I see at Spotify is many different business models to support all the different types of podcast content that exists and all the different types of audiobook content that exists.”

Former Spotify content material and promoting chief Daybreak Ostroff talked about at an investor occasion final yr that audiobooks could possibly be obtainable totally free, supported by promoting. Zicherman wouldn’t say whether or not Spotify would go down that path however solely mentioned that the mannequin can be “interesting” (cryptic!). He additionally talked about that Spotify is wanting right into a Netflix-style subscription possibility as properly. 

Rubin, who has one other e book popping out this spring, went via the potential advantages and disadvantages of utilizing ad-supported distribution for her personal work. “On the one hand, a listener might really like advertising support, because then that means it’s free to them. So that could bring in people to my work that wouldn’t otherwise get it,” she mentioned. “On the other hand, we all know that if people are used to paying for something, you would rather them keep paying for it, rather than starting to give it to them for free. Because once people give something for free, it can be hard to reel that back.”

Zitt was additionally intrigued, if involved, about what it may imply for the power of creators to make a residing. “I think a menu of options in how people sell content is a good thing — with the aside that content creators are being paid fairly for the content,” he mentioned. “Some of the models I’ve seen that have come and gone have not been beneficial to the artist, only to the platform.”

Can narrative podcasts make cash?

That is Nick Quah’s space, and sadly, his flight from Idaho was snowed out. So I stepped in with various levels of success. (You’ll should ask the individuals who witnessed it.) Massive due to John Perotti, co-founder and CCO of Rococo Punch, and Kate Osborn, EVP of improvement at Kaleidoscope, for placing up with me. They gave nice perception into the way you get a premium narrative podcast made lately, particularly when studios can go for chat reveals which are low-cost to make with doubtlessly excessive returns.

So how a lot does it price to make an honest limited-run narrative podcast? “$250,000 is the floor to make truly good narrative, engaging content,” mentioned Osborn. “I’d rather make less than make it for under the resources that we [need].” And if the story requires journey or prolonged investigations, that can push the value tag up even larger.

Perotti defined how, when he went out pitching the present that grew to become final yr’s critically acclaimed collection Welcome to Provincetown, he bought no bites. So he self-financed the venture till getting funding from Stitcher’s Witness Docs. The danger was value it. “Because we did it that way, we own the feed. Not only do we own the feed, it’s going to be a television show, or at least it’s been optioned for television,” he mentioned. “So it’s like, yeah, that’s a lottery ticket, I get it. But that’s value.”

Getting optioned for TV could also be a lottery ticket for podcast creators, however there are different methods to monetize their reveals. “The IP game is great, but that’s not all it is, right?” Osborn mentioned. “It could be a play, it could be a live show, or literally a physical product… doing all of those things together, I think, makes sense.”

iHeartMedia’s Conal Byrne on buying and selling exclusivity for broad attain

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel sat down with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia’s digital audio group, for a dwell interview. They coated loads of floor, however one theme that stored developing time and again was iHeart’s technique to get as broad an viewers as doable and letting locations like Spotify and Audible make performs for unique content material.

“I choke my audience if I choose to pull my RSS feed out of a distribution app, because people who go there and expect it there won’t see it anymore,” Byrne mentioned. “It’s why we widely distribute. Otherwise, I’d be sitting up here saying, ‘We are really working hard to get everybody on the iHeartRadio app.’ The business and the economics of podcasting today still sit with the creator and the publisher, because you own the pipe that you distribute your shows through. I haven’t found a business model that proves it differently, so I think it behooves all of us to plug that pipe into as many distribution points as possible.”

Byrne additionally insisted that advertising podcasts on broadcast radio has been invaluable for the corporate’s podcast enterprise. “We have about 70-ish shows in the iHeart Podcast Network that drive over 1 million monthly downloads or more,” he mentioned. “The only reason we have that number is because of broadcast radio marketing.” That’s a lot simpler to perform, in fact, when your dad or mum firm owns greater than 860 radio stations throughout the nation and would profit from different podcast corporations following in variety!

As Nilay famous, there are dangers with casting such a large web. He requested Byrne a couple of Bloomberg report final yr that discovered iHeart had labored with a agency referred to as Jun Group to purchase podcast downloads via freemium cellular video games. First, Byrne denied doing such a factor. Then he certified the observe. “We have experimented with Jun Group across the years. I think our stats were something like never more than 1 percent, 2 percent, 2.5 percent of our downloads in any given month,” he mentioned. “We don’t use it anymore.”

It was an enchanting dialog, and you’ll take heed to it wherever you get podcasts or try the transcript on The Verge.

Whew that was an extended one! I slept for like 15 hours after this occasion. I’ll want a beat for the subsequent one. See you subsequent week.