It’s about time we outline the reasons why finding new podcasts can feel so difficult (and what you can do to fix it)
In our 81st blog post, we thought it was time to finally address the question we are here to solve: the reasons why podcast discovery is so hard. There are over 4.5 million podcasts available worldwide so you can imagine that going through that directory is impossible for a listener. Throw in the fact that most of these pods are dead feeds with no new episodes and you are stuck in an even bigger pickle. As an agency, we help shows become more visible to their potential listeners so that people don’t have to search for you. And yet, it is still hard! Frustratingly so.
So while we are here to answer your questions about how you can make your show more attractive for newcomers, here are the reasons why everyone in the industry should care about podcast discovery:
Number 1: Podcast Apps Rely on Charts
Similarly to how we all used to find music before Spotify came in the picture, most and if not all podcast apps rely on charts. Even the Apple Podcasts front page got a new glow up that made its chart positioning even more prominent! The Top 100 podcast charts are not going away and it is important to note that charts mainly work on momentum from new follows. If you look at the top 10 podcasts in the charts today you are likely to see some legacy big brands like Goalhanger and Diary of a CEO, and that is also because they have the continuous fanbases and years of content that push them up. The tough part about this is that charts do favour scale and not relevance, so independent shows rarely stick around high up and therefore are even harder to discover.
Number 2: SEO Is Still a Problem
Most shows are really difficult to search for. There are loads of ways you can help your podcast description to hit some SEO marks but unless your listener is search for the exact wording you used, they may struggle to find your episode. This is also why transcripts and YouTube are so important in your podcast discovery journey. If you do have video and are capable of editing it, put it up on YouTube. It is better indexed and will help listeners find your show if they are searching for a specific problem they need an answer to.
Number 3: Discovery is Not (Quite) Personal
It’s true that some podcasting platforms like Spotify and YouTube do offer personalisation and algorithmic recommendations… but many don’t and even those that do only have it as part of the user interface. Listeners still have to do most of the heavy lifting and platforms can choose to turn on algorithmic recommendations for different shows. But many of the ‘You liked this show, maybe try that show too’ skew to bigger rather than smaller recommendations.
Number 4: Social Media is Important, but Not for Listeners
You might be thinking, ‘woah! Did they just say that socials aren’t important?’ Wrong. Socials are still important. But they rarely drive direct listenership on the feed. Instead they are a great way to fill up the 7 touchpoints of marketing to keep reminding listeners about your existence. And yet, they are also not the way to go if you don’t have the resource because they rarely drive subscriptions. We love that you can now link YouTube Shorts to full video, and if only we could do more links for other platforms… that would be dreamy, too.
Clearly, there is no shortage of great content out there for all of us to listen to but there is an issue with how we discover said content. As the industry gets bigger and even more shows flood the market, we hope that marketing and discovery will become an even bigger part of the conversation. In the meantime…