Getting podcasts to go viral
I came across a couple of very interesting articles discussing why podcasts, specifically audio, and long form videos, never really go viral.
Why Audio Never Goes Viral
Let Me Share This Podcast With You
Quote:
Tastemakers are like virus broadcasters, picking up outstanding, or “unexpected,” Internet phenomena that might otherwise never spread beyond their initial communities, and spraying their spores onto larger followings.
In short is seems as long when it comes to getting podcasts or clips to go viral, it all comes down to reaching out beyond your own community. I find that to be spot on. We all have our own communities of fans that listen or watch our content. Sure we would all love for our content to go viral. Get picked up by Gawker, viewed millions of times on YouTube. But how does that happen? And why is that less likely to happen with audio podcasts and long form video podcasts?
Quote:
We are trained by the podcast players to become creatures of habit. “Is it Tuesday? Can I listen to Back to Work live today? Well… I can listen to half… Should I wait?” “I streamed half this episode of Bionic in the browser… Where did I leave off?” Those all sound silly, but they are the minor annoyances that dedicated fans fret over.
Podcasting really relies on making listeners jump through these silly hoops; over-and-over, week-to-week. They are trivial, of course, but if fans need to think about these minor things then I imagine they must be part of what’s keeping the unwashed masses away from podcasts. Live listening is particularly annoying because you need to contort your schedule to get your happening-right-this-second dopamine fix. The 5by5 network has their own mobile, streaming-player apps, but there is no way to pause and record it like a DVR. There is no way to bookmark that location and shift it to your podcast player when the episode is available for download.
These are such great points the author makes. Podcasting is a very isolated thing for fans. We all have our communities where it takes a conscious effort to keep track of our favorite podcasts. I think this makes it more difficult to get new fans. It seems like there should be a better way of aggregating and sharing content, especially specific parts.
Quote:
A huge improvement will come when people can pass time codes as arguments for players. Not because I want to manually format those time strings, but because I hope apps will helpfully offer to do that for me. They will say, “Here’s the bookmarklet to save your position to Downcast, or anywhere else.” Then I will drop to my knees, weeping tears of salty joy.
Simply subscribing to a podcast, or sharing your link on Twitter/Facebook isn't enough these days. Podcasts need a social community that's a cross between iTunes and YouTube.
What are your thoughts on these articles? Is the way we do podcasting today prohibitive of getting our content to the masses? Do we need to provide transcripts of what we upload?
