The largest tales from Scorching Pod Summit

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

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

We’ll have extra on that under, however first, some acknowledgments. Huge due to our companions at work x work and the entire On Air Fest staff for bringing the occasion collectively in addition to to the Wythe Lodge for internet hosting us. Additionally, I completely wouldn’t have made it by this with out the assistance of my Verge colleagues Kara Verlaney, Esther Cohen, T.C. Sottek, Helen Havlak, and, after all, Jake Kastrenakes. Plus, we had been so fortunate that the Decoder staff was all the way down to placed on their first stay 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 at last, thanks to our sponsors for the occasion: AdsWizz and Subtext. AdsWizz is a self-serve promoting platform for creating and working audio advertisements. Subtext is a textual content messaging platform designed to attach creators instantly with their subscribers.

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

YouTube broadcasts 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 speak about their plans for the medium. The crux of it: podcasts will quickly be accessible on YouTube Music in each the free and paid variations. It marks a serious departure from YouTube’s video-first method to podcasting to date.

They had been keenly conscious of YouTube’s new-ish place of energy within the trade and in addition the drawbacks of their platform. Though it has develop into the most-used podcast platform available on the market, it’s nonetheless greatest for video podcasts. Audio-only podcasts perform in the identical manner however with a static picture and not one of the listening options customers are used to with different platforms. “It’s fairly apparent that we haven’t had an amazing answer for audio as of but. And there’s a complete new cohort of customers and creators who we haven’t actually been optimizing for in addition to we will,” Chuk stated. “That’s one thing that we do need to change.”

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

“I don’t count on podcasts to solely stay on YouTube Music, that’s the one manner that individuals devour podcasts on YouTube,” Chuk stated. “We count on there to be form of a forwards and backwards between the 2.”

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 automobile to go residence. Permitting customers to hop from one to the opposite goes to be a precedence. “We’ll bridge a few of these experiences in seamless methods for the consumer and actually heart on the consumer journey,” McLendon stated.

That’s already how many individuals use YouTube podcasts anyway (or I do, at the very least): discovering it by Google after which switching to a listening platform. The important thing, I believe, might 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 might 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 had been capable of study how Spotify’s plans for shifting the enterprise mannequin of audiobooks may affect the trade.

As an extension of the normal publishing economic system, the audiobooks mannequin has been fairly regular for some time now. Customers, who largely come to the medium as e-book readers, both purchase premium titles a la carte on one thing like Apple Books (normally for $10–$20 a pop) or have a subscription to Audible or audiobooks.com for about $15 a month. It retains costs intently consistent 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.

“Making use of a blanket method to every part — every bit of content material, each creator, similar to in podcasting — I believe really hurts the trade,” Zicherman stated. “So the longer term that I see at Spotify is many various enterprise fashions to help all of the several types of podcast content material that exists and all of the several types of audiobook content material that exists.”

Former Spotify content material and promoting chief Daybreak Ostroff talked about at an investor occasion final yr that audiobooks might be accessible without cost, supported by promoting. Zicherman wouldn’t say whether or not Spotify would go down that path however solely stated that the mannequin can be “attention-grabbing” (cryptic!). He additionally talked about that Spotify is wanting right into a Netflix-style subscription possibility as effectively. 

Rubin, who has one other e-book popping out this spring, went by the potential advantages and downsides of utilizing ad-supported distribution for her personal work. “On the one hand, a listener would possibly actually like promoting help, as a result of then which means it’s free to them. So that would usher in individuals to my work that wouldn’t in any other case get it,” she stated. “Alternatively, everyone knows that if individuals are used to paying for one thing, you’d somewhat them maintain paying for it, somewhat than beginning to give it to them without cost. As a result of as soon as individuals give one thing without cost, it may be laborious to reel that again.”

Zitt was additionally intrigued, if involved, about what it may imply for the flexibility of creators to make a residing. “I believe a menu of choices in how individuals promote content material is an effective factor — with the apart that content material creators are being paid pretty for the content material,” he stated. “Among the fashions I’ve seen which have come and gone haven’t been helpful to the artist, solely to the platform.”

Can narrative podcasts generate profits?

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 need to ask the individuals who witnessed it.) Huge 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 exhibits which are low-cost to make with probably excessive returns.

So how a lot does it value to make an honest limited-run narrative podcast? “$250,000 is the ground to make actually good narrative, participating content material,” stated Osborn. “I’d somewhat make lower than make it for underneath the assets that we [need].” And if the story requires journey or prolonged investigations, that may push the worth tag up even increased.

Perotti defined how, when he went out pitching the present that turned final yr’s critically acclaimed sequence Welcome to Provincetown, he bought no bites. So he self-financed the venture till getting funding from Stitcher’s Witness Docs. The chance was price it. “As a result of we did it that manner, we personal the feed. Not solely will we personal the feed, it’s going to be a tv present, or at the very least it’s been optioned for tv,” he stated. “So it’s like, yeah, that’s a lottery ticket, I get it. However that’s worth.”

Getting optioned for TV could also be a lottery ticket for podcast creators, however there are different methods to monetize their exhibits. “The IP recreation is nice, however that’s not all it’s, proper?” Osborn stated. “It might be a play, it might be a stay present, or actually a bodily product… doing all of these issues collectively, I believe, is sensible.”

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 stay interview. They lined loads of floor, however one theme that stored developing again and again was iHeart’s technique to get as extensive an viewers as doable and letting locations like Spotify and Audible make performs for unique content material.

“I choke my viewers if I select to drag my RSS feed out of a distribution app, as a result of individuals who go there and count on it there gained’t see it anymore,” Byrne stated. “It’s why we broadly distribute. In any other case, I’d be sitting up right here saying, ‘We’re actually working laborious to get all people on the iHeartRadio app.’ The enterprise and the economics of podcasting at present nonetheless sit with the creator and the writer, since you personal the pipe that you just distribute your exhibits by. I haven’t discovered a enterprise mannequin that proves it in another way, so I believe it behooves all of us to plug that pipe into as many distribution factors as doable.”

Byrne additionally insisted that advertising and marketing podcasts on broadcast radio has been invaluable for the corporate’s podcast enterprise. “We now have about 70-ish exhibits within the iHeart Podcast Community that drive over 1 million month-to-month downloads or extra,” he stated. “The one motive we now have that quantity is due to broadcast radio advertising and marketing.” That’s a lot simpler to perform, after all, when your mum or dad 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 about a Bloomberg report final yr that discovered iHeart had labored with a agency referred to as Jun Group to purchase podcast downloads by freemium cell video games. First, Byrne denied doing such a factor. Then he certified the observe. “We now have experimented with Jun Group throughout the years. I believe our stats had been one thing like by no means greater than 1 p.c, 2 p.c, 2.5 p.c of our downloads in any given month,” he stated. “We don’t use it anymore.”

It was an enchanting dialog, and you’ll hearken 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 following one. See you subsequent week.