Podcasts. What do you think? What are you listening to?

As someone who was involved in a Podcast business, I can tell you that podcasts are more popular than people realise.

I was involved with creating local podcasts, for which 7 towns across Scotland had their own town podcast, which featured news, local info, interviews with local dignitaries and celebrities, as well as syndicated general entertainment features between the items, for which I also interviewed a few famous people (including a feature called What Are They Doing Now, for which I would blether with someone who used to grace our TV’s, radios or even our music collections in years gone by). It was good fun.

The local podcasts were sponsored by shopping centres and local businesses and we even held large roadshow events with live bands and performers, within the shopping centres, promoting the local podcast.

The business went quite well until the credit crunch came, when shopping and town centres found that some of the biggest retailers within them could no longer afford to pay the rent, with some big-named stores closing for good. What were formerly full shopping centres became half empty ones in a very short period of time. Needless to say, sponsorship of the podcasts were pulled.

Despite that, the podcasts always had a large number of listeners to make it worthwhile – but with the lack of revenue, efforts had to be focused on other money making ideas, so the podcasts were laid to rest.

I produce and present a very successful podcast series for Top Gear Live. We’ve been doing these for 6 years now and the podcast, coupled with the obvious advantage of the brand it carries is growing constantly every year in popularity and now attracts huge numbers of downloads and iTunes subscribers.

I’ve never been comfortable with the name “podcast” as I think this does not convey the variety of ways of you can consume syndicated audio / video content. I think the move by Apple to separate out its podcasts into a standalone App outside of iTunes on mobile devices will do much to increases audience usage on mobile platforms especially.

Having listened to Radiolab and This American Life myself, why don’t we use this thread to recommend other podcasts that people might quite like?

My regular podcast list also includes Spark from the CBC, and The Media Show as well as the rather more radio-centric Earshot Creative Review, in case anyone wondered.

The Guardian’s Tech Weekly and Science Weekly are both very good, as is The Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe, which is a fun weekly science/skepticism show.

One of my favourites is The Straight Dope.
Proof that good podcasts don’t need to be long or very technically complicated.
See also From Our Own Correspondent.

Also, the Freakonomics podcast can be quite a good listen. But they do have a tendency to repeat aspects of podcasts in different guises.

Wayne: I think the podcast app, or at least something in iOS6 is already having an impact. Whilst podcast downloads are notoriously hard to track, since the release of iOS6, the number of hits we’re getting on our show has increased ten-fold – not necessarily because that many new people are listening, but it suggests that many thousands more people are seeing our show on their phones.

To explain a bit more:

Apologies if this is crossing the line into shameless plugging. For the last three years I’ve been producing The Pod Delusion – a weekly news-magazine podcast about “interesting things”. The show is made up short segments about everything from politics, to science, to culture – and it’s all informed from a sort-of an evidence-based rationalist point of view (I realise how pretentious this sounds).

We’ve found quite a nice niche in speech terms – I think generally our audience is similar to the trendy end of Radio 4 (er, Infinite Monkey Cage and PM, not the Archers and Gardeners Question Time) – but we do cover some rather geeky topics, but hopefully remain relatively accessible. What’s nice about the podcast is that unlike your traditional Radio 4 stuff, we can be as bias and as sweary as we like. And I can make appalling jokes between people far cleverer than I saying clever things.

Though traffic for these things is insanely difficult to track, we reckon we have around 12,000-15,000 listeners a week with many thousands more having subscribed (but not necessarily listen every time).

We’re yet to find a business model – I’d love to figure out a way to do it full time, but the enjoyment of producing it (and getting to meet interesting people and do interesting things) is a reward in itself. For example, off the back of the show (and as someone with no prior connections in the media industry) I’ve found myself interviewing people as diverse as David Attenborough, Stephen Fry, Hugh Grant, David Willetts, Marcus Brigstocke, Richard Dawkins, and Ben Goldacre, and recently our interview with new Green Party leader Natalie Bennett was featured in the Telegraph. We’ve also put on live events – our recent third birthday event had around 250 people in attendance.

And all of this goes largely unnoticed by the wider world – I agree that podcasts (and speech especially) is a bigger deal than you may expect.

http://www.spreaker.com/user/tedrock/jimmy_choose

How many of these actually make money though?

For tech enthusiasts, try FrequencyCast

Betty in the sky with a suitcase is one of my favourites, featuring an air-hostess discussing her experiences doing her job. It can be really quite funny at times.