Leaving Las Vegas and Brevity Being the Soul of Wit And/or Podcasts

First, a correction - as multiple people kindly pointed out - the actual title pun is “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” - Not “worry” and we regret both the lapse and the degradation of our cinematic bonaifdes.

Second, as you may (or may not notice, hard to tell just yet how this recommendation algorithm works) this is the second newsletter in two days.  With this publishing, and thanks to the help of Sydney Warren , we are now officially caught up with Newsletter updates (internal and external) and things should be a bit more timely).

And third, as of yesterday (September 28th) Dall-E 2 is now open to the public so welcome to the world of AI-generated newsletter art.  Fun stuff.  I look forward to bowing to our corporate toaster overlords in 10 years.

And with that…on to the update!

This newsletter is being written while I’m in Las Vegas for work on Sunday at about…6am Eastern Time which is 3am Vegas time, which is just…weird.  Lot of unique things going on in a Vegas hotel at 4am, made even weirder if you’ve just gotten up and are just looking for a place to grab a coffee.  Although also something deliciously taboo about taking said coffee to the craps table and playing a bit at 430am because well, why not.  

Also feel like there is a whole newsletter to be done on the power of both olfactory and auditory cues.  Really fascinating stuff, made even more so by a work colleague who pointed out that each Vegas Hotel does, in fact, have a proprietary scent.  A scent that, when I walked into the hotel, immediately took me back to the last time I was there for a Comedy Central standup shoot.  On a similar, but different synaptic bent, as soon as I heard the opening music from Serial last week, it immediately brought me back to when I first binged the series, which was, strangely enough, during grand jury duty in Downtown Manhattan.  Also with a lot of coffee.

This intro is also, perhaps, why I try to avoid writing newsletters in Vegas at 3am.

And with that, we’re going to focus on one report this week and do a bit more analysis and breakdown.  The report itself is from Rephonic who analyzed over 2.5M pods to do an update on podcast length across the industry.

Also going to grab and credit a chart so let’s see how that goes for everyone. 

The above shows the percentage of podcast episodes that were over 60 minutes in length published each year from 2013 to 2021, decreasing from 21% to 16% which becomes a bit more significant when you consider the total pool of available podcasts surveyed in 2021 (far larger N although we do not have specifics).

Rephonic posits that the reduced length could be a function of both more indie podcasters in the space (and thus less resources to produce longer pods) as well as more daily news pods going shorter.  We’d posit something a bit different - a bit of a Darwinian evolution in the space.  The podcasting space continues to grow more competitive with more pods crowding out the sunlight.  In an increasingly competitive environment we would argue that while it may be a function of resources, it is also a function of, whether recognized or not, consumer time and attention.  We won’t go deep into the latest on the attention economy, but we do believe that it is still fairly finite and competition remains fierce. 

And in that world, we believe brevity is your friend.

This isn’t to say that there is not space for long and in-depth podcasts.  Rather, we would argue that long pods are now almost an earned trait.  Joe Rogan can go for three hours. His fanbase will voraciously consume that content and has been conditioned for that length of listening experience.   I feel the same way if an episode of Pivot goes long (and also notice when it goes short).  However, when a new podcast launches (or if I’m browsing), I’m very much aware of what the length is, and as pods creep beyond 30 to 40 minutes, that does become a factor in my selection process.

Now, I’ll take it back to a conversation I had with one of our own programming whizzes a while back as I wanted to try to better understand the Hows and Whys of linear programming.  They brought up the idea of consumer need states: that as consumers go through different hours of the day their media needs change.  What they are looking for when they wake up and head out the door (or head from the bedroom to wherever their work from home laptop is) is far different from what they want in the middle of the day or when they’re unwinding at night.  We believe that as we evaluate the length of podcasts, this is also worth consideration. 

As we continue to evolve and expand our podcast portfolio, we must ask the question: How do each of the pods speak to the individual listeners and what they want from that experience?  Should pods that are more information-based (and thus potentially consumed on a morning commute) be tailored to fit within an average commute time?  What is the expectation of a scripted fiction pod?  Do people want to get lost for longer or is too much time to be completely immersed in an always on environment?  We’re puzzling through this now, guided by research from the brand side, and will be testing these concepts in the coming year (in fun and exciting ways that will be public hopefully sometime Q1 of 2023).  

In the meantime, I will take these moments to prognosticate on a feature that we still haven’t seen but feels like a miss.  Podcasts platforms that allow for a filter not just for content, but for length.  As platforms (and podcasters) continue to focus in on how to best super-serve the fanbase, this feels like a whitespace.  When I look for podcasts, especially new podcasts, knowing the length is very much a factor for me based on the time I’ve got available and the mood I’m in.

PODCASTING RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK - NORMAL GOSSIP

Went back and forth between this and “On” with Kara Swisher which I also definitely recommend but this one just seems a bit more…fun.

Also less likely that people have heard of it.

Great idea - lean into the snark and gossip that are featured in so many great pods but instead of focusing on known entities, celebrities, or people in popular culture, focus on what would theoretically be wildly mundane, the gossip of normal people.  So every week, host Kelsey McKinney brings on a guest/friend to talk about a pre-selected, but entirely normal, piece of gossip.  Within that, the guests discuss their own relationship with gossip, however the ride really is about the story and the people involved in it and what they do (or do not do).  It’s a great example of an idea that feels like it might not work on paper but exceptionally, it just does.

Super fun. Check it out.