Imagine a world in which you download a podcast episode and it’s just an audio file that you can save anywhere and play at any time. You can collect your favorite episodes and listen to them even without internet, long after any Spotify or Apple are gone.
In this world, some ads may be read by the podcast host, ads that are not tracking you but simply resemble the subject of the podcast. You can skip them. You can also regularly give some money to the podcast and get access to a feed without ads.
Podcasts in this world can work with all kinds of apps on phones and desktops since they are based on common standards that offer value to audiences. Namely, they can have chapter markers with titles and images giving you a nice overview of an episode and allowing you to skip around it.
Surprisingly, this world is still our world in a time when people may even prefer getting tracked by ads and not owning any of their media. It’s come to a point where you can pay a subscription, still get ads, and have nothing to keep at the end. Then how do the classic podcasts still exist today?
People who are aware of the open standards that can support podcasting get real value from them. It’s like radio but it works offline and you’re in full control of what you’re listening to. And it’s easy to use.
Content demands stay mostly the same as the tech gets better. Most independent surviving podcasts stick to audio because video still makes everything more expensive while tech advancements have actually made audio easier to edit, process, and host.
Monetization outside of ads kind of works. Bitcoin hasn’t yet fulfilled the promise of censorship-resistant micro-transactions, but there’s still progress and real cases where it works. On the frontier of what’s possible, there are podcasts where everyone who contributes gets paid in real-time as people listen. Or people just use Patreon.
In this value-for-value relationship between creators and their audiences, podcasting is like an old medium that is made new again, it’s newspapers for the people. You own that piece of media, you can give it away, scratch on it, add it to your collection... But now the production is also decentralized, podcasting is easy enough for anyone who listens to also try and record some of their own. That’s how the old way of the internet still happens through podcasts.
Looking for some starting recommendations on podcast players? For iOS, you have https://overcast.fm which recently had a big update. For Android, there's https://pocketcasts.com which is cross-platform.
And if you're looking for podcasts leveraging all the good stuff that podcasts can do right now:
Creates things with computers to understand what problems they can solve. Passionate for an open web that anyone can contribute to. Works in domains where content is king and assumptions are validated quickly.
