Everywhere, where you can find podcasts
On November 8th, 2023, a discussion panel on science and sustainability podcasts hosted by RIFS took place at the DIW in Berlin as part of the Berlin Science Week 2023. Below I document my almost ten-minute opening remarks to the event.
Dear podcasters,
dear guests!
The title of this event is: “Narrating for new Narratives – Scientific Podcasts for Sustainability Transformations”. In the panel discussion you will learn a lot about suitable narratives and good storytelling in science podcasts. In my opening statement I would like to go to the meta level of sustainability podcasts for a few minutes. I want to talk about the sustainability of podcasts themselves and the dangers of platformizing podcasts.
I am the editor and project manager behind the German-language „Resonator“ podcast of the Helmholtz Association. This audio podcast has been around since 2013. That was three years before Spotify even started their podcast service. We have now published 200 episodes at Resonator. That’s more than a week of listening material and more than 5 million downloads. Above all, there are tens of thousands of bonds with people – with listeners who give us around one hour of their attention every month. And in the following I would like to reflect on how these connections are technically created and ensured.
As a person with a severe podcast addiction, I listen to a lot of podcasts and I recommend a lot of podcasts to other people. In personal conversations until a few years ago, we searched for the podcast websites on the smartphones of my conversation partners. I then explained to podcast newbies how they could install a podcast app. But in the last five years or so, my conversation partners automatically open the Spotify app on their device in order to search for the recommended podcasts. And many podcast providers also refer almost exclusively to podcast platforms such as Deezer, Audible or Spotify when promoting their formats. “Everywhere where you can find podcasts,” it says. But I think this “everywhere” is a structural problem and unsustainable for us podcasters!
Does anyone remember Stitcher, Mixlr or Spreaker? No? They also wanted to become the “YouTube for audio”. But they don’t exist anymore. Alphabet is in the process of shutting down “Google Podcasts” at the end of this year. The question for us content providers in this context should be: Why should we become dependent on such intermediaries?
The term intermediary hereby referes to digital platform providers – not only but also social media networks – including Podcast plattforms. Intermediaries offer a service, that can connect content providers and user – but also monetize this very connection.
Intermediaries can use algorithmic weighting to control access to content between providers and consumers. In addition, all of the intermediaries that have been successful in recent years, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc., have business models that push barely regulated advertising content into users’ timelines – including, unfortunately, false reports, lies, hate speech and content with group-related misanthropy. We have seen the negative effects of this on society as a whole again and again in recent years. For example: the Brexit referendum and the Trump election in 2016. And even the Facebook scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica in 2018 has so far changed little in terms of platform use by content providers. Over the past 12 months, we have also been able to track the negative changes to the service now called X. Many organizations are seeing significant drops in reach, not only but also due to changes to the algorithms.
Why should we depend on such intermediaries? Why should we make ourselves depend on their business models and self-interests? Especially us as publicly funded researchers and science organizations?
I keep hearing four answers to this question:
• 1.) “Because of the reach.”
• 2.) “Because the users are there.”
• 3.) “Because that’s just how you do it.”
• and 4.) the basic attitude “There are other distribution channels than podcast platforms?”
I only have a short time to address these replies:
#1: “Because of the reach.” – Yes, but: You can also create reach outside of podcast platforms. The Helmholtz Resonator for instance only has a some 3 percent of its plays on Spotify, while 97 percent is on the free internet and especially in open podcast apps.
#2: “Because the users are there.” – Yes, but: You can also point out to the listeners within the broadcast that you can also listen to the podcast outside of the platforms. Real podcast apps, for example, also offer added value features such as chapter images.
#3: “Because that’s just how you do it.” – No, I disagree. I also notice that more and more new podcasts are only being published on Spotify. But as an old-school podcaster, for me this really is a no-go.
#4: “There are other distribution channels than podcast platforms?” – Yes, there are! A podcast feed that can be accessed publicly and without restrictions on the Internet. Audio podcasts have emerged as the technical siblings of blogs, which communicated their content via RSS feeds. A cultural technique that has unfortunately not become very widespread, but is indeed very practical, especially for consuming news and also podcasts.
If you host your podcast yourself or with an open host service such as Podigee, you can offer to your listeners a freely accessible podcast feed from your own server. This is comparable to a customer contact without intermediaries via a website visit or an email newsletter. Here, too, there is no middleman company that could technically limit the reach, demand money for it or even insert advertising into the content. This direct connection to our listeners should be very valuable to us. We should nurture it and it should be our primary outlet! It also sticks very well with the idea of Openess of Science. And it doesn’t cost us anything.
My conclusion: What doesn’t work in my opinion is not communicating your own free podcast feed at all or hiding it as best as possible in the “how you can hear us” information. Unfortunately, this is exactly what I see very often with many podcasts on the web.
We shouldn’t become dependent on intermediaries like Spotify! Not from their business models and self-interests – especially we as publicly funded researchers and science organizations! This is incredibly easy, especially with podcasts: Let’s use publicly and freely accessible podcast feeds and primarily promote them. Let’s point out smartphone podcast apps such as Overcast, PocketCasts, PodcastAddict, AntennaPod or even Apple Podcasts in our about texts! Here we have a direct connection to our listeners without a superfluous intermediary in between! In this way, science and sustainability podcasts themselves remain sustainably connected to their audience.
I’m coming to an end. As mentioned, I often get asked for podcast recommendations. Since my time here is now up, I am now not recommending individual science podcasts for you to listen to, but rather a website that links many German-language podcasts worth listening to as a directory. You can find it on the website: wissenschaftspodcasts.de.
Thank you for your attention!
