One of podcasting’s biggest challenges of the past decade has been discoverability. Finding new shows is challenging, and only the blockbuster hits seem to manage to scrape into Apple’s charts. It’s an issue companies have put a lot of effort towards solving over the past 12 months, with Spotify at the forefront launching tools like ‘Your Daily Podcast’ and ‘Morning Drive,’ as well as redesigning to promote discovery.
Helping people discover new podcasts will be the key to unlocking the next wave of growth in podcasting. According to Edison research, of the 68% of people who haven’t listened to a podcast in the past month, 65% of them said that the issue was there were so many podcasts they didn’t know where to start.
Headliner is trying to solve that issue. The platform is popularly used by podcasters to create audiograms – mini shareable videos that can be used to promote clips of a podcast on social media. Podcast audio can be overlaid with animations, captions, gifs and more, and quickly exported to social accounts.
The team behind Headliner believe that podcasting is following a similar trajectory to blogging at the start of the millennium. In a post on Medium, co-founder Oliver Wellington wrote:
“We’re seeing a huge similarity between the blogging of the early 2000s and the podcasting of today: vast amounts of great content waiting to be discovered.”
Wellington argues that although many companies are having a fair go at becoming the ‘Netflix of podcasting’; creating original content and placing it behind a paywall, no one has yet truly got close to the podcast version of Netflix’s recommendation engine. “If they had, more of America would be digging into the amazing podcasts that are currently available,” he said.
Headliner’s primary use case is for creating short snippets of podcasts to tempt people to listen further. “We think that these short video clips are the first step to unlocking discovery for podcasting,” said Wellington. “Think of them as short movie trailers for your podcast.”
As a result, Headliner has built HeadlinerFlix; a mix of Headliner video tech and the famously simple Netflix user interface. The videos act as mini-trailers for podcasts, with a mix of fully automated videos using their Headline Automation product, and some that have been created by a human editor.
Read the rest of this article by Esther Kezia Thorpe on What’s New in Publishing…
