There is a virtual mobile graveyard loaded with podcast apps that promised everything from socialization to audio clipping to better recommendations. Podcast apps are hard: hard to generate clear differentiation, hard to create awareness, and hard to gain ground against incumbent apps with already habituated listeners.

Even high-profile apps out there today with giant megaphones garner relatively small audiences. Stalwarts such as the BBC and NPR have struggled with proprietary app initiatives. In the early podcast days, NPR launched its NPR One app with modest success and later doubled down as the lead investor in Pocket Casts before abandoning it.

This makes last week’s entry of The New York Times audio app most curious. The new app, called “New York Times Audio,” curates the current slate of Times podcasts but goes way beyond, including narrated articles, dispatches from correspondents, and, importantly, short-form audio. After 18 months of testing, oddly, the app is only available on the Apple platform, leaving Android users in the cold for now. Currently, the app is for subscribers only, with no public plan to open it up to everyone.

The quest for time, money, and attention is everywhere. In response to economic worries, changing consumer habits, and competition at scale, Meta, AT&T, Ford, and many other companies have called 2023 the ‘Year of Efficiency.’ The goal is to chop away extra ...

There is a lot of chatter about the new era of “efficiency” in business today. In the past few months, with fears of a slowing economy, many big companies, especially tech-focused ones like Meta and Amazon, are letting thousands of employees go. Amazon built a ...

At last week’s Podcast Movement Evolutions conference, I moderated “View From the Top,” a panel with a wonderful group of top podcast executives to discuss the rapidly changing business and its direction in the future. With us were Jeanine Wright, the ...

Fighting for media attention is maddening. Social channels are jammed and less effective than ever. Just a few years ago you could pop a link into a Tweet and your podcast would be off and running. Today, regardless of platform, most posts don’t generate much ...

If you are reading the headlines about podcasting, you might be a little nervous. There has been a lot of confusing and contradictory chatter about what the drop in new podcasts in 2022 means. Has the podcast bubble burst? Are podcasts on the way out? Not ...

This is part one of a two part column Walking the halls of CES in Las Vegas last week, it's seductive to get caught up in the whole “urgent disruption and innovation” frenzy. I’ve been to CES five times and witnessed significant, business-altering ...

This is our second post about CES. The first “Hey CES, Where is my Flying Car?” is about innovation which often doesn’t happen as fast as prognosticated. What happened to autonomous cars, 5G and smart speakers? This post is about our business of audio ...

The audio space has been on a wild ride in 2022. There were massive changes in every corner of the audio business; across consumption, marketing, organizational structure, and beyond. We're looking back to see what happened and offer a glimpse of what's next in 2023. ...

When you think of podcasting, it is almost always about national podcasts. That appears to be changing. The next wave of podcasting growth is coming from locally-focused content. While the early days of local podcasting were populated with hobbyists, a larger ecosystem is ...