We’re in the midst of a pod-renaissance. Not a collapse. Sure, yeah some companies *cough* BuzzFeed *cough* are shuttering their podcast studios and packing up because well, it’s like running a You’veTube channel or getting into oil prospecting. Sometimes you win, and sometime you lose.
BuzzFeed knows this. They live by the sword, and die by the sword. It also just so happens, that running a 17M subscriber channel on You’veTube, is a bit more profitable. Do you really think:
“podcast listeners == YT subscribers“?
https://twitter.com/roseveleth/status/1042449918915272704
Update: the tweet was deleted, it read as follows:
The BuzzFeed “pivot” away from podcasts makes sense when you remember that BuzzFeed lives and dies as a business on detailed analytics. Web content has them. Video has them. Podcasts still don’t.
Rose Eveleth ▷▷ (@roseveleth) September 19, 2018
That’s just business. If past is prologue, podcasting will win over the hearts of radio listeners, and perhaps even take a bite out of SiriusXM marketshare. I for one, can’t wait for SiriusXM to go under. It’s a horrible service, who consistently has made bad bets, produces bad content, and treats their customers like second-class citizens.
Anyways, sensational stories like this one, reminds me of this fantastic maxim, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
Ian Betteridge’s extended quote (remarking on this somewhat unrelated Techcrunch story):
This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.” The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.