The discovery experience of podcasts online is ancient. It literally feels like browsing the web in 1997. Since podcasts are usually upward of 30 minutes long, it’s hard for listeners to browse new shows — listening to an episode of a podcast isn’t as easy as trying out a song by a new artist.

Many companies are trying to improve the discovery experience, but only two at the moment are worth to be mentioned: PODZ (acquired by Spotify) and Moonbeam. They both do a similar thing that can be summarized as follows: they turn podcasts into personalized audio newsfeed. They present users with under 4-minute clips from various shows. By simply interacting with the content shown, their recommender systems understand who the users are and personalize the feed accordingly.

At the same time it is interesting to see how things in the TikTok galaxy are evolving. It’s now super common to see in the feed video-clips of podcasts. These contents most of the time are not even published by the author of the podcast himself but from random profiles. Regardless the copyright topics that won’t be addressed here, this approach is really interesting because:

  1. it improves new podcast discovery
  2. it improves the discovery of older episodes as well

There are already some really good examples of podcast creators like 20VC that are using TikTok for this reason.

The only limit to the actual configuration is that if I discover an episode on TikTok and I want to see the complete clip I have to go out from the platform, open Spotify, research the name of the guest, find the episode and then play. Which means frictions, frictions and frictions.

If Tiktok becomes the go-to discovery platform especially for the younger generation an incredible opportunity in the podcast industry will be open. The model I imagined is the following:

In this way the user experience is frictionless: from episode discovery  to episode consumption in just a matter of seconds.