Behind the scenes of a daily news podcast in Europe (+ seven takeaways)
Here is what we are learning on the way.
In the last blog I wrote how we started a daily news podcast in Slovakia (at SME.sk), a country where people do not understand what a podcast is, and what we learned in the process.
Three months later, people still ask us what is a podcast and our colleagues can't stop to wonder why did we start such an enterprise when anyone sane would not even think about it.
Now, I can write that podcasting is a thing for us.
Turns out that an audio product you can fairly precisely measure is an interesting ad opportunity for advertisers and loyal listeners can be converted into fans or even paying customers. More about that later.
What we learned after 3 months (+ stats)
First things first. As I wrote before, the biggest question in the beginning was whether we will be able to produce the podcast daily and grow our audience.
We managed to accomplish both objectives. The podcast is being produced daily and we see a 20% growth in listenership on a month to month basis.
At the same time we have been hearing from our fans that they could listen to even longer episodes (we started our with 13–14 mins per episode). Now the average length is around 15 mins and if the topic is newsworthy enough we go over 20 mins per episode.
On a daily basis the Dobre ráno podcast averages a little more than 4-thousand listens (or downloads if you are into that metric). After three months we reported more than 350-thousand listens.
Oh, and have you read this WIRED piece on podcasting? The author writes that podcast listeners are making it through about 90 percent of a given episode. I can confirm, based on Apple Podcast analytics for our podcast it is 89 percent.
Weekend specials & breaking news podcast episodes
Besides the regular weekday episodes we have introduced two types of special episodes — weekend specials & breaking news.
Once a month we have brought our listeners a special longform interview with an interesting guest. The first one was on the issue of transgender in Slovakia with a famous Slovak transgender DJ, the second one with an outcasted bishop. Both performed very well.
During the past three months we have produced a few breaking news episodes about national politics, world politics or even snow calamity.
We have been careful not to do this regularly and only produce the breaking news episodes occasionally outside our regular programming.
Domestic news yes, sports no, life stories hell yeah
As SME.sk is a news website the audience is primarily focus on news of all types, most of all domestic, national news. Naturally we have been sticking to this presumption in the production of the podcast.
Turns out we were right and wrong.
The politics have been always strong a topic, especially when we used our op-ed columnists as guests to talk about various developing situations in Slovakia.
On the other hand we have tried to do several sports related episodes. But turns out our audience is not that much into sports. Fair enough.
Once we told a story of wife whose husband died due to the doctor's carelessness. We did not expect anything out of the ordinary. We were wrong, that episode did very well.
After that we did this kind of personal storytelling a few more times and it was always very popular, even though the topics were as hard to talk about as child abuse.
Takeaways
- As I have written in the previous blog — if it's possible to launch a daily podcast in a country where people don't know what a podcast is, then you can do it as well.
- Always be looking for new platforms to distribute the podcast — we have recently been accepted to Spotify (LibSyn, Audioboom, PodBean are partners).
- Look closely at the stats — based on stats we see our podcast is being listened mostly in the morning and mainly on weekdays.
- People really want news explained — to take apart the most important topic (as The Daily podcast does) seems to be most valuable to the listeners.
- Special and breaking news episodes work — of course you have to be careful with the topic and timing, not to overdo it and spam your listeners' podcast feed.
- People listen all the way to the end — great news if you are looking for advertisers.
- Be transparent — if you are forthcoming about your numbers and behind the scenes you can build a loyal audience (our FB group helps us a lot) + you can better convince advertisers that you have a quality product.
What's next
Clearly, there is a market for podcasting in Slovakia, so naturally we are thinking about building our podcast network. There are already two new podcasts in the working, which we will be launching soon.
The biggest news of the past week has been that Spotify has added our podcast to the platform. It will be interesting to watch what happens, I explain why.
As I have written in one of the previous blogs about podcasting in Europe, over here in contrast with the US people have more Android mobile phones which means they do not have a native app for podcast listening.
But Spotify has a global audience of more than 140 million users. And we have already seen many people reacting positively to the news that our podcast is available on the platform. I am very curious to see what happens.
I do also a weekly podcast with Marc Biskup called Check Your Facts, we talk with journalists and media movers round Europe and beyond. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts (iTunes) | RSS or head over to SoundCloud and 🎧 .
