Podz app helps consumers discover podcasts via a newsfeed

Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers and Melody Hahm, along with Doug Imbruce, founder & CEO of Podz, discuss the launch of the company’s new app, which helps consumers discover more podcasts.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: Now let's turn now to that conversation on podcasts. We're joined now by Doug Imbruce, founder and CEO of Podz, and Yahoo Finance's Melody Hahm. So Doug, I don't want to spend too, too much time because there's so much interesting stuff to get into here. But I'm hoping for everyone at home if you can explain a little bit how Podz works.

DOUG IMBRUCE: Yeah, sure, so it's funny. You know, Melody wrote the other day about sort of the golden age of audio. And while it is a golden age and we're seeing more podcasts being produced than ever by these really thoughtful, incredibly knowledgeable creators, for consumers, it doesn't feel much like a golden age because the process of discovering podcasts and using these decades old directories, it really-- it hasn't changed. And if you look at the data, it sort of supports this gap. We're only more than-- about 1% of podcasters reach more than 5,000 listeners.

And so, at Podz, we thought we could sort of transform the discovery of podcast content with a really modern experience that basically matches the kind of experience you have when you use apps like TikTok and Instagram and Snap and automatically transforms podcasts into a personal feed of highlights that you can enjoy and save full episodes to listen later. So we're just trying to grow the audience for podcasts overall and help people fit this amazing medium into their digital-- busy digital lives.

MELODY HAHM: Doug, there is a humorous component to this moment, right? Because it's basically radio, what we're listening to. And Podz is essentially creating snippets of compelling conversations, and you can go deeper, right? You can choose to listen to a full episode in-app. What do you make of this structural shift back to perhaps the '80s, when podcasting first started, and that it feels like perhaps the innovation has actually been stunted and that there isn't any new territory to really explore?

DOUG IMBRUCE: Yeah, no, I mean, look, it's a great point. If you look at every other medium, it has been digitally transformed. So, right? When text was was brought online, Twitter basically took the idea of long blog posts and transformed it into these short 140-character tweets by building a platform around creative limits. TikTok did the same thing in video, Instagram via their photo filters. But to your point, that same transformation has not happened in podcasting. And we think it's limiting growth.

MELODY HAHM: You know, Doug, looking at the space with a lot of this consolidation that's happened, Spotify is the player to beat, right, when it comes to content creation and also the pipes as well. As I understand it, Podz now hosts about 5,000 podcasts. You've been able to aggregate some of that manually, some of that with big data. But you don't have original podcasts on the platform.

Believe it or not, I'm sure everyone watching knows that Joe Rogan from the Obamas to Brené Brown, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, they are all Spotify original podcasts. How are you able to make sure you can have all of the premium high quality content on the platform when there seems to be more of this race to get creators to be sort of tied to individual platforms?

DOUG IMBRUCE: Yeah, you know, it's unfortunate that everybody talks about the big names in the space with these incredibly lucrative deals who typically have either pre-existing platforms. You know, either they're sort of media personalities or existing celebrities that Spotify pays to create original exclusive content that goes behind Podify-- Spotify's paywall.

Because, you know, as sort of we dig into the industries ourselves, as a company that wants to disrupt the experience of podcast consumption, there's just so many other incredible creators that nobody is talking about. And we hope, similar to the way, again, companies like TikTok and Instagram and Twitter created platforms that allowed creators to be elevated and built these incredible network effects through these really modern experiences, that we can bring that same approach to podcasting.

And hopefully next time we speak, you'll be talking about, you know, the long tail of incredible creators. And we don't have to keep people's attention focused on Joe Rogan because I don't want to live in a world where everybody listens to only Joe Rogan every day.

KRISTIN MYERS: So that brings me to a question that I have to ask you, which is about Clubhouse. You know, Melody and I were listening to a chat that you were doing yesterday on that app. I mean, as you were mentioning, there's so many content creators out there. They're are inking those really big deals. But there's, as you said, tons of content creators that no one has even heard about. So how does an app like Clubhouse really turn that industry on its head and kind of change the game for the audio-only industry?

DOUG IMBRUCE: Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunately, in Clubhouse, I think you're seeing a lot of the same dynamics sort of take shape. Because while Clubhouse is an incredibly powerful tool for live broadcasting, the discovery experience inside an app like Clubhouse, where you load the feed and sort of the most popular rooms appear first, it just seems like kind of an echo chamber, similar to-- you know, the same kind of personalities that are appearing in traditional podcasting.

You know, again, apps that really help this-- us discover this long tail-- again, Twitter, TikTok-- those, to us, are models that are far more exciting. Not to mention that, you know, we're living through a pandemic and everybody is sort of this incredibly captive audience now, right? And so these are live events. They create urgency. And certainly, they drive traffic. But the internet is an on-demand medium.

And so we're excited to introduce a platform that conforms to the way that people traditionally experience their content, which is on-demand and asynchronously, and again, really focused on elevating that long tail. Because as exciting as it is to hear what Elon Musk has to say, again, you don't want to listen to the same kind of folks every day.

KRISTIN MYERS: So Doug, when you were talking about Twitter taking text and shortening it, and then you mentioned, of course, TikTok, which, of course, everyone thinks about Vine, which took video and decided to make content in just a couple of seconds or less, I'm wondering if you see that also coming in the podcast industry, where we might have an audio-only Quibi coming up soon.

DOUG IMBRUCE: Quibi, yeah, it's-- [LAUGHS] No, but it's-- look, I think that the great thing about audio is how deep and how thoughtful the content is. But because the average podcast is over 40 minutes in length, again, in kind of today's world where everyone's trained on not just consuming short form content, but also sharing it, these longer audio files, get left behind.

And that's why we've invested so much time in this layer of digital transformation, where we can actually evaluate the content of every podcast, surface the most engaging 60 seconds through machine learning, and then deliver those highlights in a feed that allows you to, as Melody mentioned, then go deeper.

And so we see Podz almost as a lead generation engine for time shifting the consumption of these longer form shows that are really thoughtful, really interesting, but that you just don't always have time to consume in the moment.

KRISTIN MYERS: I'm super new to podcasts. I literally only listen to two right now. So I'm definitely going to have to check out Podz to see what other podcasts are out there that I would be interested in. Doug Imbruce, Podz founder and CEO, and of course, Yahoo Finance's Melody Hahm, thank you both for joining us for this conversation.