People No Longer Have to Listen to Your Entire Podcast, Thanks to Audioburst

What’s the right length for your podcast? Should it be 10 minutes or an hour? The answers to these questions may soon be “it doesn’t matter.”

With Audioburst, users can not only search audio streams for topics they care about, and only have to listen to the snippet of audio that addresses their preferred topics, they can now create playlists that get smarter over time.
According to a well-written press release boilerplate:

Audioburst is a revolutionary AI-powered audio search platform connecting audio content and users. With the mission of organizing the world's audio content, every day, the Audioburst AI platform listens to, understands, segments and indexes millions of minutes of audio information from top radio stations and podcasts.

Powered by advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and a proprietary AI platform that indexes audio segments into searchable “bursts” in real-time, Audioburst is introducing an entirely new way for consumers and businesses to interact with live or recorded audio content across platforms and devices.

The playlist feature acts similarly to Pandora (shout out to my Michael Buble Pandora station I’ve had since 2007!) in that you set up your topics and over time, it’s AI-powered engine learns your preferences and modifies the snippets it plays for you over time.

It’s not just consumers that can capitalize on the platform, however. Brands can now provide a much better audio content experience to their listeners.

What Does This Mean for Podcasters and Marketers?

The way I see it, there’s a mix of good and bad here, folks.<

Good: Content Amplification

For starters, services like Audioburst have potential to enable you more reach of your content.

Either the service is so new the indexed library is too small, or no one in our space has played with it yet because I tried searching for things like “inbound marketing,” “video,” and “content marketing,” and got nothing.

I even gave up and just typed “marketing” and still got radio silence.

So the amplification remains to be seen, but in theory if this - or another service like it - takes off, this could be a really good thing, assuming the AI gets smart enough to match up user intent to your content correctly.

Good: Podcasts are now short-form and long-form content

As a marketer, you may no longer need to wrestle with how long your show should be.

Granted, not everyone is going to want to consume content this way, but if you’ve been afraid of going too long and people falling off - or if you’re worried people will fall off before they got to the good stuff, services like Audioburst could help.

It allows you to review the tags on your content and create a playlist you can house on your site.

How cool is that? Instead instead of a new visitor finding your podcast and having to spend an hour deciding if they like it, they can instead listen to several “bursts” based on a topic they care about!

Good: Attract the Non-Podcast Audience

It’s bad enough we all just skim articles, or worse, read the title and share blindly, but the reality is, this same friction happens with audio consumption.

The difference is those with shorter pockets of time - or attention spans - previously passed on podcasts altogether.

Now, this audience has an option that caters to them.

Good: New Monetization Potential

Of course, Audioburst wants to monetize the snippets it serves.

Without going through the entire sign up process, I don’t have all the data here, but they are positioning themselves as another way to monetize your content.

Bad: New Monetization Threat

This monetization is also a potential challenge for marketers. If you’re envisioning a way to monetize your podcast and now have to share a cut of that with a third party (if consumers actually start using this service more), that’s a bummer.

If your goal is not to ever monetize and your podcast is strictly an awareness play, then no worries here for you.

Bad: Personalization Can Prevent New, Expanded Learning

I’m pretty stuck on my Michael Buble Pandora station for my “work” music, but because of that, I tend to miss out on newer music. 

When personalization overpowers our habits, we can miss out on some pretty great new stuff. For marketers, this poses a challenge.

How do you get in front of people who have already closed themselves off from getting content like yours?

You’re asking them to create a new habit, which is a pretty tall order.

Bad: Skynet

via GIPHY

Just kidding (kind of).

Curious what to do next? 

Test out becoming an Audioburst Creator (it's free) and let the community know how it's going in IMPACT Elite!