Years from now, when Podcast Industry Historians write their lists of the most significant events of 2018, it’s hard to imagine they won’t mention today’s news that Google has launched a standalone podcast app.
From Casey Newton in The Verge:
The app, called simply Google Podcasts, will use Google’s recommendation algorithms in an effort to connect people with shows they might enjoy based on their listening habits. While podcasts have previously been available on Android through Google Play Music and third-party apps, Google says the company expects Podcasts to bring the form to hundreds of millions of new listeners around the world.
The way I see it, there are three questions everyone in the podcast industry are asking themselves:
What is Google’s goal?
How likely are they to succeed?
If they succeed, what will that mean for the industry?
1. What is Google’s goal?
Google makes money by showing you ads when you search for things. Right now people don’t search much for audio, but we do search for text, images, and video. (YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world.) There’s no reason to believe in principle that people would never search for audio.
For example, imagine you wake up, check your inbox, and start reading a fascinating article about the origins of liberalism. You take a shower and your mind keeps turning over a few interesting points. You want to know more about this. On your way out the door, you put in your headphones and open up your podcast app. At this moment you would really like to listen to more about political philosophy. Maybe you even have a specific question you’d love to hear an expert talk about. How do you find this? You don’t. So instead, you listen to whatever the newest episode is of some podcast you usually listen to.
One of Google’s main goals, as I understand it, is to shift the world towards making this kind of experience commonplace. Why? So they can extend their search advertising business. (Also, to be fair, because it’s a cool idea.)
2. How likely is their success?
Right now I’d put the odds that they get > 1m MAU of their podcasts app within the next two years at an even 50-50. I’ll continue to update this as new evidence becomes available.
It’s wonderful that Google built and launched this app, but let’s be honest, Google launches (and kills) a lot of apps. The base success rate is probably in the 10-20% range. So I’m already being incredibly optimistic by pegging the chances at 50%.
The challenge is going to be getting Google to put serious energy into promoting the product to their existing user base. If they make it a default app I’d peg it’s chances at closer to 80-90%. But so far that seems like it’s a long way from happening. We haven’t even seen a tweet from @Google yet.
And even if they do make it a default app, they’ll still have to start telling people about it. Say what you will about Apple’s historical laissez-faire attitude—they have done a lot to promote podcasts to their users.
3. If they succeed, what will it mean for the industry?
My intuition is that even if they succeed at their goal, it will have less of an impact on the industry than you might think (i.e. it will be noticeably different but not completely changed, as many seem to suspect).
The first and most obvious thing is that they have the chance to bring in a lot of new listeners. But I think if they succeed, they’ll bring in a different kind of listener. I suspect the marginal new Google Podcast listener will be more “topic and search” oriented, and less of a “loyal subscriber / repeat listener” than current podcast audiences are.
So even if there are a lot of new people, they might be best served by a different kind of content publisher. The people who won in the RSS world and the people who won in the SEO world were mostly using different strategies, each optimized for their own environment / growth model. These new publishers won’t really get in the way of the existing “loyal listener” types from doing their thing.
I also don’t think Google will really disrupt the current monetization methods. They’ll let advertisers pay to be placed in the audio search results, but they probably won’t build some sort of walled garden ad network that you have to use (a-la YouTube) because they’ve always pretty much let web publishers monetize however they want, using whatever ad networks they want.
The biggest possible change in my mind is that they might be a force for pushing the open RSS-based standards of the industry forward, because they have the most to gain from it. But until podcasters see tons of “Google Podcasts” downloads in their analytics, nobody will spend too much effort to change anything. And that could take time, depending on how aggressive Google is about promoting their new app.
That question—“how aggressive will Google be in promoting the app?”—is one of the two big questions this whole thing hinges on. The other is “how quickly can they get people to be in the habit of searching for audio?”
At least, that’s what I’ll be paying the most attention to.