Remember surfing through TV channels or scanning through radio stations, stopping when a show or conversation sounded interesting? Or skimming the sections of a newspaper or randomly flipping through a magazine?

For many, this opportunistic style of content consumption is rather antiquated. Interactive TV  guides, podcasts piped through our car radios, and news delivered to our news apps. We’re choosing the content we want to consume, often when we want to consume it. Just like podcasts.

Podcasting sucks for the opportunistic listener for all the reasons I listed above. But the rise in drop-in audio apps and live recording sessions streamed to social platforms is changing that. The opportunistic listener uses these services with little or no intention of being social or engaging with the creator. They just want to lean back and listen/watch. And they are. 

From the creator’s perspective, we may see dozens or more people commenting on our “lives”, boosting our streams with hearts, or raising their hands to get on stage with us. But what we’re not seeing—simply because we’re not looking—are the hoards of silent participants doing none of those things, content to listen to or watch us do our thing.

Conventional wisdom tells us to create content specific to the strengths of a platform rather than the lazy method of repurposing content to another medium, shoe-horn style. I may have been complicit in that wisdom. On more than one occasion.

But maybe it’s time to rethink that position. Maybe we should look less at making an engaging social-worthy experience on those platforms and just give the opportunistic consumers what they want: a lean-back experience of our content as we’re making it.

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A written-to-be-read article and a full transcript of the audio of this episode can be found at https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/solving-podcastings-opportunistic-challenge-today

Follow @EvoTerra on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

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Evo Terra produces Podcast Pontifications four times a week to provide ideas and ask questions every working podcaster should be thinking about.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.