Wondery will soon be part of the Amazon machine. The acquisition—rumored to be worth some $300 million—garnered a lot of attention from the media, proclaiming this as Amazon’s play to become the dominant player in podcasting. 

My take, surprisingly enough, looks at this deal through a different lens.

Large companies are buying their way into podcasting for different reasons. Spotify cares most about driving subscription revenue to Spotify Premium and reducing the share of revenue paid to music labels and rights holders. And they care about growing revenue they make from in-app advertising.

With Amazon, it’s all about Amazon Studios. Today, Amazon Studio execs have to decide if a given bit of IP is best-suited for development into a feature-length movie or as a television series. But tomorrow, they’ll have a third option for show development. One that costs a fraction of the other two yet is still capable of reaching millions of people.

I think the process we’re seeing play out right now will mean that, at some point in our very near future, there will be no single dominant player In podcasting. 

As podcast consumption continues to fracture across apps, working podcasters like us face two major implications:

1. Achieving 100% distribution is 100% on you. No longer can you rely on a single platform to distribute your show to other podcast apps and directories. You do not want to be caught unawares with allegiances shift. 

2. “Podcasting’s Discovery Problem” becomes a real problem. Tomorrow, it'll no longer be enough to make sure your show and episodes look good on the purple platform. You won’t be able to rely on optimization tricks that only work on a single directory. And efforts to game any single system will be less relevant. Also, your website can’t suck anymore. How you present your episodes can’t be half-assed anymore. And no, you can no longer do the lazy thing of just sharing an Apple Podcasts link to your latest episode on your social channels and call it a day.

Remember; two-thirds of the population still have yet to develop the podcast listening habit. As the Amazons of the world continue to expose more people to podcast content on their apps and platforms, more people will discover the wider world of podcasting. That’s what we want. Your job, my job, all of our jobs as working podcasters, is to make sure that our shows are well set up for the fractured world we live in without a dominant player. 

-----

Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/the-death-of-podcasting-dominance-brought-to-you-by-amazon-wondery

Follow Evo on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

Buy him a virtual coffee to show your support.

And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit Simpler.Media to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting.

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

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.