Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, launched shy of two years ago, has become one of the most popular podcasts in the US. In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, O’Brien discussed the show with signature self-deprecation: “Like most of the best things in my life, the success of the podcast was a complete surprise.”
In those same two years, O’Brien’s media company has rolled out nine other podcasts. Team Coco is busy developing more scripted and unscripted series, but quality comes first. “‘I don’t want to set a number goal,’” he said. “‘I’m not sitting around saying, ‘hey, we’ve got to get to 35 podcasts by this point.’ Because I’d like them to be good.’”
Will the podcast continue after his late-night contract ends? O’Brien suggests he won't be tied down by one company. “[…] people need to open up their minds a little bit,” he said. “If I’m making podcasts, it doesn’t prohibit me from also maybe doing something, it doesn’t have to necessarily be for Turner, it could be for anybody.”
In Evo Terra’s Podcast Pontifications, the podcaster, author, and radio broadcaster calls out a common creator habit: “So many podcasters want to grow their show. But so few of them — us, rather — want to do the work.” According to Terra, submitting early to Amazon Music was an ‘easy’ task that was largely neglected.
At launch, Amazon Music carried about 700,000 podcasts. However, “Amazon sent an email to every single email address contained in the ~1,400,000 RSS feeds that make up the podcast ecosystem.” That’s five percent participation, Terra laments, toward an “audience of fifty-five million audio-consuming people around the world.”
Terra urges creators to focus on “the new listener who’s not only new to your show, but new to podcasting all together.” Discovery is changing. Growing an audience means not sleeping on friction-free discovery opportunities like Amazon Music: “We need to change our behavior and start thinking and acting like a new listener.”
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