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(By Evo Terra) Time-shifted audio is what podcasting was built upon. We didn’t want to be stuck with the appointment-based mentality of radio, television, or other media that require the listener of the content and the producer of the content to be on the same schedule.
Because this is podcasting! People subscribe to our content automatically downloads content, leaving it up to the listener to consume the content on their schedule.
While that paradigm still holds true, attitudes are changing. And therefore, my advice might be changing.
Since starting my consultancy, I have been recommending my clients select set day and time for their episodes to release. Unless they have a compelling reason not to, that time is usually midnight local time for them. Assuming a good portion of their listener base is on the same or adjacent time zones, putting a file out at midnight allows time for the file to propagate down to all of the devices all of the applications. When the audience wakes up in the morning, there is a fresh episode of the podcast waiting for your listeners to consume.
That has been the advice I’ve given for a very long time. But maybe that advice needs to change.
Several things have happened recently that are causing me to change my opinion. One is we are now seeing a proliferation of shows that are time-of-day dependent. The Daily, for example, comes out every weekday morning while you’re sleeping. That makes sense because the New York Times is a newspaper, and papers tend to come out in the wee hours of the morning.
But there are also been some shows release episodes for evening drive-time. Ride Home Media produces both a tech and a politics-based show to get you caught up on all the niche news you missed while you were working. Episodes of both shows are out by 5:30 pm Eastern Time.
The third trend is the time it takes for a new podcast episode to be available to subscribers. That used to take some time, so being in-app when a listener was looking was smart. But with the proliferation of new podcast listening apps and updates to existing ones, you’ve probably seen “new episode available” notifications throughout the day. It’s only taking single-digit minutes for subscribers to get a notification that your new episode is available.
That’s powerful. Especially when you remember that just because someone is subscribed to your podcast, it doesn’t mean they’re actually listening to your episodes. Many of your subscribers rely on that little notification to remind them to check out the recent episode to see if it’s worth downloading.
Maybe time of day is much more important than I thought? To help you answer that question, I have three “tests” for your show.
- Is the source and/or content you’re producing time-dependent? I mentioned the Ride Home shows earlier. Those shows gather news that happened throughout the day, so those episodes need to go out at the end of the day. If the hosts waited until first thing the next morning, they’d be talking about yesterday’s news.
- When is the audience in the right mood to listen to your show? Take the great and very weird show Desert Oracle as an example. The only time I listen to it is when I’m taking a late-night drive. It’s just too weird for daytime use.
- Can you take advantage of a buzz factor from those podcast app notifications? Few people are getting notifications at midnight, because the phone and the person are both asleep. Which is why many of us wake to something like 17 notices of new episodes every Monday. All of those are lost to the din. Zero buzz factor.
So we need to rethink our approach. By the way, email marketers know this. I think we need to start learning from them. Time-of-day and day-of-release are going to become more important to more podcasters in the future. So much for time-shifted media production.
Listen to Evo’s Podcast Pontifications episode on time-shifted media HERE.
For more information about what Evo does for for businesses you should contact him today at evo@podcastlaunch.pro and check out his website PodcastLaunch.pro.